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

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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