Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2002)
ISSN: 1525-447X
A Rereading of Juan Boza'a Critique of Wilfredo Lam:
The Emergence of Afro-Cuban Arts in Post-Revolutionary Cuba
Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2002)ISSN: 1525-447XA Rereading of Juan Boza'a Critique of Wilfredo Lam:
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Juan Boza, (1941-1991), was an Afro-Cuban artist trained in Cuba’s School of National Art at Cubanacan, near Havana. As one of a large group of artists, who were banned by the government in 1971, he emigrated to the United States during the Mariel boat exodus of 1980. After settling in Brooklyn, New York, he produced orisha-inspired art and took exception to those, who like Wilfredo Lam, had extracted orisha symbols out of their religious and social milieu. In an interview published by Ricardo Viera and Randall Morris in 1996, Boza critiqued what he saw as Lam’s distant gaze and detached engagement towards the orisha and Afro-Cuban social life. Their commentary during the interview, indicated that Viera and Morris were unable to appreciate Boza’s point. This reveals the Eurocentric filters through which they saw Lam.
In this essay, I examine Boza’s comments about Lam and the social context of Cuban orisha arts. Since the end of the revolution, Afro-Cuban artists have been overturning the older Eurocentric domination of the arts by the white Cuban elite. The revolution broke down that dominance and opened the art academies to Afro-Cuban artists and aesthetics. This opening resulted in the public arts of dancing, music, song, and theatre of Lucumí orisha arts.1 The emergence of the once devalued African aesthetics, and the struggle in post-revolutionary Cuba for its African soul constitutes the background against which I will examine Boza’s critique of Lam.
Wilfredo Lam was Cuba’s most celebrated artist of the twentieth century, and his paintings are now permanently on display at the Museum of International Art in Havana, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and other modern art museums, in Europe. Lam is best known for his surrealist paintings of tropical scenes and African sculptured figures, of which The Jungle, (1942-1943), is his most famous painting.2 His move to surrealist and primitivist art was a product of his seventeen-year stay in Europe. During this period he contributed and shared artistic knowledge with Pablo Picasso and André Breton in the milieu of the international art community. Most accounts of Lam’s artistic career in Madrid and Paris tend to present him as a student of Picasso, rather than as one who also taught Picasso. It is correct to say that his association with Breton was also portrayed, as a pupil to master relationship, yet by the early 1940’s Lam was ready to move beyond surrealism. This came about after he returned to the Caribbean in 1941 and reasserted his relation to the Caribbean and Cuba. From then on, he incorporated into his painting a fusion of Afro-Cuban religious forms and symbols. With this new series of artistic production, Lam’s fame arose internationally and, in Cuba, he became a respected representative of its national arts. During the Second World War Lam matured in an understanding of himself as a Third World intellectual, fully engaged with other artists, writers and intellectuals in challenging European imperialism. This critical sense of appreciation of world politics emerged in later years in his painting, Third World, (1967).
Lam’s primitivist phase spanned the late 1930’s to early 1950’s and was critically acclaimed and promoted in New York. Reviews of his early shows portrayed him as a Picasso progeny and frequently racialized him noting his Afro-Chinese background. His art received recognition principally on Eurocentric grounds. Initially it was absorbed into Surrealism, and after the second World War, it was treated as primitivist abstraction, as abstractionism became the weapon of the Cold War.3 This shift from proclaiming Lam as a Surrealist to projecting him as a primitivist took place between 1941 and 1944. It occurred between the publication of his drawings in 1941, in Charles Ford’s Surrealist newsletter, View 4 and the exhibition of his Lucumí inspired paintings in 1944 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.5 While Lam’s artistic references to Lucumí and Afro-Cuban spirituality enjoyed a measure of respectability, its content offered only a hint of the full range of possibilities offered by Afro-Cuban arts.
Juan Boza was an academy trained artist who left Cuba for the US in the 1980 Mariel boat exodus. He eventually settled in Brooklyn and achieved a measure of artistic success with his Lucumí-inspired arts, altars and paintings.6 Although Boza shared artistic affinity with his teacher, Wilfredo Lam, he kept a critical distance from him. In a 1986 interview, Boza explained his differences with Lam along biographical, stylistic and iconographic line. The critical point of difference was the nature and influence of spirituality in Afro-Cuban artistic expression.7 In his interview, Boza offered an incomplete narrative of Afro-Cuban arts as a social process of emergence. Until the 1980’s Afro-Cuban culture and arts lacked recognition from the State and non-Afro-Cuban elites. The recent emergence of Afro-Cuban culture into the open, signals a politics of empowerment that is determinedly revising the idea of it as a folkloric pastiche.
In the Viera and Morris interview, Boza recalls his origins. His father was a shoemaker in Camagüey, a district with a high concentration of sugar mills. He recalled that his own intellectual identity was formed in Camagüey, from various cultural influences, including observances and participation in the dance and rituals of the Yoruba-Lucumí pantheon (Viera and Morris, 171). From his childhood he learned to make art from the synthesis of religious practices—Catholicism, Yoruba, and Congo—and it was to this principle of creativity that he returned after the government banished him from formal art in 1971.
Boza’s first exposure and formal training in art began at age 10, after the Cuban revolution. He received a scholarship and enrolled at the esteemed colonial and nationalist art academy, the San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts from 1960 to 1962. He transferred to the new School of National Art in Cubanacan, after its founding in 1962. As an Afro-Cuban, his admittance into these academies would have been impossible before the revolution transformed the island’s racist culture in significant ways.8 Boza was among the first Afro-Cubans to benefit from the revolution’s impact on art pedagogy, marked by the move away from the white elite arts of the nationalists to the dynamism of the revolutionaries.9 At the School of National Art, he met Lam, who unlike Boza, had traveled and lived extensively in Europe and in Paris. Lam’s privileged class position allowed him to develop an academic approach to African art, which contrasts sharply with Boza’s own immersion in Afro-Cuban aesthetics.
The difficulties Boza and other Afro-Cuban artists encountered at the national art school derived from internal conflicts over the direction of art pedagogy.10 Whereas Lam attained his international renown as a surrealist painter in pre-revolutionary Cuba, Boza began his professional career in the less prestigious areas of graphics and lithography, not in painting. Forced to quit working as an artist in 1971, he maintained his spiritual commitment, and worked to resolve his internal contradictions.11 He developed an inner resolve during this decade of retreat from art until his departure from Cuba in 1980.
Boza critiqued the characterization of Lam as “the Afro-Cuban artist” on stylistic and iconographical grounds. His criticism is directed at Lam’s transposition of orisha aesthetics into European forms, resulting in an unwarranted Europeanization of Afro-Cuban forms and de-Africanization of the orishas. According to him: “when I looked at Santería from another perspective I started to recognize what the real Afro-Cuban elements were, and when I looked for them in Lam’s work I did not find them (Viera and Morris 1996,183). He found Lam’s painting to be facile depictions of distorted and “really dark African sculptures” (Ibid). The color scheme was one in which the “coloration had nothing to do with Cuba” (Ibid). The orisha forms do not reveal the intertwined metaphysical context of dance, textile, arts and music, which provide both an outward and inward reflection for Lucumí arts and the interpenetration of their space by santeros and santeras. The reason for this is Lam’s distant relation to Lucumí. It is a relation that is based on nostalgic yearnings to recreate an identity, yet the more tangible material source of this creativity is European aesthetics, which held the form of primitivism and surrealism. With this criticism, Boza claims a superior aesthetic ground as an Afro-Cuban artist, and as one whose aesthetic sensibilities and stylistics have been shaped by Afro Cuban religious experiences.
Although Lam’s detachment from Afro-Cuban aesthetics was the target of Boza’s critique in the interview conducted by Viera and Morris in 1986, the interviewers found this unacceptable. Viera challenged Boza’s assessment by speaking highly of Lam’s Italian choice of color. In turn, Morris too praises this European palette and style of painting, even though Lam was depicting images of African art and African spirituality (Ibid). This strategy of upholding Lam’s greatness on European aesthetic grounds proved that the evaluation was being conducted with Eurocentric lens and on Eurocentric ground. The problem in this strategy is that both Viera and Morris have ignored the Caribbean context of Cuban aesthetics as well as the Afro-Cuban principle of Lucumí-inspired creativity. Because the interviewers were unfamiliar with Lucumí arts and Afro-Cuban aesthetics they missed the point of Boza’s critique and invoked the standard art historical technique of Eurocentric legitimation. By so doing, they discounted the relevance of Caribbean aesthetics on Lam’s work and praised him for embracing European techniques, Italian color tones and palette. They elevated him as an artist for deploying these European techniques in capturing the composite forms of decontextualized orishas. Viera and Morris seem oblivious that their interpretations of Lam’s work within the European art paradigm misconstrue the silent painted forms that had been taken out of their cultural context. Not so surprisingly, they misunderstood Boza’s critique because they were employing radically different explanatory schemes.
In deep ways, Boza’s critique of Lam, invites us to evaluate the histories of other non-European art movements that have been labeled or promoted as surrealist, notably those of Japan and Egypt. Japanese surrealism had other roots. It rose in part as a critique of martial law and fascism in Japan in the 1930’s, and faced severe censorship for its stance.12 In Egypt, the surrealist movement of the late 1930’s and 1940’s enjoyed a greater degree of freedom and flourished among its several dozen proponents.13 However the imprisonment of Egyptian surrealists in 1947 forced some of the proponents of the style into exile and radically limited the power of these artists within Egyptian intellectual circles. In Egypt, the critique of the State by artists began with its leading theorist, Georges Henein, a Coptic Christian, and son of diplomats. Henein was amenable to modernist European forms and he criticized the state for its authoritarian culture, after it had waged a series of civil wars in the 1930’s. Like Lam, he studied art and literature in Paris, corresponded with André Breton, and returned to Egypt in the late 1930’s to form an association of surrealist artists.
With these criticisms of the state by intellectuals in Egypt, Japan and the Caribbean, a radical transformation occurred in the art movement in these regions. One major change was that the idea of art as an elite project dissipated as artists began to connect to the culture of the masses. Whether this redefinition began as philosophical-cum-psychological explorations in the poetry and writings of George Henein or as metaphysical or spiritual explorations in the art of Lam, what was crucial was the artistic return to the material conditions of local cultures. If ultimately the art of Egyptian surrealists or of Wilfredo Lam is seen as stylistically or iconographically constricted, it is because of their incomplete merger with the social context of Egypt or of Cuba. Begun as experiments in transplantation (transforming European form and techniques to Egyptian or Cuban context), the success of these surrealists was limited. These experiments were difficult to sustain beyond that generation of artists. It was left to the next generation of artists to return artistic forms to the cultures of both Egypt and Cuba. The succeeding generation of artists, notably, Hadi ‘Abd al-Gazzar (1925-1965) in Egypt and Juan Boza in Cuba, moved into the local context of their culture and ingested it into their arts. The Egyptian painter al-Gazzar incorporated magic and ancient and popular philosophical symbolism in his painting, and Boza celebrated Lucumí altars.
We can better appreciate the basis of Boza’s critique if we examine Lam’s own growth as a cultural figure and his detachment from his Afro-Cuban roots. By 1942, a series of articles emerged which identified Lam’s Afro-Chinese origins. This biographical detail was later reiterated in Pierre Mabille’s 1945 article, which described Lam’s father as the son of a Chinese immigrant and his second wife, a black woman whose mother was from Congo, but who had married a mulatto of some means and escaped servitude.14 While Lam grew up among the sugar cane fields of Sagua La Grande, his parents’ ambitions for social mobility encouraged his association with his father’s compatriots at the casino. Mabille alludes to the existential distance of Lam from Afro Cuban culture.15 His upbringing disassociated him from black culture as he embarked on a career in painting with his father’s aid and approval.
Lam received an education in Havana and in 1923 he received a grant from his hometown to study in Madrid. He remained there for fifteen years, and married during that period. After the death of his wife and child, Lam fell into prolonged depression, and stopped painting. He suffered intense despair from which he began to emerge around 1934 (Mabille, 204). During the final years of his stay in Madrid, he encountered an exhibition of African masks and sculptures, and in his resolve to recover emotionally, Lam associated African art with a search for his own Cuban origins, particularly those of his maternal side. Given the modernist politics of the time, it seems that this decision was motivated by the idea that if Europeans can draw from African art, he, Lam could do so with greater legitimacy given his Afro Cuban roots.
In his final year in Spain, Lam was forced to flee the country at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and moved to France where he associated with leading artists and surrealists in Paris, including Picasso and Breton. The difficulty a reader today would have with Mabille’s first hand recollections of Lam and his meetings at the cafes in Paris is the total subordination of the younger artist, Lam, to the European master, Picasso (Mabille, 208). Mabille, a French theorist, perhaps like Lam himself, was only able to approach Afro-Cuban culture as a rapprochement between European styles and African art. In this grand scheme of things, Lam could only feature as a student given his search to instill an identity he never understood and from which he remained aloof.
Lam’s alienation from Afro-Cuban life and spiritual practice continued even after his return to Cuba, in the 1940’s and he became a part of the elite white liberal community of Cuba. He associated with various writers, folklorists and ethnographers including Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier and Fernando Ortiz, who raised the study of Afro-Cuban culture to the level of academic pursuit.16 His European stature as a surrealist established him as an artist of renown and stature in Cuba, allowing him to live the privileged life open to whites.
The critical difference between the two artists Boza and Lam rests on their stances to Afro-Cuban religiosity. For Lam, a secularist and non-practitioner of the religion, the artistic presentation of the orishas of Lucumí or Santería is through symbols that have been reduced to a myriad of interlaced forms rendered in “surrealist” style. The figures in Anam (1942) or The Jungle (1943) are ambiguous as to the identity of the represented orishas. The identities of the two orishas, Oggun and Eleggua in The Green Morning, (1943), are constructed with shapes that incorporate ambiguous references to orishas, because of its high stylistic abstraction. These ambiguous references embody a spiritual distance not only from the Afro Cuban masses from whom Lam drew the imagery of the altar or the votive, but also from the academic and literati coterie who admired his work but were disinterested in any meaningful encounter with Afro-Cuban orisha (Hechter, 164). As a secularist, Lam was an uninformed observer, a standpoint that mystified the underlying meaning of his art and his relation to his subject.
Conceptually removed from the Lucumí religious world-view, the only available assessment of Lam’s work is a modernist one. Yet there are modernist faithfuls who want to uphold Lam as a quasi-religious figure. In the process they further essentialize the religious inferences and symbols in his paintings by taking them out of their social and cultural milieu. The very fact that Lam has routinely been catalogued as primitivist surrealist, shows that his proponents do not really explore his anthropologic encounters with the Lucumí form and essence of Afro-Cuban spirituality and his treatment of them as ‘other’.17
Clearly, Viera and the artistic world’s appraisal of Lam as an astute synthesizer of African and European forms is largely a white outsider’s observations. Theirs, is the language of Eurocentrists who revel in an exotic encounter with the “primitive.” They are utilizing for Lam the same kind of language reserved for the “geniuses” of Western art—Picasso, Klee, Matisse or Gauguin—who have taken similar paths. In resorting to a language of essentialized terms, Viera and Morris underscore the difference between European and non-European art and play down the interpenetration of culture and art. To ignore Lam’s genuine though incomplete cultural search, and to label his work ‘primitive’ or ‘surrealist,’ places him in the very same category as other European artists, for whom these are merely intellectual, not existential explorations.
We cannot but recognize that Lam was channeling his personal experiences and paradoxes of identity into his art. Where European representational styles were inadequate to represent the devotional symbols he sought, he resorted to primitivism, a style easily available to him. He inserted into the painting, symbols, forms, and indicators of devotion, which he could find from his encounter with African practices. And yet, just as his European and American connoisseurs and critics reduced his art through hegemonic filters of language and artistic assumptions, so too did Lam unintentionally reduce the power and cogency of his search by resorting to the essentialist codes of primitivism. Unable to reconcile himself fully with this own Afro-Cuban origins and practices, his social privilege further isolated him from encountering his own African practices of devotion which could have provided him with the artistic interpretation he sought.
It is against this background of pre-Revolutionary race relations in Cuba that the full force of Boza’s criticism emerges as a shrewd insightful critique. It has yet to be fully understood and developed. Viera completely missed the complexity of this criticism, and so, interjects several times to defend Lam whom he venerated as an interpreter of stylistic influences and environment ‘in a universal way’ (1996, 183). His attempt to dismiss the validity of Boza’s point fails because he was recouping Lam into a European paradigm that was ill-equipped to address the Cuban experience to which Boza was alluding. The underlying problem in Viera’s dismissal is the fallacious assumption that any artists who produces through the Western technique, as Lam has done, becomes a supreme arbiter of culture by engaging in this kind of combination of European techniques and non-Western forms. For him, a culture that is external to this European epistemic base is interpretable in a “universal way” through “universal” categories. Insofar as this understanding of culture glosses Afro-Cuban reality, his notion of “universal way” or “universal category” is empty. Lucumí art cannot be reduced to primitivism as that is not the appropriate category for its analysis. That flawed methodology harkens back to the old ethnographic, colonialist ploy of Fernando Ortiz, of modeling Afro-Cuban culture as primitive.
Boza’s criticism of Lam rejects this effort to reclaim or capture an African basis of the divine for his works. As the recent writings of Pedro Pérez Sarduy shows, Boza reminds us of the material and physical manifestations of the natural and the divine in Afro-Cuban metaphysics. The prominence of Santería as the basis for his art come, from his personal knowledge and of the religious practices of people in his environs. Tested by hardships of rejection and censorship, Boza turned inward and within his own community to define his own artistic project. Boza’s elements of inspiration remained true to his Afro-Cuban experiences, which he used to transform his art, knowledge, and spiritual devotion. While his own art has now become the subject of avid collecting among a modest following in New York, the range of this support varies dramatically from that commanded by Lam.
Although there are elements of a search for transformation in Lam’s art, the language of his art remained remote, and removed from its cultural and religious genesis. After the Revolution, however, he produced a number of paintings with orisha themes, of which we may assume were as familiar to Boza as were Lam’s famous works from the 1940’s. Among these, Embo for Yemaya, 1963, is illustrative of Boza’s complaint of Lam’s obliviousness to Cuban landscape and light.18 For him, the darkly colored canvas of flat-formed figural representations bear little identification with Yemaya, the powerful orisha and la Regla of the sea. Where African religiosity spoke of light and power, Lam’s Europeanized aesthetics spoke of darkness and ominousness. Throughout the 1960’s Lam’s paintings commonly featured backgrounds of dark base tones in heavy browns or sepias, with angular geometric figures superimposed in tones of lighter browns, and pastels or whites. Even a painting with a promising title as Tropical Fruit, 1969, is rendered with drab overtones of beige, browns, off-whites and the only hint of primary colors are pastel toned turquoise and red clay colored fronds set alone to one side.
A question that Boza’s critique raises is: Could we actually expect Lam to achieve an ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban art, and if so on what terms? Lam’s status as an outsider from even his own Afro-Cuban roots and encumbered by class privilege, was a limitation through which his art could only reach and offer remote cultural experiences to impressionable critics. But, we must also ask what kind of authenticity could be vested in Boza’s art, when he had been forced into exile and his own artistic training seemed to have caused considerable self-searching in developing a local rationalism for his art. We will attempt an answer by reflecting on the career of Boza’s contemporary, Juan Moreira, (b. 1938), who like Boza, was another protégé of Lam.
Juan Moreira was also trained at the Escuela Taller de Artes Plasticas de La Habana, (San Alejandro), and he works in a surrealist influenced style and format. He continues to work and live in Cuba, yet unlike Boza, he enjoys critical acclaim and has participated in a wide range of exhibitions, including a recent showing in Los Angeles.19 Moreira like Boza, distinguished himself from Lam by resorting to a wider palette of color and volume. His representations of orishas is more tentative than Boza’s altar art, but occupies a middle position between Lam’s flat renderings and Boza’s move to three dimensional altars. Moreira’s relation to the subject of his paintings is a more restrained and ambiguous one than Boza’s devotional altar. While the orisha theme is nevertheless present in a series of Moreira’s paintings, including “Osain #2” (1989), these works render the orisha as a visage from a dream world and remain at a subjective distance.20
Although in exile, the authenticity of Boza’s art is secured by recent developments in Cuba. After the mid-1980’s, stronger associations have developed between exhibiting institutions in Cuba and Lucumí art practitioners. Afro-Cuban artists began to openly display Lucumí themes, which had been previously been censored, within the genres of studio arts. Although Boza paid the price of censorship and forced emigration from Cuba, his artistic vision was in line with the sentiments and aspiration of his community. The resilience and upwelling of Lucumí-inspired arts has continued proving that even after his emigration to the United States of America, Boza remained sensitively in tune with the artistic heartbeat of Afro-Cuban culture both in Cuba and in the United States. In the mid-1980’s in Havana, the Afro-religion-inspired works of José Bedia and Ricardo Rodríguez Brey were shown.21 By the late 1980’s regional museums, such as the Museo de Guanabacoa, were openly exhibiting palero installations.22 Boza’s early death from AIDS in 1990 deprived us of his mature perspectives on the cyclical effects of an upwelling of arts from the masses to which the state has reluctantly but ultimately stepped aside to tolerate.
http://www.artscenecal.com/Listings/WestHwd/CouturierFile/CouturierArtists/JMoreiraFile/.
Web site for new art from Cuba, >http://www.cubaupdate.org/contempo.htm.
“picassolamming” Art Digest, 17 (December 1, 1942), 7.
Wilfredo Lam and his Contemporaries, 1938-1952. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992.
Camnitzer, Luis. New Art of Cuba, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994).
Coulthard, G. R. Race and Colour in Cuban Literature (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).
Fouchet, Max-Pol. Wilfredo Lam, (New York: Rizzoli, 1978).
Fuentes-Perez, Ileana et al., Outside Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists = Fuera de Cuba: artistas Cubanos contemporaneous (Rutgers Press, 1989).
Gharbi, Samir. As-surrialiya fi misr (Cairo, al-haya`ah al-misriyah al-’amah al-kitab,1986).
Herzberg, Julia P. “Rereading Lam.” In Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, ed. Arturo Lindsay (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 149-170.
Loomis, John. Revolution of Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
Mabille, Pierre. “The Jungle: On the importance assumed by art criticism in the contemporary age,” Tropiques, no. 12 (January 1945). Reprinted in Michael Richardson, ed., and trans., and Krzystzt of Fijalkowski, trans., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Verso: London, 1996, 199-212.
Martinez, Juan. Cuban Art and National identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,1994).
Morales, Pedro Rondùn. “Form against Content, The Project of a Revolutionary Cuban Art.” In Utopian Territories New Art from Cuba, eds. Eugenio Valdes Figueroa, et al. (Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery; Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 1999).
Munroe, Alexandria. Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994).
Nicodemus, Evelyn. “Bourdieu out of Europe?” Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 74-87.
Ortiz, Fernando. Los negros brujos (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1995, rpt. 1906)
Power, Kevin. “Cuba One Story after Another,” While Cuba Waits: Art from the Nineties, (Small Art Press, 2000).
Sarduy, Pedro Pérez and Jean Stubbs, eds. Afro-Cuban Voices: on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000).
Sims, Lowery Stokes “Myths and Primitivism: The Work of Wilfredo Lam in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952, Wilfredo Lam and his Contemporaries, 1938 – 1952 (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992), 71-88.
Thompson, Robert Farris. Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas (New York, 1993), 165.
Viera, Ricardo and Randall Morris, “Juan Boza, Travails of an Artist-Priest, 1941-1991.” In Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art, ed. Arturo Lindsay (Washington: Smithsonian Press 1996), 171-187.
1. “Lucumí” is an Afro Cuban religion from Yorubaland, Nigeria.
2. Outside Cuba, Lam is well know partly because of his long international career which took him to Paris and New York, and partly because of the love for primitivist arts in Europe and the United States in the interwar period 1919-1935. This love was revived during World War II as Americans mined their experiences in jungle warfare, a component of that global war.
3. On the notion of appropriation by Surrealism of Lam or Kahlo, see, Evelyn Nicodemus, “Bourdieu out of Europe?” in Reading theContemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999, 78. One may also study how the international surrealists held up Lam’s work for their own purposes in configuring Third World arts in the midst and aftermath of World War II. See the catalogue, Wilfredo Lam and his Contemporaries, 1938-1952. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992.
4. These featured minotaur figures.
5. See, Lowery Stokes Sims, “Myths and Primitivism: The Work of Wilfredo Lam in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952., in Wilfredo Lam and his Contemporaries, 1938 – 1952. (1992), 73.
6. Difficulty with Boza’s estate and probate kept his art in isolation for nearly a decade. After a long period, a retrospective on Lucumí arts at The Painted Bride Art Center, in Philadelphia was held in June 1999, included a display of some of Boza’s Yemaya altars and several websites have since emerged mentioning his work. Marc Zuver of the Fondo del Sol art gallery in Washington, D.C curated this retrospective. Another spelling of Boza’s name is Juan Bauza as listed in the catalog by Robert Farris Thompson, Faces of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas, New York, (1993), 165.
7. For the excerpts of Boza’s 1986 interview, see Ricardo Viera and Randall Morris, “Juan Boza, Travails of an Artist-Priest, 1941-1991” in Arturo Lindsay, Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art. Washington: Smithsonian Press 1996, 171-187. (172). Other comments from the interview of Boza by Ricardo Viera was translated and published in the catalog of Ileana Fuentes-Perez, et al., Outside Cuba: Contemporary Cuban Visual Artists = Fuera de Cuba: artistas Cubanos contemporaneous, (Rutgers Press, 1989). In these, Boza admits to partaking in the National Salon of 1970, in which artists displayed works of contemporary interest in abstract, erotic and other previously banned subjects. (21). Afro-Cuban arts have been regarded as folk art both as a state political strategy for administering art and as a pastiche. See the comments of Pedro Rond(n Morales, in “Form against Content, The Project of a Revolutionary Cuban Art,” in Eugenio Vald(s Figueroa, et al., Utopian Territories New Art from Cuba, Vancouver: 1999, 7. The idea that Afro-Cubanism has become a folkloric strategy or style to be used against abstraction is suggested by the pastiche scenes of public dancing by Afro-Cubans in public squares by Pedro Álvarez and in comments by Kevin Power. See “Cuba One Story after Another,” While Cuba Waits Art from the Nineties, (Small Art Press, 2000), 29.
8. On the development of Cuba’s national arts program, some insight into the scale and design of the larger national academies as art centers of a revolutionary movement may be gained from the overly sentimental architectural photographic study by John Loomis, Revolution of Forms: Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools (1999). The shortcoming of Loomis’ book is its reliance on architectural formalism as determinative of the meaning and context of the schools. Loomis’ work casts little insight in this direction. Similarly, some interpretation of the privilege of the nationalist generation of artists who preceded the revolution may be gained from Juan Martinez, Cuban Art and National identity: The Vanguardia Painters, 1927-1950. (1994). Martinez adopts a Eurocentric perspective in assuming that the choice of the nationalists to develop an art of their own succeeded as it absorbed European avant-garde styles. See also, Luis Camnitzer’s chapter on Art Education in Cuba in his L. Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). Camnitzer though, does not provide analysis of the position of Afro-Cubans in the official arts program of the Cuban post-revolution government.
9. Thanks are due to Professor Nkiru Nzegwu of the Africana Studies Dept. at Binghamton University for suggesting a review of the interpretations of Lam and Boza, and who has provided a critical framework for studying diasporic African culture. I am also thankful to a lecture in December, 2000, by the Cuban journalist, Pedro Perez Sarduy, for this notion of the impact of the Cuban Revolution on removing segregated practices and for the freeing of black participation and the revival of Santería in public arts. Sarduy gives the distinction between white and black as distinguishing features of pre-Revolutionary and post-revolutionary Cuba. See also, Pedro Pérez Sarduy and Jean Stubbs, eds., Afro-Cuban Voices: on Race and Identity in Contemporary Cuba, (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000).
10. These art schools have since fallen into disuse. Loomis does not fully explain why in his 1999 study, Cuba’s Forgotten Art Schools, his description of the career of Boza is illuminating.
11. See, Ricardo Viera and Randall Morris, “Juan Boza, Travails of an Artist-Priest, 1941-1991,”Arturo Lindsay, Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Art. Washington: Smithsonian Press (1996), 171-187. (172).
12. For discussion of the position of Japanese surrealists in resisting authoritarianism during the 1930’s, see Alexandria Munroe, Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky. New York 1994.
13. On the relative autonomy of the Egyptian surrealists, see, Samir Gharbi, As-surrialiya fi misr, (Cairo, 1986). Yet, the problem, which faced the surrealists in Egypt, was maintaining support after the Egyptian Revolution, when the need for a more amenable public art and ultimately a resort to folklore ensued.
14. See, Pierre Mabille, “The Jungle: On the importance assumed by art criticism in the contemporary age,” in Tropiques, no. 12 (January 1945), and reprinted in Michael Richardson, ed., and trans., and Krzystztof Fijalkowski, trans., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Verso: London 1996, 199-212. Lam’s Afro-Chinese origins had begun to appear in art reviews appearing in New York in 1942, for instance “picassolamming” Art Digest, 17 (December 1, 1942), 7.
15. Thus, Mabille writes imaginatively, “On some evenings, whilst his father joined his compatriots at the Chinese casino, Wilfredo heard, coming from the far reaches of the plain, the echoes of the ceremonies by which the blacks, his mother’s blood brothers, asked the forces of the earth, through the power of the herbs, for beneficent support and the means to gratify their vengeance.” Ibid. P. 203.
16. See Julia P. Herzberg, “Rereading Lam,” in Lindsay, Santería Aesthetics. (1996), 164.
17. See, the discussion of myth and primitivism in the catalog of Lowery Sims, “Myths and Primitivism: The Work of Wilfredo Lam in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952,” Wilfredo Lam and His Contemporaries, New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, (1992), pp. 71-88. The ogres of primitivism in Cuban intellectual development as a social containment strategy of division by race and culture, particularly of the demonization of lucumí as witchcraft, as in Fernando Oritiz’ Los negros brujos (1906), have been critiqued by a number of scholars, including G.R. Coulthard, Race and Color in Cuban Literature, (1962).
18. This work is reproduced and probably mistitled in Max-Pol Fouchet, Wilfredo Lam, New York, (1978), as figure 161. An offering to an orisha is commonly referred to as an ebbo, and not embo. It is on display at the Galleria Nuovo Sagitario, Milan.
19. Moreira’s last show in the United States was at The Couturier Gallery, in Los Angeles in 1999. See, the website, http://www.artscenecal.com/Listings/WestHwd/CouturierFile/CouturierArtists/JMoreiraFile/.
20. See the listing of this title under the web site for new art from Cuba, http://www.cubaupdate.org/contempo.htm.
21. See, Luis Camnitzer, New Art from Cuba, Austin (1994), 46-50. Camnitzer is not critical however of Lam’s representation of Lucumí, instead follows the accepted wisdom on the authenticity of his representation, even though he notes that Lam was not a believer.
22. Camnitzer, 40. “Palero” is an Afro-Cuban religion of Angola origin.
© Africa Resource Center 2003