H. (2007). Martín Chambi: Corresponsal gráfico (1918–1929). In: Martín Chambi (ed. A.B. Echenique), 31–44. Madrid: Fundación Telefónica y La Fábrica.22 Sekula, A. (1986). The body and the archive. October 39: 3–64.
23 Weissberg, L. (1997). Circulating images: Notes on the photographic exchange. In: Writing the Image After Roland Barthes (ed. J.‐M. Rabaté), 109–131. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Further Reading
1 Antelo, R. (1984). Literatura em revista. São Paulo: Editorial Atica.
2 Becerra Gonzalez, M. (1933). La mujer, la moda y el diseñador. Imagen 1 (2): n.p.
3 Billeter, E. (1998). A Song to Reality: Latin American Photography, 1860–1993. Barcelona; New York: Lunwerg. Available through D.A.P.
4 Debroise, O. (1994). Fuga mexicana. Un recorrido por la fotografía en México. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Available in English as Mexican Suite: A History of Photography in Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.
5 Eder, R. (1988). El concepto de modernidad en el arte de América Latina. In: X Coloquio Internacional de Historia de Arte. Simpatías y diferencias: relaciones del arte mexicano con el de América Latina, 319–335. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
6 George, W. (1933). Fotografía, magia moderna. Imagen 1 (2): n.p.
7 Hooks, M. (1993). Tina Modotti: Photographer and Revolutionary. London: Pandora/HarperCollins.
Part II
1945–1959
The Cold War and Internationalism
This group of essays addresses the rise of abstraction and consolidation of “internationalist” formalism, the polemics between the proponents of social realism, and indigenismo as “authentic” art forms versus the subsequent development of alternative movements such as geometric, concrete, and gestural abstraction. It examines these movements within the social and political context of the Cold War and the rise of modernization theory and state‐led developmentalism across Latin America. It also highlights the importance of the rise of institutions, museums, and events, such as the São Paulo Biennial, in the growing internationalization of Latin American art.
6 Wifredo Lam, Aimé Césaire, Eugenio Granell, André Breton: Agents of Surrealism in the Caribbean
Lowery Stokes Sims
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When the painter Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) returned to his native Cuba in 1941, after a fifteen‐year sojourn in Spain and France, his presence would become emblematic of the course of surrealism in the Caribbean during the 1940s. As Europe faced the scourge of war, various intellectuals deemed enemies of the Fascist, Nazi, and Vichy states – including “subversive” agents such as surrealists – fled the continent and many made their way to the Caribbean. Some like Lam and the Spanish surrealist painter Eugenio Granell (1912–2001) would linger; others like André Breton and surrealist artists who left France through Marseilles, would transit through the area.1
Specific to this story, a group of surrealist artists fled Vichy France on a boat, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, which docked in Martinique in 1941 for several weeks before the passengers dispersed to various locations including the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. During this detention in Fort‐de‐France by a regime that was in allegiance with the Vichy Regime in France, Breton and Lam came into contact with the Martiniquan poet and patriot Aimé Césaire, his wife Suzanne, and René Ménil. Inspired by the surrealist publications of the 1940s and 1950s (Césaire had spent many years in France in the interwar period), the Césaires and Ménil had just begun to publish the review Tropiques, a journal of cultural polemics (see Rosemont 1978, pp. 83–84, 95–96, 230–236) in which pages they embarked on a project to define an Antillean identity as a mode of cultural liberation. Lam's friend and recently appointed French envoy to Haiti, Pierre Mabille, would publish the first extensive article on Lam's work in Tropiques in 1944 (Mabille 1945).
Unsuccessful in securing a visa to Mexico – his preferred destiny – Lam found himself back in Cuba in the company of Helena Holzer, the Alsatian‐born scientist whom he had first met in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. She would become his second wife in Cuba in 1944.2 Once settled in Cuba Lam began to work on a group of paintings that would evolve into the works of 1942–1943, such as La jungla (The Jungle), which would become his best‐known work. It manifested the first resolution of his signature style and iconography, which was characterized by an alchemical potion of stylistic elements and strategies of cubism, surrealism, and the symbolism of the Afro‐Cuban religion known as Lucumí. In this painting, Lam presented plant/human hybrids and objects that appear amid, against, and within a dense growth of sugarcane and tobacco leaves. The figures are masked, their anatomies askew as heads merge directly from prominent buttocks; a horse's tail protrudes from the backs of two of the figures; breasts mimic the rotund forms of the buttocks that in turn mimic tropical fruits such as mangos and papayas.
Despite his European experiences in Spain and France, Lam had to establish himself in the firmly entrenched and established contemporary Cuban artistic hierarchy. As a result, he would not have a solo exhibition in Cuba until April 1946, a full five years after his return from Europe. In the meanwhile, through the good graces of Katy Perls, the mother of legendary dealer Klaus Perls, Lam had already had an exhibition of his work at the Perls Gallery in New York in 1939. Then, through the intervention of André Breton, who had gone on to New York City from Martinique, Lam established a relationship with the Pierre Matisse Gallery, where he exhibited several times during the 1940s.
What is interesting is that during the mid‐1940s Lam's work was seen and written about in the context of the surrealist‐inflected early work of New York artists who would form the abstract expressionist group. Albeit by proxy, Lam along with surrealists such as Breton, Matta, and Masson would establish important relationships with individuals such as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky, who would become key figures in those art movements. We can read in reviews of Lam's work at the Matisse Gallery evocations of sacred content, mythic structure, hybrid imagery, and abstracted form that placed it squarely in the middle of the dialogue of what would come to be seen as the quintessential “American” art form (A Way to Kill Space 1946).
However, by the end of the decade, as many of the European artists drifted back to Europe, the Americans eventually enacted a most Oedipal reversal, rejecting the influence of surrealism for a more existential – albeit performative – interpretation of their work. During the later 1940s and into the 1950s, therefore, the Caribbean would become an important arena for the art movement, especially as Lam exhibited in Haiti, Granell ignited the arts and literary movements in the Dominican Republic, and Breton himself visited both these locales, supporting opposition movements among the youth in the region.
In the context of the Caribbean, Lam's work and Breton's postulation of surrealist premises became beacons of resistance and revolution. As an art movement, surrealism has been described as working for the “liberation of man” (Surrealism and International Politics 2010). That liberation was to be accomplished both
