LITMIR.BIZ

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image of creole cultures of the Antilles that was being promoted by the Césaires and René Ménil coalesced into the concept of an “Antillean identity” heralded by Césaire in his book‐length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Here Césaire evokes the hyperbole of tropical Caribbean life when he writes:

      I dream of a beak swollen with hibiscus and of virgin sentences in violet, which makes itself heard by lizards that fly to the sun.

      (Césaire n.d.)

The reader hears and smells the nostalgia for things uniquely Caribbean. This quality in Lam's work undoubtedly prompted his contemporary René Portocarrero to observe that in distinction from the work of their Cuban contemporaries, Lam's paintings evoked:

      … the delirium of the tropical. The Caribbean tropical above all … What might be called a Cuba in which the black rules decisively a new time in history and a new time in life Altogether, something we have within us and that has been submerged until now.

      (Aguirre 1946)

During this period and in these contexts, Lam and his work become the flashpoints for notions of this Antillean identity. In an article published in Cahiers d'Art in Paris in 1947 Aimé Césaire notes Lam's achievement of a physical union of humankind and the world around it. This act repudiates the perception of Antillean culture as a bastardized amalgam of others (Césaire 1945–1946). Césaire echoes the sentiments of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who in a 1944 article on Lam described the painter's blending of human, animal, and plant forms as animating “a world of primitive myths with something that was ecumenically Antillean – myths that belonged not only to the soil of Cuba but also to the larger chain of islands.”⁵

      Lam himself referred to acts of problematizing the picturesque in an interview with the Cuban writer and intellectual Carlos Franqui in 1945, noting about his work that his paintings:

      … reflect our life, our complexes and the idiosyncrasies of our people, with their rhythm and sensuality manifested in our music and dance; the sugarcane which alternately represents our misery as well as our wealth; our beliefs and superstitions; the inequality among races; the lack of integration between our economic situation and our psychology; and our climate and geography with their beauty and violence; the cacophony which characterizes our common condition.

      (Franqui 1945) [translation by the author]. Archives SDO Wifredo Lam, Paris.

      Lam then delivers the coup de grâce to the picturesque:

      There is no equivalent for the well‐known phrase “No problem” in my paintings. There are problems in them … If certain people wish to ignore such terrible truths, we can't take them seriously. They deserve only our compassion.

      (Franqui 1945)

Alejo Carpentier revisited this ecumenical Antilles in his 1948 article “De lo real maravilloso americano,” (The Marvelous Real of America) again evoking the surrealist celebration of the “marvelous” (Carpentier 1948). He observed the effect of this contact with the Caribbean on drawings by André Masson, published in Martinique, charmeuse de serpent, his collaboration with Breton. The unexpected hybrids in Masson's drawings mirror some of Lam's own trans‐species inventions. Carpentier contrasts Masson's and Lam's work and observes that it is in Lam's work that one finds “the magic of tropical vegetation, the profuse creation of our nature – with all its metamorphosis and symbiosis” (Carpentier 1948). Carpentier predicts postwar exhortations to recover humanity's lost innocence through exotic escape. The quasishamanic persona that he conferred on Lam within the context of the School of Paris after World War II continues a metaphor introduced by Césaire and Carpentier to distinguish authentic from appropriated primitivism. Over the next four decades this would become a critical point in Europe and the United States as growing numbers of artists from non‐European backgrounds established a strong presence within the international art market.

      By this time Caribbean artists from this era show the impact of surrealist ideas in their own depictions and narratives of the islands. In this enterprise they may more or less reflect some of the more radical image‐making strategies of surrealism and other European modernist movements seen in the work of Lam. More often than not, however, we can see how Caribbean artists brought new nuances to the themes of the picturesque through the creation of affirmative images of the black body and the Caribbean landscape. These images pointed to the struggle for ownership and agency that, as Krista Thompson has noted, was constantly subverted by lingering social and economic dynamics, as well as critiques of the Caribbean as the tropical paradise (Thompson 2006).

      An indication of the new affirmative spirit in the Caribbean was potentially declared in the 1935 sculpture Negro Aroused by the Jamaican artist Edna Manley. It brought the formal characteristics of Art Deco to a power image of aspiration. A black male figure is seen in three‐quarter view, pressing himself upward with his arms off a plinth. At the same time he raises his head upward, aroused as he is by the clarion call of independence and self‐determination. The fact that Manley was married to Norman Manley, one of the architects of Jamaican independence, validates the description of Negro Aroused as capturing what the Jamaican poet‐anthropologist M.G. Smith described as “the inner spirit of our people” that “flung their rapidly rising resentment of the stagnant colonial order in a vivid appropriate sculptural form” (Boxer and Poupeye 1998, p. 15). What we also see in the art of the Caribbean at this time is a reprise of the presentation of natives either posed or engaged in their daily activities. As mentioned previously in the case of Cuba and Mexico, art from this era in Jamaica represented a “new awakening, a new nationalism” (Boxer and Poupeye 1998, p. 17). Norman Manley indicated this in a 1939 speech when he noted that:

      National culture is a national consciousness reflected in the painting of pictures of our own mountains and our own women‐folk …

      Norman Manley then goes on to reaffirm and reclaim a sense of connection with the African past of the Caribbean, mirroring the message of Alain Locke, the magus of the Harlem Renaissance, in his essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” first published in 1925 in the anthology The New Negro. Locke encouraged African‐American artists to look to African art for inspiration and guidance in their search for an art connected to their African heritage. However, rather than encouraging a mastery of traditional styles, he focused on the more conceptual aspects of African art for their emulation: its “classic background,” “discipline,” “style,” and “technical control,” its “abstract decorative forms” (Locke 1992). Manley, on the other hand, embraces a more emotional and psychological approach, noting:

      The immediate past has attempted to destroy the influence of the glory that is Africa, it has attempted to make us condemn and mistrust the vitality, the vigor, the rhythmic emotionalism that we get from our African ancestors.

Mirroring the surrealists' psychoanalytical approach, Manley notes that Jamaicans “must dig deeper” into their “own consciousness” and use their art to “stir a country into a state of national consciousness” (Boxer and Poupeye 1998, p. 17).

      Such developments are seen in the work of the generation of artists who grouped around Edna Manley and were trained at the Junior Centre of the Institute of Jamaica. Artists such as Albert Huie, Henry Daley, Ralph Campbell, David Pottinger, and their more independent contemporaries Carl Abrahams and David Miller Sr., combined the treatment of form that reflected modernism's break with academic illusionism and conventions inherited from Europe with anecdotal scenes and depictions of daily life and the individuals living those lives. They reveal a sense of belonging and innate experience that personalizes the work more than those done in a picturesque mode.

      The third Caribbean encounter for the surrealists in the 1940s was with Haiti and the newly developed style of Haitian painting. The particular style of that work with his straightforward narrative approach to both historical and metaphysical content was nurtured through the Centre d'Art, which was founded by DeWitt Peters, an American art educator. Breton, who had settled in New York City after the stopover in Martinique, returned to the Caribbean

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