Jonathan Fineberg – Additive Aesthetics

New York art scenes, just as Basquiat
was to the art world in New York.
In her monograph on Lam, Lowery Stokes
Sims points to “the inexorable inversion
of European colonization that occurred
as global trends in the post-World War
II era were marked by migrations of
populations from former colonies to
the centers of world economic, social,
and political power.” 4 While on the one
hand Lam exhibited at the established
Klaus Perls and Pierre Matisse galleries
in New York in the 1940s, alongside his
mainstream European and American
contemporaries, he also said he wanted
to capture “the Negro spirit, the beauty
of the plastic art of the blacks,” 5 like
“a Trojan horse that would spew forth
hallucinating figures with the power to
surprise, to disturb the dreams of the
exploiters.” 6
Wifredo Lam’s father was Chinese,
endowing this Afro-Cuban, half Chinese
artist with a complicated identity, forged
in destabilized meanings. He spent the
formative years of his career in Spain
and France and then worked in Cuba
and Haiti. He showed with the Abstract
Expressionists in New York and with
the French Surrealists in New York
and Europe, and was embraced by the
Cobra artists of Northern Europe at mid
century. Both Lam and Basquiat had
roots in the Black Atlantic and embodied
the hybridity of a new world identity.
But as Jordana Saggese pointed out,
in her book Reading Basquiat, one of the
important discoveries Basquiat made in
the writings of Robert Farris Thompson
concerned the mutability of culture in
the African diaspora: “Above all else,
Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit focuses on
the production, rather than the strict
preservation of African culture in the
Americas.” 7
In a painting like Lam’s late Untitled, done in
the 1960s [p. 22-23], the spectral presences
of the orishas persevere in the triangular
headed figure in the lower right with its
glowing eyes and upturned, limb-like
blades, but also in the simple configuration
of the elongated rhomboid at the base of
the truncated arm that lies horizontally
across the canvas. Citing Robert Farris
Thompson, Sims points to these diamond
shaped, criss crossed, and triangular forms
as representing the “four-point boundaries
of the soul’s orbit” which “guard the point
of entry/exit between realms of existence.” 8
At the same time, the attenuated arm
seems to harken back to the dark Spanish
Baroque crucifixions and martyrdoms of
Lam’s formative years in Spain.
Lam lived a long life, dying in Paris
at the age of eighty. Jean-Michel Basquiat
lived a sped-up life in New York. Raised in
Brooklyn, he exploded onto the New York
art scene in 1980 like a firework that rains
down brilliant light and then suddenly goes
dark; he died of a drug overdose in 1988
at the age of twenty-seven. The dynamic
complexity, the multivalency of images, and
the poetic layering of disparate trajectories
of thought and identity in Basquiat’s work
are among its meanings.
By 1980, Baquiat had cultivated
his innate gift for drawing by looking at
artists like Hurson for semantic distance
and simplified figuration, on the one hand,
and the new painterly expressionists
like Julian Schnabel, on the other. He
updated his romance with Abstract
Expressionism and Rauschenberg’s
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