Lam's Caribbean modernism. - Wilfredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 - book review

Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 by Lowery Stokes Sims, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2002; 311 pages, $39.95.

Sometime in the spring of 1961, I received a letter from my grandmother, who lived in South Bend, Ind., with my grandfather, a professor at the University of Notre Dame. There had been an exhibition of the work of Wifredo Lam at the university art gallery, and she described the show and sent me the small catalogue (with a text by James Johnson Sweeney of the Museum of Modern Art, New York). An intelligent but conservative art lover, she wrote: "If this is what modern art is, we may as well give up to the Communists." As an 11-year-old budding liberal, I was fascinated, of course, and Lam became my new hero. Only years later did I realize that my grandmother's skittish approach to Lam's art in 1961 represented much more than a disdain for his imagery. This was only two years after the Cuban Revolution, in the midst of tensions that would soon lead to the Cuban missile crisis. Lam (whose relationship with the government of Fidel Castro could be described as cautiously cordial until his death in 1982) was inevitably connected in the minds of many Americans, including my grandmother, with a '60s version of the "axis of evil."

These days we are used to seeing Lam's work as representative of some of the main currents of Cubo-Surrealist modernism. In the early 1940s, he returned to Cuba from many years of study abroad and produced his most famous painting, The Jungle (1943, now in the MOMA). Thereafter, he consolidated his unique blend of Afro-Cuban religious references with the visual consequences of his rapport with Picasso, the Surrealists and the sensual richness of his Cuban surroundings. By the late 1980s, Lam had become something of a poster child for multiculturalism, his art easily lending itself to (sometimes facile) deconstructions by postcolonialist critics or to readings by essentializing advocates of sacred symbols as an appropriate iconography for emerging nations.

In her new book on Lam, Lowery Stokes Sims, executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, examines the many agendas that have been assigned to the Cuban painter since he first emerged as part of the international avant-garde in the late 1930s. Her close examination of the various meanings that his art has had over the last 60 years is perhaps this book's most admirable accomplishment. Sims has been researching Lam for over 20 years and is certainly the foremost authority on him. In this study, she puts his career, from his early years at the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana to his time in Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and back to the Americas, in the broadest possible context. This is the most fully illustrated of the many books and catalogues dedicated to the artist. In scores of unevenly reproduced black-and-white and color illustrations, we are given a sweeping overview of his work, matched only by that in the encyclopedic first volume of the Lam catalogue raisonne edited by Lou Laurin-Lam (Lausanne, 1996).

Within her discussion of Lam's links to both Afro-Antillean culture and Surrealism, Sims stresses the importance of certain key Caribbean intellectuals, such as Cuban anthropologist and essayist Lydia Cabrera and Martinican poet-philosopher Aime Cesaire. Sims points out, for example, that the 1943 Spanish version of Cesaire's influential poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" was published in Havana with introductory texts by Cabrera and Benjamin Peret and illustrations by Lam. I think that the artist's affinity with Cesaire could be taken even further. In a brief but illuminating essay titled "A Poetics of Anti-colonialism" in a recent edition of Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism (New York, 2000), Robin D.G. Kelley stresses that Surrealism has "like the movements that gave rise to Pan-Africanism and Negritude, ... independent anticolonialist roots." Lam's embodiment of a Surrealist/anticolonialist stance is suggested by Sims but could be the basis for an even more revealing discussion in future literature on the artist.

A particularly informative feature of Sims's study is her consideration of Lam's position in the New York art world of the '40s. His earlier shows there had been organized by the Klaus Perls Gallery and the Pierre Matisse Gallery. Sims writes: "he found [in New York] a context both among the exiled Surrealists ... and among the nascent Abstract Expressionist group with whom he shared an interest in exploring aspects of myth and totemic imagery." In a critical sense, though, his continued reliance on this visual vocabulary of Afro-Caribbean spirituality worked against Lam, since many critics of the day insisted on commenting principally on the stereotypical "primitive" aspects of his art. With the distance of time, it's clear that the discussion of his work in the North American art press of the '40s and '50s had more to do with questions of race than with those of cultural affinity. Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins, who exhibited during these same years at both Julien Levy and Valentine Galleries, elicited much less of a cliched response from those who wrote about her art. And, as Ann Eden Gibson has suggested in her study of Abstract Expressionism (Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics, New Haven, 1997), Lam's continued use of evocative and, to some extent, culturally specific symbolism throughout his career created disadvantages (as it did for many African-American artists) in the face of an increasingly "non-mimetic" visual vocabulary of the later phases of "mainstream" (read: white) Abstract Expressionism. In the U.S., at least, Lam's work was either labeled "Cuban" or "primitivist." There was a good deal of questioning commentary when he failed to conform to either of these two categories. Much was made, for instance, of his refusal to participate in Alfred H. Barr's 1944 MOMA exhibition "Modern Cuban Painters" (organized with Jose Gomez-Sicre and Maria-Luisa Gomez Mena). Preferring to identify himself as an "international" artist, Lam steered clear of his Havana contemporaries in that large-scale New York show.