psychoanalytical nuances to the anticolonial discourse by asserting the movement's commitment to “displacing the ego, always more or less despotic, by the id, held in common by all.”7
Breton is also in Haiti early in 1946 when Wifredo Lam has a solo exhibition at the Institute de Culture in Port‐au‐Prince. Breton's text for the exhibition catalog “La nuit à Haiti” (Night in Haiti) expresses the desire to find a modern Eden in the present‐day Caribbean, a quest all the more urgent, he noted, in the face of “atomic disintegration” a reference to the detonation of atomic energy in Japan the previous year (Breton 1946). In a dramatic way in which art and politics came together, a statement by Breton published in La Ruche, which called for the return of democracy to Haiti, was credited with precipitating the overthrow of the government that occurred after his departure (Rosemont 1978, pp. 258–260; André Breton: La Beauté Convulsive 1991, pp. 354, 394).
He also makes a brief visit to the Dominican Republic, where he is reunited with Eugenio Granell and meets the group of intellectuals in Santo Domingo who spearheaded the production of the journal La Poesía Sorprendida between 1943 and 1947. Granell's presence in the Spanish Caribbean is especially catalytic. He is sometimes known as the last Spanish surrealist painter. A supporter of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party for Marxist Unification, POUM), Marxist factions in Spain during the Civil War, he was exiled to France in 1939 and went on to the Dominican Republic from there. Granell's own paintings were allied with the more abstract aspect of surrealism in which biomorphic forms mimicked nature without specifically inscribing it. Although Lam's signature imagery can be said to have emerged from the cadavre exquis, Granell created lyrical compositions with dreamlike qualities and pristine surfaces that ally his work with the illusionism of Granell's countryman the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and the lyrically suggestive landscapes of Frenchman Yves Tanguy.
Franklin Rosemont notes that:
La Poesía Sorprendida was an international publication with contributions – including many translations – from all over the world. Breton saluted the “noble quality” of this too‐little‐known review which, under the very noses of the Trujillo dictatorship, was a vehicle of prime importance for the transmission of surrealist thought during the war.8
In their compendium of surrealist texts from Africa, the Caribbean, and the diaspora, Rosemont and Robin D. Kelley describe the publication as “resolutely multi‐racial” as well as “international.”9 Among the most ardent supporters of surrealism associated with the journal were of African descent, including poet Aída Cartagena Portalatín, Manuel Llanes, Marel Valerio, and J.M. Glass Mejía.10
As Breton and Masson were captivated by the magical potential of the lush environment of the Caribbean, Granell celebrated the Caribbean as a “‘coffer’ of myths that are yet in the process of becoming” (Rosemont 1978, p. 56). In this he refers to the mythic perspective of artists associated with abstract expressionists in New York in the early 1940s, who Mark Rothko would declare were engaged in creating imagery that forged “new hybrids from old myth.”11 Granell would leave the Dominican Republic for Guatemala and then settle in Puerto Rico in 1950. There he served as professor of art and painting at the university in Río Piedras and mentored a generation of painters and writers committed to surrealism.12 This lead to the formation of the group El Mirador Azul (The Blue Bay Window), which sponsored several exhibitions including a major one in 1956 before dispersing with the departure of Granell for New York in 1957.13
It was also during his 1946 visit to the Caribbean that Breton became familiar with the emergent Haitian school of painting. This work came from a distinctly indigenous and vernacular perspective that might be labeled “primitive,” which was ultimately rooted in the ritual aspects of Vodun and its mythology that dominated daily life on the island. The development and promotion of Haitian painting were focused in the Centre d'Art, founded in 1944 by the American‐born educator and painter DeWitt Peters and several collaborators to showcase the work of individual painters who came from various circumstances all over Haiti.14 The fact that the creation of this work was associated with the so‐called “masses” rather than the Haitian bourgeoisie and seemed to have developed with a minimum of outside influences, would have imbued it with a cast of authenticity that would have interested Breton. As art historian Pierre Monosiet records in 1948, during a subsequent visit to the Centre d'Art, Breton was moved to write:
Haitian painting will drink the blood
of the phoenix
and with the epaulettes of Dessalines
it will ventilate the world.15
Although Breton tended to focus on the role of poetry in his conferences, dialogues, and writings on Haiti, Stebich reports that Breton was particularly attracted to the work of Hector Hyppolite and included a chapter on his work in his 1942 publication Surrealism and Painting in which he summarized the condition of surrealism during the War period.
Besides describing the aesthestic appeal of the work, he illuminated Hyppolite's background as a hougan [or priest in the Vodun religion] and explained the syncretism of Voodoo [sic] and Catholicism evident through the iconography.16
Breton then concludes that Hyppolite's vision reconciled a high form of realism with an exuberant “Super Naturalism” (André Breton: La beauté convulsive 1991, p. 396). Hyppolite's work would then be included in the exhibition “Le surréalisme en 1947” at the Galerie Maeght in July of that year. Breton returned to Haiti in 1948 and acquired 12 paintings by Hyppolite17, having already purchased at least one in 1946.18
By the late 1940s the primary period of surrealist interaction with the Caribbean had wound down. As noted previously, Granell would influence the art and literary scene in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. Breton would continue to communicate with Lam particularly in Paris through the 1960s and later would bring the same enthusiastic support of the waning surrealist movement to the struggles for independence in Vietnam (“Freedom Is a Vietnamese Word,” 1947; in Rosemont 1978, pp. 339–340) and Algeria (“Declaration Concerning the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War,” 1960; in Rosemont 1978, pp. 346–348). Franklin Rosemont has noted that in the literature on surrealism Breton's visits and interactions in the Caribbean “seem to have provoked little more than anecdotes and they are seen as marginal incidents, late biographical ‘fragments’ of a lifetime that had attained its climax long before” (Rosemont 1978, p. 95). The legacy of that moment, however, would continue to unfold over the next 2 decades during which island after island joined the convulsion toward independence in Africa, Asia, and the Americas that came to define the later 1950s and the 1960s.
For his part, Wifredo Lam is increasingly drawn into the orbit of postsurrealist circles in Europe. He becomes a mentor for the CoBrA group from northern Europe and especially its leader Asger Jorn.19
