Lam/Basquiat – Annina Nosei: Common Ground. Wifredo Lam and Jean-Michel Basquiat

Common Ground: Wifredo Lam
and Jean-Michel Basquiat
by Annina Nosei
One day in 1981, when I had my
gallery on Prince Street, I went to see an
exhibition at P.S.1 entitled New York/New
Wave. This was the much talked-about
show introducing the latest generation
of upcoming New York artists. At that
time, I had exhibited the work of Italian
and German artists, but now I wanted to
show American artists, living and working
in New York. There was an actuality, an
atmosphere, that represented the culture of
New York City at that time, and I believed
that it had a palpable connection to the
island culture of the Caribbean. I felt
that in the music in those days, in the
people in the streets and in the fashion
magazines, all in one way or another
mirroring the city’s youthful energy.
When I went to P.S.1, the two
artists that I liked the most and
that I wanted to have in my gallery,
represented exactly that aspect of New
York: open and connected to that urban
aesthetic mirroring a tropical hybridity.
One artist was Roberto Juarez, in whose
paintings I sensed the affinity for this
“tropicalism”; the flowers, the colors and
the warmth were present in his imagery. I
thought the paintings were fantastic and
I wanted to show them in my gallery. As
it turned out, he was already showing at
the Robert Miller Gallery, so I could not
sign him up, but I did put his work in some
of my group shows. Juarez’s work is still
provoking that kind of enthusiasm after
all these years.
The other artist whose work had a
similar feel to it albeit of a completely
different nature, was in fact Jean-
Michel Basquiat. His works I saw at
P.S.1 were small paintings, “written”
images on canvas, vignettes similar
to the writings on the walls of lower
Manhattan he had been known for.
And so while these works were so
different to Juarez’s formally, they
also communicated a distinctly Afro-
American experience.
Several art writers at the time and
later called his powerful works “iconic”
or “magic signs” and “verbal images”,
while Jean-Michel however also inherited
the graffiti stigma for his writing
on the walls. But his was a quite a
different message. In fact those writings
are concrete poetry and that mode of
expression continued throughout his
late works.
In 1981 I invited Jean-Michel
to participate in my gallery group
show Public Address for which he
created large, spectacular canvases.
In those works, there was also another
element, which one could describe
as a voice of the minorities. Their
directness and unique vision presented
a confrontational clarity. The paintings
stated a social and innovative purpose,
a clear agenda, together with a personal
reflection, that further stressed the
presence of the young Afro-American
44

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Annina Nosei in Basquiat’s basement studio at her gallery on Prince St, New York, 1982
within society and cultural history at
large.
Jean-Michel’s visual language meanwhile
– his magical and spiritual signs – produce
a special aura of sacrality. Because of this,
his visual emblems had a natural, logical
association with Afro-Caribbean ritualistic
traditions and syncretic folklore such as
Vodou and Santería or the islands’ artifacts
such as pagan masks, all of which partly
derived from Western Africa.
The compositional strength, the
structure, and the harmony found in his
work places his visual language in the
context of the classic art of Western
Modernism. A painting such as his “Untitled”
from 1981 with its basic architectural and
multi-perspective organization of space
is reminiscent of Matisse’s paintings, The
Moroccans (1915/16), at MoMA.
A similar correspondence can
be detected between Basquiat’s works
and some of the paintings of the CoBrA
movement. For example, Jean-Michel’s
“Dust Heads” from 1982 could easily be
compared to a painting by Asger Jorn,
in particular the raw and boldly colored
heads facing the viewer, and the white
band running through the center of the
composition, bifurcating the space in each
of these works.
Many art critics who have written
about Basquiat discussed the obvious
affinity his work has with preceding artists,
45

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled, 1981
such as Jean Dubuffet, Picasso, Pollock,
Twombly, and Rauschenberg. Everyone
underscored the strength that Jean-Michel’s
work possesses: his use of words, his
images, his signs, were all written about and
analyzed. But from the very beginning there
was this other quality in the presentation
of all these visual elements that went
beyond the reproduction or imitation of any
modernist style of painting, going beyond
these immediate affinities or influences.
His work was completely changing the
course of art history, as his image making
represented a direct reference to himself,
yielding a subjectivism even in images
reproducing vignettes or what may be
considered a general description of life
in New York or his paying homage to
black athletes and jazz musicians. All this
suggested a sociopolitical agenda that
came from a deep personal awareness.
It was manifested in a strong spirituality,
an inherent belief system, which again
connects his work to the Afro-American
spiritual tradition rooted in the culture of the
Caribbean. For all these reasons I had early
on mentioned and pointed out that one of
the most striking parallels between Basquiat
and his artistic forebears, is the work of
Cuban modernist Wifredo Lam.
Lam hailed from Cuba and was
born to a Chinese father and an Afro-
46

Wifredo Lam
Untitled, ca. 1975
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Dust Heads, 1981
Cuban mother and thus his connection to
Caribbean pagan-ritualistic culture was
more autobiographically ingrained in his
work. And yet, the aforementioned sacral
radiance of Basquiat’s paintings and his
drawing’s elaboration on imagery drawn
from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santéria
cults suggests a strong correspondence
of mutual attitudes and themes. Although
Basquiat, being a New York native, never
had to emigrate from a non-Western
locale to access the cosmopolitan artistic
center as Lam did when leaving first for
Madrid and subsequently Paris, Basquiat’s
multi-ethnic family background is not
dissimilar, his father having being Haitian
and his mother American of Puerto Rican
ancestry. Due to these parallels, both of
their practices follow a self-referential
methodology to engage the modernist
canon for a sometimes explicit and other
times subtle socio-political agenda to
express the hybridity inherent to culture.
Last winter I went to Havana, Cuba,
to see the incredibly inspiring installation
of Lam’s work at the Museo Nacional de
Belles Artes. Of course I was already
familiar with many of his paintings and
drawings, such as the masterpiece The
Jungle held at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, but those rooms in
Havana dedicated to his work were
simply spectacular. There was a series
of paintings on black backgrounds. The
angular and strident movement of these
anthropomorphic figures, their mysterious
presence, clearly demonstrated Lam’s
unique voice within postwar modern art.
The theme of tropicalism, which runs
through Lam’s work, has a revolutionary
spark that also speaks to minorities’
struggle for freedom. It is that energy
and flair of the tropics that permeates his
signs and colors, in contrast to the work of
Picasso, whose négritude is more forced.
Picasso was re-inventing painting a
generation or two before Lam, but Lam’s
take on négritude is more urgent and
genuine than Picasso’s more superficial
approach famously exemplified by his
Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907), a work
inspired by the African masks Picasso
saw at the Musée du Trocadero in Paris. So
Picasso’s work is based on appropriation
and quotation while Lam’s work is an
organically derived expression because his
47

is rooted in personal first-hand experience
and engagement with his cultural heritage,
which is a quality one discerns in Basquiat as
well.
Exemplifying this dialogue is a late
work by Basquiat entitled Exu from 1988
(p.43), a large oil and acrylic canvas that
exhibits several similarities with Lam’s
works from the 1950s and 1960s. Exu
is originally a demonic deity of the
West African Yoruba religion, where it
represents death as well as figuring as
a trickster subverting boundaries and
stirring chaos, overseeing the threshold
to the afterlife. Also known as Eshu
or Eleggua it is one of the deities that
during the West African slave trade found
its way into Afro-Caribbean culture, where
it is a well-known character of the so-called
Orisha spirits idolized in for example the
Santería tradition of Lam’s native Cuba,
which also frequently populate Lam’s
paintings. (In fact Lam’s grandmother was
deeply immersed in this cultic tradition).
Several analogies can be distinguished
here, most prominently of course in
Lam’s own numerous depictions of the
horned Eleggua or in thematic works
such as a major canvas from Lam’s Cuban
period, the 1944 Autel pour Elegua (Altar
for Elegua) (p.61). Here Lam revisits the
classic Western genre of the still life
rendered in a Pointillist manner, which
however has been transposed to the local
cultural context of Cuban pagan ritualism,
the various goods depicted representing
the offerings to Elegua. Lam here deploys
Elegua allegorically, as an artistic device
that adopts the deity’s faculty of crossing
specific realms whose boundaries thus
become blurred and ambiguous – in this
particular a classical motif of Western art
and Cuban spiritual customs.
Basquiat, in his version, adopts this
Elegua character by blending the creature’s
physiognomy with his own, including
trademarks such as his dreadlocks, while
the rolled cigars at the feet of Basquiat/
Exu represent devotional offerings. (In
1984, Jean-Michel wore the deadlocks
fashion of the Rastafari, which comes
from Ras Tafari (Chief Tafari), the 255 th
monarch of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, who was
perceived as a true god. Rastafari means the
liberation and the coming back to Zion in
the unity of all black people.)
The agitated lines and scribbles
radiating from the figure out to the canvas’s
edges meanwhile, along with the multitude
of eyes that intensify the explosive energy
of Basquiat’s painting present yet another
formal and thematic bridge to several
pastels of Lam, such as his Composition
from 1958 (p. 42) or Composition from 1962
(p. 45). Their energy and iconography are
remarkably similar.
Both Lam and Basquiat would
further imaginatively tap into socially or
ethnographically distinct sign systems.
Lam particularly drew on the ideographs
of the Afro-Cuban Abakua cult, a coded
sign system circulated within the group’s
male initiates who mostly came from
the segment of the island’s former slave
community. This strategy of a creative
appropriation is famously exemplified by
a work like Rumblings of the Earth (1950),
which today is in the collection of the
Guggenheim Museum.
In rather similar fashion and approach
Basquiat would study the coded sign
systems used by hobos, representing the
historical American outsider demographic,
which he discovered in a book called Symbol
48

Wifredo Lam
Composition, 1964
49

Wifredo Lam
Rumblings of the Earth, 1950
Collection Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY
Sourcebook by Henry Dreyfuss. Just like Lam
had done some thirty years earlier, Basquiat
studied these motifs and subsequently
transformed them into novel visual elements
to serve his individual artistic expression
while introducing these non-orthodox motifs
to the realm of fine art painting.
Another interesting work for this
discussion is Jean-Michel’s painting Untitled,
1984 which I also refer to as “Ironworks” (p. 24).
It presents a seated male figure, his legs
akimbo with his knees pointing outwards,
and his right arm raised above his shoulder.
The head is in partial profile, and we can see
the mandibular, lower jawbone. His face is
like a mask. An orange upper background
is interrupted by white openings that are
contiguous to the lower white half of the
backdrop. Around the head something like a
large halo is hinted at, while the figure’s black
dreadlocks are barely peeking out from a
swath of red semi-transparent paint covering
the face, dripping down the canvas onto the
right leg. That leg is not human; it has a hoof,
evoking the god Pan, or an African animal
deity, part animal and part human. This is
perhaps the most interesting aspect of the
painting as it reveals the Caribbean source
of the image. It reminds us of the frequently
hoofed anthropomorphic figures populating
Lam’s canvases, notably one of his 1940s key
works La Réunion (1942).
The masks of Jean-Michel’s paintings
distinctly remind us of the Caribbean and
African masks that Lam also painted. We also
find similar morphological elements like the
bent knees. Yet, while in Basquiat’s work feet
point outwards, in Lam they frequently point
inwards and create a diamond-like triangular
shape. Another interesting detail is the set
of ribs depicted in Basquiat’s piece discussed
above, which is similar to Lam’s use of exposed
ribs and other bone forms in a number of his
compositions. In Basquiat’s painting, a nail
50

Ceremonial mask from Jamaica
Hobo signs from Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol
Sourcebook owned by Jean-Michel Basquiat
Statuette gifted to Annina Nosei by Jean-Michel Basquiat
51

Wifredo Lam at his Paris home in 1972
appears to have penetrated the body and similarly
the left foot of the figure has a broken chain
behind it. Details like these evoke ironworks such
as shackles and other torture tools endured by the
slaves, which are also found in Vodou rites.
One of Jean-Michel’s late paintings, Riding With
Death from 1988 (p. 69), is comprised of a starkly
empty background roughly painted in gold,
surrounding a lone rider mounted on a skeletal
creature. This looming solitude or sudden silence
of pictorial space are present in some of the late
paintings by Lam, and that economy of visual
impact reflects a focus and a clarity that both
artists had accomplished, one that most other
artists of that time had not, including Picasso.
Even in American modern and contemporary art
of the time, except for Pop art in the manner of
Warhol where there was just a graphic image,
there was still a sense of a background that
“housed” images or signs. This silence of space
surrounding a solitary figure in the mature oeuvre
of these two artists is unique to their work and
distinguishes their practice, now and then.
Over the years of our friendship, Jean-
Michel gave me presents here and there; some
of them were more meaningful than others.
For instance, in 1988 he gave me a cube that
had collaged pictures on it, one of which was
an image of a mother and child. Underneath
it he wrote, “thank you Anina”, which was
intended to show recognition and gratitude,
because I had been sort of a mother figure to
him. The last time I saw him, in 1988, he gave
me a poster showing his portrait which he had
52

Ideographs of the Cuban Abakua cult
signed “To Anina, with love 1988”, which was
unfortunately the last time I saw him. But at
the very beginning of our working relationship,
he gave me two presents, which are still
meaningful to me. One was a little booklet on
Duchamp, and for a 19 year-old to give me
such a sophisticated present, was remarkable.
Another present that he liked – and was so
amused about when giving it to me – was a
little African statuette made from wood. It is
similar to and perhaps a source for some of
his drawings, while reminding us of Lam’s own
avid collecting of tribal artifacts such as the
many statuettes and masks he gathered at his
studio.
I will always remember Jean-Michel’s
generosity of spirit, his exceptional talent, and
unique vision.
53

Publication © Galerie Gmurzynska 2015
For the works by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Wifredo Lam:
© 2015, ProLitteris, Zurich
Documentary Images of Wifredo Lam SDO Wifredo Lam
Editors:
Krystyna Gmurzynska
Mathias Rastorfer
Mitchell Anderson
Coordination:
Jeannette Weiss, Daniel Horn
Support:
Alessandra Consonni
Cover design:
Louisa Gagliardi
Design by OTRO
James Orlando
Brady Gunnell
Texts:
Jonathan Fineberg
Anthony Haden-Guest
Kobena Mercer
Annina Nosei
PRINTED BY
Grafiche Step, Parma
ISBN
3-905792-28-1
978-3-905792-28-7