A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art. Группа авторов
war in Europe both disrupted the sojourns of Caribbean artists and writers on the continent and precipitated the emergence of new political and social paradigms that were preludes to independence movements in various islands that flourished with the return of their native sons and daughters. Individuals such as Leon Damas (French Guiana), Aimé and Suzanne Césaire (Martinique), and Wifredo Lam (Cuba) left Europe to return to their native islands, or, as in the case of the Spanish surrealist Eugenio Granell (Dominican Republic), exiled themselves to the Caribbean. They brought with them the ideals and concepts of surrealists and directly transplanted them in the Caribbean. This set the stage for the second direct encounter of the surrealists with the Caribbean on Martinique. When the Germans entered Paris in 1940, several of the surrealist group fled first to Marseilles. Within a year Breton, Lam, and several of the surrealist group were aided by the International Rescue Committee run by Varian Fry to secure passage to the Americas. En route they were detained on Martinique before they were allowed to proceed to various destinations in the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. On Martinique Breton and Lam made the acquaintance of the Césaires, who along with René Ménil had begun to publish a surrealist‐inspired journal, Tropiques.
Journals such as this became important vehicles by which ideals of self‐affirmation, political change, and cultural hegemony were promulgated. In the pages of Tropiques and La Poesía Sorprendida, founded by Granell in the Dominican Republic, writers and artists explored the parameters of a Caribbean or Antillean identity that accompanied the protracted struggle for liberation and self‐identification from the late nineteenth century through the mid‐1950s. Interestingly enough, however, the language, images, and sounds of those paradigms of a postcolonial Caribbean were frequently adapted through a strategy of deconstruction, where the very stereotypical views of the Caribbean that bolstered colonial occupation and economic exploitation would be turned on their head or transformed by an insider's perspective.
The aforementioned nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century romantic landscape paintings and prints of the Americas find their antipode in Suzanne Césaire's model of l’homme‐plante (man‐plant), which was the literary correlate of the hybrid, anthropomorphic “jungle” that – as we've seen – Wifredo Lam first conceived in his paintings of the 1940s (Figure 6.1). These images not only presented a more “indigenous” and self‐affirming identity for the Caribbean but also turned the picturesque on its head by positioning the landscape and man/woman within that landscape as an image of reclamation. The redemption potential of that position – artistically and politically – was indicated by the Cuban critic José Hernández Meneses in his 1946 profile on Lam. Meneses spoke to the message Lam's work had for Cubans who focused on their European heritage:
We have completely separated ourselves from our own land, and have replaced its dynamism with a false sense of order that is derived from Europe … Wifredo Lam … has come to show us our own essence. Are we able to see it?
(Hernández Meneses 1946)
Like Lam, the Césaires used such notions of Caribbean life and culture as metaphorical concepts to problematize the usual colonial images of the Caribbean. The fruition of Lam's formal experimentation is seen in his aforementioned monumental 1942–1943 composition, The Jungle. Lam inscribes a spatial realm in which the perspective systems do not apply. Nature in The Jungle is uncultivated, wild, and impassible, located in what art historian and critic Marta Traba describes as “a sort of anti‐space, an amniotic fluid” (Traba 1980, p. 69). Lam's work encapsulates the character of the drawings, that resulted from sessions of producing cadavre exquis drawings, where individual artists would produce a fragment of an image, conceal it, and pass it on to the next individual, who would add their own image. The result would be an entity that was a hybrid of individual imaginations.
Figure 6.1 Wifredo Lam, La mañana verde (The Green Morning), 1943.
Source: © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.
Lam once cast his art as an “art of decolonization,” calling on all artists like himself to “sever all ties with the colonial culture” (quoted in Mosquera 1983, p. 179). In a parallel gesture Suzanne Césaire's “l'homme‐plante” not only described an individual in balance with the rhythm of the life of the universe found in nature (Césaire 1942) but also countered stereotypes of black Antilleans as “lackadaisical,” “innocent,” or “childlike,” which appeared in the numerous popular images of black Caribbeans (as well as African‐Americans and Africans). This hybridity, as she asserts, demonstrates that, on the contrary, black Antilleans were “doubly true to themselves,” being “close to a universal life force – nature.” Then, like the tropical landscape, they must be left “to find their own nature inside and outside themselves” (Césaire 1942, p. 45). Breton would echo such ideas in his 1948 publication Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (Martinique, Snake Charmer), where he declared that the surrealist landscape was embodied in the tropics, where a natural balance between the physical and the metaphysical is attained (Breton 1972).
John Yau indicated the profundity of this idea of the “tropics” when he noted that Lam had reversed the relegation of appropriated forms from African art to being mere “reductive artifacts to be absorbed into Western perceptual systems” and “reintegrated” them “within nature,” where they could reclaim “their original and rightful place” (Yau 1988). Even the great appropriator Pablo Picasso would acknowledge the authenticity of the work of artists like Lam. During his first meeting with Lam in Paris he asserted Lam should find pride in a horse‐headed African mask in his collection because the African blood Lam shared with the unacknowledged carver of the mask was a marker of an authenticity that even Lam (Wifredo Lam 1902–1982, 1983) would not acknowledge until he returned to Cuba.
These developments accompanied the sense of “cultural renaissance” in Cuba and other locales, which paralleled the situation in Mexico, where artists of the government‐supported mural movement “documented the pre‐Columbian and folk heritage of their country” (Blanc 1992, p. 94), and Jamaica where – as is discussed further in this essay – there was a revival of interest in African roots and sources. It was this indigenous, nationalistic element that distinguished New World modernism from that of Europe (Ades 1989). As seen in the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera and other members of the Mexican mural movement, Kahlo, and Lam, there was an emphasis on the unique contribution to culture that came out of the racial mixing in the Americas (Aranda‐Alvarado 2001).
Furthermore, as art historian Rocío Aranda‐Alvarado noted, Vasconcelos saw racial mixing as “the creation of a new race,” a view that “underscores the vision of the Americas as the society of the future” or what Raúl Roa characterized as a “new time in history and a new time in life” (Aranda‐Alvarado 2001, p. 280).
The new nationalism that accompanied this cultural renaissance was therefore encapsulated in racial self‐affirmation, which would be a key issue in the 1940s. It provided an important political and psychological gateway to independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s for those islands still under the colonial control. In this context Lam's infusion of Afro‐Cuban motifs into the landscape firmly positioned the Cuban landscape as a symbol of national identity that we can compare to strategies pursued in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States and Canada (Sims 2002). This can be seen as the basis of art historian Suzanne Garrigues Daniel's reading of The Jungle as extrapolated metaphors comparable to those found in Fernando Ortiz's 1940 publication Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Encoded social and political nuances allow the leaves in this painting to be read as tobacco (which Ortiz associated with “liberty” and the national and political hegemony of Cuba) and the cane elements as sugarcane: “a symbol of femaleness, fertility, and carnality” but also “a symbol of slavery, exploitation, colonialism, and capitalism” (Sims 2002, p. 64).