Dominique de Villepin – The fraternity of sorcerers: Wifredo Lam and the poets

WIFREDO
NOUVEAU NOUVEAU MONDE
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The fraternity of sorcerers:
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Wifredo Lam and the poets
Dominique de Villepin
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Dominique de Villepin
The fraternity of sorcerers: Wifredo Lam and the poets
Dominique de Villepin
Nowhere are there as many ghosts as in paintings. A question has always
jumped into my mind looking at Lam’s works: what is a ghost? I believe, it
is the shape of a memory, a spirit distilled through the mechanics of time. It
is the part in us that doesn’t decay, but remains, endures and even fortifies.
It is what art has been forged to bring back to life and to recreate. And,
indeed, Lam’s paintings are lively ghosts of our new global culture. They
emerge from the past, from the accumulation of images and inventions
of the 20 th century as something that speaks to us, that tells us how to
confront this world of diversity, of uprooting and of exile, how to invent
new magic where old beliefs have gone astray. They offer ceremonies for a
new communion in modernity.
In a time of broken and bloody identities, in a time of cultural hegemony of
mass-consumption, Wifredo Lam provides us a place of resistance, a refuge,
a roof and even a womb for a new birth. As years go by, Wifredo Lam keeps
growing, at par with the giants of the century, to the size of the world,
he, the son of a Chinese man from Guangdong and of a Cuban woman
with both criollo and slave ancestors with origins in Africa, raised in Cuba
and revealed in France, famous in America, shown throughout the world
in beautiful exhibitions like this one, curated by the Galerie Gmurzynska
of Zurich. Before the word globalization even entered our vocabulary, he
embodied and exemplified the global man.
Not only was he global in his grasp of the world, but he was also universal in
his understanding of art. He believed in an art of essence, a poetry of forms
and colours that would allow cultures, languages and beliefs to interconnect
and transcend their differences.
Our world is getting out of touch with itself. It is derailing and losing grasp
of its inner magic. To me, this mission of poetry that has accompanied
man on his beautiful and violent journey through history, this function of
language beyond concepts and realities, through evocations and invocations,
is the true nature and the real force of Lam’s paintings and the reason why
his relationship to poets and poetry is the key to his work. Among the
many poets who accompanied him on the way of creation throughout his
life, I would like to mention three of these masters of witchcraft of words
who illustrate each a part of Lam’s deep and complex relationship to poetry,
André Breton, Aimé Césaire and René Char. But they are only three of
Wifredo Lam and André Breton,
Haïti 1945
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the trees of Wifredo Lam’s forest of inspiration, among Gherasim Luca,
Benjamin Péret, Alain Jouffroy, Christian Zervos, Pierre Mabille or Yvan
Goll.
Lam’s art was born out of the realm of poetry. Some friends-poets and
before all André Breton have been the midwives of his forms and colours.
Meeting and living with the poets in Paris, Marseille and the French Antilles
between 1938 and 1941 has been decisive in the push towards his very
personal singularity, that he achieved between 1935 and 1940 or 1942. As
such, he was indebted to the masters of words, among which first of all to
the Surrealists. In many regards fatefully, his first major collaboration on
a book of poetry was for André Breton’s Fata Morgana in 1940, a piece
censored by the Vichy Government and that had its part in the common
exile of the two artists. Already, the text hinted at the “disquieting register of
masks” (“le répertoire inquiétant des masques”). He was on common ground
when discussing with André Breton, Michel Leiris or André Masson. He
found in them the freedom of mind that he himself longed for and had
seen in his Cuban poet friends like Nicolás Guillén or in Federico García
Lorca, met in his years in Madrid. But the movement around André Breton
played a decisive role for Lam because it offered him the perspective of
the reconciliation of the arts, between poetry, painting and sculpture. It
endeavoured to break up the walls dividing the fields of different techniques
and to gain access to a realm of imagination in which art and creation were
unique and original. They rooted art in the creative mind – in the genius -
putting aside the object of art, the œuvre d’art, as a mere concrete expression
of the subject’s intention. They tried at the same time to bridge the trenches
that separated reason and imagination, civilization and savagery. Science,
art and politics were wrought together in an outcry for the unity of the spirit
of mankind, regardless of time and place. This declaration of independence
of art, this spirit of boundless freedom was the revelation Wifredo Lam
needed to overcome the diversity of teachings, influences and impressions.
It allowed him to connect again to his inner self and find, in the field of
poetry, his own identity.
In the creative tempo of Wifredo Lam, there have always been times of
respiration that allowed him to grow further and stronger. There were times
of intense and massive creation, and other times dedicated to readings and
reflection, to the acquisition of his comprehension of the world, and in
particular readings of poetry and of ethnology. These words were the matter
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Dominique de Villepin
Note by René Char for Wifredo Lam,
February 23, 1953
‘Fata Morgana,’ by André Breton, with illustrations by Wifredo Lam, 1941
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he painted with, he transformed into colours and into forms, dancing
shapes of ritual dances of beastly figures with horns and sharp mouths, at
some moment howling through touches of colours reminding of Miró’s
windows to otherworldly colours, at another moment captured in solemn
gestures on the dark backgrounds of a half-open inferno. Sensitive to words,
he published himself poetical writings, in Spanish as well as in French, or
favoured the publication and translation of his friends’ poems. But before
all Wifredo Lam’s paintings are poetry beyond language itself. He’s even
more a poet in his understanding of painting.
The meeting with Aimé Césaire, master of the awakening of the “snakecharming
Martinique” described by Breton, is another key to his work and
to his relationship with poetry, with poems and with poets all at once. He did
not conceive creation as an abstraction but as flesh and bone, as immediate
friendship of two souls, one speaking, one listening, and as the intimate
bond of a whole community, knit together by the commonwealth of words.
His connection to Aimé Césaire’s négritude, to the solemn and inventive
poetry of Haiti, of Rene Depestre or Jacques Stephen Alexis to the luxurious
historical epics of the Caribbean spirit of Édouard Glissant had the same
intimacy, because it opened up to him the horizon of his native land. It
is not by chance that Wifredo Lam wanted Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au
pays natal to be published in Spanish and to illustrate it. He asked his close
friend Lydia Cabrera to translate it into Spanish. This “way home” was Lam’s
own itinerary. He had left Cuba for Spain and France with not much more
than dreams of what he would find, leaving a scorched and unspeakable
land and he travelled back, in the turmoil of history, on the Capitaine-
Paul-Lemerle, the “Flying Dutchman” of European intelligence, that was to
transport in 1941 three hundred artists and intellectuals to their exile in the
Americas, among which André Breton with his wife and daughter, Victor
Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anna Seghers. The Caribbean was at this time
under the spell of intolerance and political oppression, specifically in the
French Antilles with Admiral Robert as governor.
But the movement of the négritude was not about restoring an old identity.
It was about retrieving a dignity and inventing a destiny and a future. It
was about transforming the most savage of experiences – slavery – in a
reconciliation of the broken world. This poetry is a constant struggle, it is
the banner of the humiliated and the language of rebellion. His figures are
figures of danger and devouring, dark encounters in a time when the tragic
René Char and Wifredo Lam, Paris 1976
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Dominique de Villepin

Wifredo Lam and
Ghérasim Luca working
on ‘Apostroph’Apocalypse’
at the atelier Grafica Uno,
Milan 1965
Michel Leiris and Wifredo Lam during
the “Salon de Mayo,”
Havana 1967
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Dominique de Villepin
‘Retorno al país natal,’ by Aimé Césaire, cover and inside front cover illustrated by Wifredo Lam, 1943
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of history reaped its fruits day after day in wars and massacres. With time,
one could be tempted to assuage the images of Wifredo Lam, to keep them
so to say in the closet of good manners. This would be high treason. All
the poets he befriended throughout his life had in common this essential
rebellion in the name of life. They were all sons of Arthur Rimbaud.
Lam aspired to a truly universal poetry. His mythology is the constellation
of a global archipelago. His art announces the concepts of Édouard Glissant.
He forged and wielded his very own language, a language of signs, of rites
and of myths. A language of savagery and civilization, a natural language, a
language borrowing from the enigmas of Chinese calligraphy, from the oral
transmissions of Caribbean lore and from the conflagrations of surrealist
poetry. Languages can sometimes be separations between men, the symbol
of their incapacity to understand each other. He invented a mythology
without words, open to all. This is also what he admired in Picasso’s
painting, this access to naked universality. In this sense, Lam’s paintings
are poems crowned by forms and colours. He found access to the senses.
As the French philosopher Louis Althusser put it, he “speaks in silence our
language this stranger, and we understand it” (“Cet homme étranger qui
se tait, parle en silence notre langue cette inconnue, et nous l’entendons”.)
Lam aspired to share visions. His art was an art where lightning strikes in
every painting. It’s the result of a fantastic force hurled through the canvas.
It’s a trace of the metaphysical. As André Breton described it, his aim was to
“reach the primitive marvelous he bears in himself to the highest point of
consciousness” (“Atteindre à partir du merveilleux primitif qu’il porte en lui le
point de conscience le plus haut”).
There is a third poetic encounter in Lam’s life that bears witness to another
fragment of what I believe to be his conception of poetry. It was the
friendship with René Char, the sorcerer of L’Isle sur Sorgue, where he was
born in the South of France. Wifredo Lam believed in charms, in the ability
of searching through the earth for the sources of truth with the simple tool
of words. He invites us to the ceremony of creation.
He grew up in the mysteries of the Santería of Cuba, under the guidance
of his godmother Mantonica Wilson. In her ability to evoke and suggest,
to tell and to chant, she was for me the real tutor in matters of creation of
forms and of figures. And her teaching showed him that there is no essential
difference between the word and the thing, between telling and showing,
between saying and doing.
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Dominique de Villepin
Wifredo Lam and Aimé Césaire, 1976
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His magic is a magic of being. It’s the place where nature and culture become
inseparable. No tree in his paintings can be compared to a real tree. They
emerge out of the forests of the mind, of the memory of exiles and transshipments,
they are trees as well as boats in which slaves are huddled. It’s
the place where mankind, the animal realm and the sphere of vegetation
get confused in one archaic reality. Are they portraits? Are they landscape
paintings? No one can tell. There are only exchanges of substance and
degrees of existence as in the painting Canaima, named after the islands in
Venezuela, and in which he wishes to capture the “forest spirit.”
In Le Rempart de Brindilles, poems of René Char illustrated with five
etchings of Wifredo Lam, the bird figures, black, white or multicoloured, are
assembled in triangles of golden light and red flames. They don’t merely
illustrate the verses. They are their keepers and guardians, watching us while
we let the text flow out of the pages of the book. The painter found in the
illustration of poems a way to transform his technique, to adapt it to the
formats and necessities of etchings and lithographs, taking pleasure in the
collaboration with gifted printers and publishers like Giorgio Upiglio.
What he shows us is an infinite saraband of masks, of devils and of beasts
that is imprisoned in these canvases, a “danse macabre” in the honour of life
where we see creatures, as René Char described them, “amaigries par lae
nervosisme de l’art” (“thinned by the nervosism of art”). The masks of fear
are held up against the day of truth. They act as intermediaries, as veils, as
window-blinds to make reality acceptable and understandable. His paintings
as Édouard Glissant rightly put it, are “genre paintings of mystery.” Aimé
Césaire wrote that his friend Lam was “the spirit of creation” (“l’esprit de la
creation”).
Few painters have developed such a natural and intense fusion with poets
and their poems. In a way, Lam worked and lived in a time of experiments
and visual discoveries, a time in which poetry had been blown up by the
audacity of visionaries like Arthur Rimbaud, Georg Trakl or T.S. Eliot
and the paintings were radically reinvented through abstraction since the
intuitions of Kandinsky, Braque or Picasso. He arrived in Europe at the
moment of reinvention of the arts when nothing could be said self-evident
anymore. He was to carry further this legacy of Modernity, to open a path
in the inner jungles of consciousness for a reconciled art, without words and
without figures to take form.
In this sense, not only was Lam a poet, not only did he charm poets into
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Dominique de Villepin
singing in tune to his paintings, but he makes each and every one of his
spectators a poet. The person who watches his paintings is drawn into the
act of creation in the same way no one who attends a ceremony of the
Santería can remain out of reach of the magic. By entering his world, we
belong to a new community of perpetually new creation, a community of
desire and longing. As Aimé Césaire said, “Wifredo Lam doesn’t look. He
feels” (“Il ne regarde pas. Il sent”) And he teaches us how to feel through the
universal body of mankind. He opens, with force and even violence, the
gates of a reunited world.
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Credits
© documentary photos SDO The Estate of Wifredo Lam
© Archives Loeb (p.28)
© Perls Galleries (p. 30)
© UNESCO (p. 31)
Chillida Archives (p. 41)
© Graham Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation (p. 49)
© Published with the graceful permission of Marie-Claude Char (p. 57)
© Éditions du Sagittaire (p. 57, 265)
© Nouvelles Éditions Place, Paris (p. 74)
© Austrian Frederick and Lilian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna (p. 75, 89)
© John and Trude Schiff papers, courtesy Leo Baeck Institute (p. 76)
© Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght (p. 89)
© Revista Revolución y Cultura, Havana (p. 91–95)
ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (p. 100, 101, 113)
© Lee Miller Archives, Chiddingly, East Sussex, 2012. All rights reserved (p. 110, 111)
Courtesy Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan (p. 126, 131, 132, 133, 134 )
Courtesy Casa Museo Asger Jorn, Albissola Marina (p. 127, 136)
Courtesy Comune di Albissola Marina / Comune di Albissola Marina (ph. Gianluca Anselmo) (p. 121, 132)
Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid / Foto: Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores
(p. 148-149, 154-155, 160-161, 178-179, 206-207, 220-221)
Courtesy Bibliothèque et Archives Canada / e000756917 (p. 200)
© Bill Cotter, WorldsFairPhotos.com (p. 201)
© association Atelier André Breton, www.andrebreton.fr
© ProLitteris for the artworks by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam
Despite a thorough research, not all copyright holders could be identified. Should you be the owner of
the copyright or related rights to the illustrations published in this book, please contact the gallery.
338

Concept
Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer
Coordination
Alessandra Consonni
Texts by
Eskil Lam
Alain Jouffroy
Professor Luca Bochicchio, University of Genova
Professor Dawn Adès
Monsieur le Ministre Dominique de Villepin
Dorota Dolega-Ritter, Associate Director of the Wifredo Lam Archive
Adrian Clark
Antony Penrose, director of the Lee Miller Archive and Penrose Collection
Jacques Leenhardt, Directeur d’Études at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris
Quote: ‘My Painting is an Act of Decolonization’
an Interview with Wifredo Lam by Gerardo Mosquera (1980)
Jean-Louis Paudrat
© galerie gmurzynska 2018
Printed by Grafiche Step, Parma, Italy
galerie gmurzynska
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