Anthony Haden-Guest – Wifredo Lam / Jean-Michel Basquiat

Wifredo Lam / Jean-Michel Basquiat
by Anthony Haden-Guest
It was while Jean-Michel Basquiat
was working in Annina Nosei’s downstairs
space that he became familiar with the
work of Wifredo Lam. It seems that
Basquiat was in the process of looking over
the work of other artists that caught his
attention - Nosei had suggested he check
out the Cobra group, for instance - and he
had been strongly drawn to Lam. Dieter
Buckhart, the Viennese curator who put
together the remarkable show of Basquiat
notebooks for the Brooklyn Museum,
simply says that Lam was “on Basquiat’s
ladder.”
Not hard to see why. Not only did
Lam have preternatural skills in picturemaking
but Basquiat and Lam shared
biographical background of a nature well
fitted to feed into the making of those
pictures. Both were of mixed race. And
similarly mixed race. Wifredo was the
eighth child of Lam-Yam, an emigrant to
the Americas from Canton, and his mother,
Ana Serafina Catilla, was of mixed African
and Spanish stock. Basquiat’s father,
Gerard, was a Haitian of African descent,
his mother Matilde was Puerto Rican. So
both were a melange, yes, but both looked
African. Which means being identified as
African in most of the world. You don’t
believe me? Feel free to check with Barack
Obama or Tiger Woods on this.
Lam was born in Sagua la Grande,
a township on the coast of Cuba, on
December 8, 1902. He would often say
that his first intuition of the marvelous was
the shadow of a bat fluttering through
his bedroom when he was five. The family
moved to Havana when he was in his early
teens and he was sent none too willingly
to study law. He went to an art school
instead, disliked the Beaux Arts training,
but got a grant to study in Europe and
left for Madrid when he was 21, planning
to soon move on to Paris. Actually he
spent fourteen years in Spain, joining an
avant-garde group where he made art
variously inflected with Cubism, Fauvism
and Surrealism. But in 1931 his first wife and
their son died of TB, darkening his world.
Lam fought for the Republicans in
the Spanish Civil War, took part in the
defense of Madrid. He then finally made his
way to Paris, arriving in the beating heart
of the avant-garde on May 1, 1938, armed
with a letter of introduction to Picasso,
given to him by the Catalan sculptor
Manolo Hugue. Havana, Lam’s former
hometown, was not, of course, “primitive”
but the capital of a former colonial culture
and Lam, whose family had wanted him to
be a lawyer, was scarcely tribal, but this
did not prevent his perceived African-ness
from being a plus with the Parisian avantgarde,
who had long been channeling
the energy of tribal art. Indeed their
use of it had sometimes been attacked
as exploitative, an avant-garde form of
colonialism, but it was actually a matter
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of using that raw, brimming energy
to undermine the genteel salons. As
when Josephine Baker, the dancer who
electrified the Paris of the 20s in La
Revue Negre, had observed, “For too long
people have hidden their behinds. I see
no reason to be ashamed of them.”
Picasso told Andre Malraux in 1937
that his discovery of the energy in tribal
art and artifacts had begun when he
had been overwhelmed on a visit to the
Ethnographic Museum in the Palais de
Trocadero. “The masks weren’t just like
any other pieces of sculpture,” he said.
“Not at all. They were magic things. Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come
to me that very day.” He had made that
painting - arguably the first “modern”
artwork - in 1907. This is a Picassoid
reading, of course, and it has been
claimed that it was Derain who brought
the work to his attention. But that
Picasso got the most oomph! out of the
encounter is not open to question.
Picasso and Wifredo Lam did duly
meet. And Picasso took to the Cuban right
away. “Even if you hadn’t brought me a
letter from Manolo, I would have noticed
you in the street,” Picasso told Lam later.
“And I would have thought: I absolutely
must make a friend of this man.” He quickly
saw to it that Lam met the creme de la
creme of the avant garde, introducing him
to Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara,
Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, George Braque
and Michel Leiris, who was a Surrealist and
the director of the Black Africa department
in the Trocadero, and who would in due
course write a book about Lam.
The tutelary Picasso/Lam
relationship was discussed at the
time and it makes for an interesting
comparison with the young/old, black/
white relationship between Jean-
Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. One
significant difference is that Picasso was
no way perceived as being in a creative
slump - indeed was accelerating from
one prime into another - whereas Warhol
could be seen as needing Basquiat rather
more than vice versa. A more serious
distinction, though, was that Basquiat,
young though he was, was already a
developed artist when he began to work
with Andy Warhol, whereas Picasso
saw promise in the work of the still
evolving Lam, who was soon perceived
as his protégé. Indeed the part Picasso
played in his flowering was huge, and
included getting him a dealer, Pierre
Loeb, who put it on the record that he
visited Lam’s studio with Picasso.
Loeb said, while looking at the work,
“He is influenced by blacks.”
Picasso said, “He has the right, he
IS black.”
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Lam had his first solo show in Paris
with the Loeb gallery in the summer of
1939. Those who attended his opening
included Le Corbusier and Marc Chagall.
And that same year Picasso and Lam
showed together at the Perls Gallery in
New York, as Warhol and Basquiat would
almost half a century later.
I should note that many of the
details above come from a 2003 essay
by Michele Greet, entitled Inventing
Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-
Garde’s Primitivist Fixation. In this
Greet observes that “during his time in
Paris, Lam did not employ Africanizing
forms as a reflection of his Afro-Cuban
heritage, but rather he engaged these
forms as a means of emulating the
modernity of the Parisian avant-garde,
and in so doing, definitively breaking
with his academic training. Lam was
attracted to Picasso’s incorporation of
primitive forms to invent visually new
and challenging images … Lam began
to explore the possibility of imbuing
these formal constructions with meaning
specific to his identity as an Afro-Cuban.”
So. It was 1940 and Lam went
down to Marseilles in Vichy France to
dodge the Nazis. There he became a
habitué of the Villa Air-Bel, HQ for
the “Defense of Intellectuals Menaced
by Nazism,” which was run by a
gentlemanly American, Varian Fry,
who described Lam as “the tragicmasked
Cuban Negro who was one of
the very few pupils Picasso ever took.”
Amongst the Menaced Intellectuals
were a number of Surrealists, including
Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Victor
Brauner and Andre Breton, who
picked Lam to illustrate his poem
Fata Morgana. In retrospect it was a
last gasp of the primacy of the Paris
avant-garde. And the following year
Wifredo Lam was back in Cuba.
* * *
Yes, Lam was back, with his
mother and his three sisters, but
Havana was greatly changed. Under
the Batista regime, the capital was
Americanized, a tourist playground,
utterly disregarding the hard lives of the
peasantry in the countryside. “For me,
seeing Europe had been everything,”
he wrote. Lam’s humanitarian nature,
the side of him that had labored making
anti-Franco posters was reawakened.
“What I saw on my return looked like
Hell,” he wrote. “All the drama of the
colonialism of my youth resurfaced in
me.”
Nor that only. His sister Eloisa
well acquainted with the venerable
rituals of Santeria. “When I came
back to Cuba, I was taken back by
its nature, by the traditions of the
Blacks, and by the transculturation of
its African religions. And so I began
to orientate my paintings towards the
African.”
Eloisa arranged for her brother
and a friend, Alejo Carpentier, one of
the writers who had formulated the
key Latin-American concept, Magic
Realism, to participate in the rites. It
was as if the pictorial language which
had helped Picasso and the Cubists
construct Modernism was now Lam’s
to use for real.
16

Wifredo Lam with Pablo Picasso, Cannes, 1954
It was at the suggestion of Andre
Breton that he was offered a New York
show by Pierre Matisse. The younger son
of the artist had moved to New York and
opened a gallery twenty years before.
He was now operating out of the Fuller
Building on East 57th, where he showed
Giacometti, Derain, Dubuffet, Balthus
and Le Corbusier. Wifredo Lam might
as well have been back in Paris. Back
in Cuba Lam worked as never before.
MoMA bought his 1943 canvas, La Jungla.
They hung it alongside Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon.
Wifredo Lam died in September
1982. That March Jean-Michel
Basquiat had his first one-man
show at the Annina Nosei Gallery.
It did extremely well. A review by
Jeffrey Deitch read “Basquiat’s great
strength is his ability to merge his
absorption of imagery from the
streets, the newspapers, and TV
with the spiritualism of his Haitian
heritage, injecting both into a
marvelously intuitive understanding
of the language of modern painting.”
Good call.
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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