A major retrospective of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (Sagua la Grande, 1902 – Paris, 1992) has just berthed at Tate Modern in London, weighing in at more than two hundred works and neatly splayed in chronological order across eleven rooms. After a season at both the Pompidou in Paris and Reina Sofía in Madrid, viewers may now step into this sprawling survey featuring Lam’s proclamation writ large on the wall: “My painting is an act of decolonization, not in a physical sense but in a mental one.” The oft-cited quote fires this curatorial endeavour, delving into the fringes of art history’s canon in a bid to weave more plural, or polycentric, histories of global modernism. This is in concurrence with the retrospectives of the Uruguayan modern artist Joaquín Torres-García at MoMA in New York, and the Portuguese modernist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso at the Grand Palais in Paris. These institutional redresses are long overdue, and the political moment is ripe for critical reappraisal. In the wake of the postcolonial turn, a wave of revisionary scholarship has thrust Lam’s work into new relief: Lam is a poster boy for diasporic displacement, cross-cultural hybridity, and black cosmopolitanism in the early twentieth century.
Yet, Cuba’s best-known painter, and the first artist of color celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic, has not had a solo show in London since 1952. Sixty years on, this comeback has been overwhelmingly welcomed with critical acclaim, its timeliness attested to by the scant negative responses that harp on long-standing refrains. Some critics snub the decision behind the return as “the taste du jour for unchallenging, relativist this-and-that-ness.” Others slate the work therein as “entirely a product of colonialism.” As is well known, Lam’s La Jungla (1943), no longer hangs in the hallway by the cloakroom at MoMA, but now sits in the gallery, alongside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The pressing task, it follows, is not that of righting exclusions, but of rewriting the inclusive terms of a non-Western avant-garde, still bound to old discursive knots of power, authority, and hierarchy – usually evaluated from the axis of Paris-centric, or within the orbit of Picasso-tropic, narratives of modern art.
Tate’s opening decolonial salvo is therefore salutary. But as one courses through six decades of prolific, diverse creative output – paintings, drawings, engravings, and ceramics – along a peripatetic career, from the student days in Havana and Madrid, through Paris and Marseille, the brief return to Cuba, and the ensuing lifelong exile, one is nevertheless wont to wonder whether the format of a retrospective suits the decolonial goal of confronting and delinking from Eurocentrism. Such a vast assembly brought to public view is doubtlessly a momentous occasion, sampling a range of exemplary works sourced from an impressive array of international collections. Lam’s life and relationships are also extensively documented throughout, in plinths replete with photographs, posters, paraphernalia, book covers, and such. They insistently point to Lam’s mixed parentage, as a Cuban of Chinese, Congolese, Spanish origins; they also track important visits to Venezuela, Martinique, New York or Haiti; and stress the close friendships, and oftentimes even creative partnerships, with cultural figures such as Picasso, Breton, Lévi-Strauss, Césaire, Carpentier, or Glissant.
All these roots and routes were, of course, part and parcel of the works on display. But, as is often the case with retrospectives, context is played down in favor of personal identity – one of Lam’s earliest enthusiasts, Michel Leiris, once tellingly offered a mea culpa: “I didn’t talk about him in the way I would have talked about another artist. For another artist, it would never have mattered to me at all whether he was of Breton origin, or Basque, or whatever.” This personal reading reinforces precisely the biographical model of influence that haunts Lam’s work and is liable to close off perspectives beyond that of an aping acolyte or middling outlier in modern art. Leiris’ fleeting shame points to the ongoing failure to open up new frameworks and to reconceive the complexity of a hybrid and unstable subjectivity. Such a standardized, clean narrative sequencing is somewhat at odds with the nomadic experience of exile and alienation that would define a life traversed by multiple identities, negotiating multiple languages and cultural entanglements in a syncretic vitalism that commingles gestural abstraction, folk art, avant-garde idioms, witchcraft practices, Santería rituals, Yoruba and Catholic signs.
Exiting the exhibition through the gift shop, the decolonial call does not become clearer. On the one hand, nothing is made – even in an otherwise illuminating catalogue – of recent developments in decolonial (as opposed to postcolonial) theory across Latin America. That is, the decolonial movement is a resounding call for counter-hegemonic, global discourse predicated on non-hierarchical affiliations and cross-border thinking. Is there a more apt definition for the poetics and politics that animate Lam’s late, most celebrated work, straddling several transatlantic spaces and breaking frontiers between elements in the composition? On the other hand, because what Lam specifically meant by “decolonial” has been elided from the opening quote. This would shed an important light on his work for the uninitiated, for Lam never laid claim to any grandiose, or abstract decolonial project. The motto is culled from a passage that read: “I wanted, with all my might, to paint the drama of my country, but expressing in depth the spirit of blacks, the beauty of the art of blacks. This way I would be like a Trojan horse from which would emerge fantastic figures capable of surprising, of troubling the exploiter’s dreams.” Arguably, Lam defines the “decolonial” there.
Unlike Latin American artists with a similar path, who preferably dwelt on the pre-Columbian legacy upon returning from Paris, or Cuban figures like José Lezama Lima and the Orígenes group, who extolled the Hispanic past, Lam hinged on the Afro-Cuban experience. Torn between the conservatism of Cuba and the regressive primitivism of Paris, Lam’s work gradually responded to, and grew out of, what he saw as cutting across and binding together both coasts: a disavowal of Africa and vilification of blackness. “I spoke here in Cuba with other artists,” said Lam, “about the importance of bringing the Black presence into art, but they did not seem to understand me. They thought that I was merely speaking to them about painting a little black person with a basket of fruit on his head.” When positing his work as “decolonial,” Lam stated: “Africa has not only been dispossessed of many of its peoples but also of its historical consciousness. It irritated me that in Paris African masks and idols were sold like jewelry.” This places his work within the problematic of authenticity and originality – as Picasso quipped at first looking at Lam’s paintings in Paris, “He has every right to paint like that, he is black!”
Once a “primitive” amongst the “primitivists,” Lam, always enthralled to Cubism and Surrealism and their use of African sources, progressively strove to appropriate Western appropriations of non-Western art for anti-Western ends – as his decolonizing “Trojan horse.” This subversion of modernist forms came through the symbolic restitution of African iconography, plunging himself into the depths of Afro-Cuban culture, and upending the use of African masks as tokens of alterity, as the only artist to identify himself as such in the history of self-portraiture. The particularities of such reclamations can get diluted by mobilizing Lam’s work as a mere conduit to broadly address the political violence and colonial legacy of the past century. Even as it finally redresses a notable absence, the peril of an ambitious survey is that it may detract from the radical edged comparative work that it beckons. Lam’s oeuvre has finally left the coatroom, and lies within the walled spaces of major institutions. But a sweeping retrospective like this might also lead us to forget, or further ignore the elephant in the room. A horse, to be more precise: Lam calling on artists like himself to “sever all ties with the colonial culture.”
The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam
Tate Modern, London
September 14, 2016 – January 8, 2017
Featured image: The Sombre Malembo, God of the Crossroads, 1943. The Rudman Trust © SDO Wifredo Lam