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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 through artistic techniques that fostered a derailment of the constraints of conscious decision, literal narrative, and conventional materials. It was also to be achieved through the promotion of political ideals that challenged the prevailing Eurocentric domination of global politics. During the period between the World Wars, the surrealists came to champion the cause of colonized peoples. They both questioned the imposition of European values and culture on other world cultures and examined the political and economic situation of those cultures.³ Under the leadership of André Breton and the aforementioned members of the surrealist cohort in Martinique such as René Crevel, Jacques Viot and J.M. Monnerot promoted the idea that non‐Western cultures held their own integral values systems and that they should be left untouched by European colonialist impositions.

The surrealists actualized their commitment to colonized peoples in various ways. In a 1929 issue of the magazine Variétés, for example, they published a redrawing of the map of the world to emphasize regions they had designated as centers of surrealist activity (Le Monde au Temps des Surrealists 1929). Russia, New Guinea, Alaska, Mexico, and Easter Island were given outsized proportions in comparison to their mapping in conventional cartography. These locales represented realms of the “marvelous” – that elusive expression of the surrealist concept of beauty as “an impassioned fusion of wish and reality … where poetry and freedom are one.” On this same map entities that represented the acme of the political, social, and economic world hierarchy – e.g. the lower forty‐eight states of the United States and the continent of Europe – are practically charted out of existence.

Two years later the surrealists mounted a protest against the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in the Parc de Versailles in Paris. In response to this latest in a series of celebrations of France as a colonial power, they created a makeshift installation in a Parisian storefront that accompanied the publication of “La Verité sure les colonies” (The Truth about the Colonies). André Thirion, then an associate of the surrealists, describes this event in his memoir. He writes of a room “designed by [Yves] Tanguy and furnished by [Paul] Éluard and [Louis] Aragon with fetishistic and primitive objects and a few of the most foolish devotional ornaments from Rue Saint‐Sulpice” (1975). Thirion himself “installed loudspeakers to broadcast political commentaries from time to time and to urge passersby … to stop in,” and Aragon and Elsa Breton “brought records of any Polynesian or Asian music they could find at special shops … including a nice rumba (or some other Caribbean rhythm that had just become the rage)” (Thirion 1975).

Thirion's account demonstrates not only the rather kitschy nature of this earnest protest but also highlights the gap between intention and reality with regard to the surrealist infatuation with the primitive. However, in spite of the seeming naïveté of the surrealists' contrasting European culture with that of the realm of the “marvelous,” their map of the world did serve to indicate the dichotomy that existed between the reality of colonized peoples – marked by oppressive social, economic, and political conditions. This would set up rather stereotypically dyadic oppositions of the “rational” and the “irrational,” the “physical” (i.e. “empirical”) and “metaphysical,” and the “real” and “surreal.” The result was that actuality was viewed under exoticist lenses or, at worst, simply overlooked and ignored. In her 2006 publication, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Krista A. Thompson analyzes this process of “producing and policing [emphasis this writer's] the picturesque” (2006, p. 132). These are particularly seen in the painted or lithograph landscape depictions that played into the notions of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century romanticism with which unsuspecting visitors, immigrants, or transplants couldn't help but be impressed once they crossed the Atlantic to inhabit this “new” world.

However, it is clear that initially the Caribbean was not specifically on the surrealists' radar when they conceived their new map of the world. As a result, on the 1929 map the Caribbean was just a summary series of dots and dashes. But when the surrealists – specifically André Breton – finally came into contact with key individuals, they recognized qualities of the marvelous that existed in the region. It is also pertinent to note that the 1932 surrealist manifesto, “Murderous Humanitarianism” – with its powerful expression of anticolonial rhetoric and proletarian politics – has been associated with a “Black Surrealism” (Black Surrealism 2018). Drafted by René Crevel and signed by Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, and the Martiniquan surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot, it is a powerful indictment of Europe, from the decimation of the indigenous populations in the “Antilles” to the lynching of blacks in the United States. No longer, the document notes, will “the proletariat of today, whether metropolitan or colonial … be fooled by fine words as to the real end in view, which is still, as it always was, the exploitation of the greatest number for the benefit of a few slavers” (Murderous Humanitarianism 1932).

Prior to the detention in Martinique noted at the beginning of this essay, the first direct contact of the surrealists with the Caribbean basin came in 1938 when André Breton visited the renegade communist Leon Trotsky, whose conflicts with Stalin had led him to flee to Mexico. Surrealism had tended to align itself with Trotskyism, which accommodated culture within the realpolitik of the party (Surrealism and International Politics 2010). Trotsky had been given refuge in Mexico by the noted muralist and painter Diego Rivera and his wife, painter Frida Kahlo. One of the highlights of the trip was Breton's encounter with Kahlo's paintings, to which she brought her unique artistic persona as a vivid and emotional dream imagery that chronicled her physical travails and relationships. Kahlo's work mirrored more vernacular, “folk” sensibilities that would have triggered in Breton an association with nonacademic artistic communities that the surrealists especially championed for their fresh unfettered expression: that is, the self‐taught, the emotionally challenged, and children. Her work also illustrated the particular hybridity of Mexican culture, in which African, European, and Amerindian societies had been intermixing for over four centuries. Upon seeing her work, Breton declared Kahlo to be an “innate surrealist.” She would be one of the artists profiled in Breton's 1942 publication Surrealism and Painting, which was published in the United States (Breton 1945).

Following this initial meeting in 1938 Breton invited Kahlo to Paris for an exhibition of her work that same year. At the same time Wifredo Lam, who had been living and working in Spain since 1923, found his way to Paris fleeing the ultimately triumphant Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. Lam first reached out to Picasso, whom he naturally considered his artistic mentor and predecessor. Picasso was clearly fascinated by the Afro‐Chinese Cuban artist who came to represent the living avatar of the “primitive artist” whose art Picasso had appropriated for his own stylistic innovations at the beginning of the twentieth century. Interestingly enough, Picasso introduced Lam to Breton, and in the context of the surrealists Lam would then find his unique signature as he participated in the various artistic activities of the group both in Paris and in Marseilles, where they retreated after the German invasion of France in 1940.

The war in Europe both disrupted the sojourns of Caribbean artists and writers on the continent and precipitated the emergence of new political and social paradigms that were preludes to independence movements in various islands that flourished with the return of their native sons and daughters. Individuals such as Leon Damas (French Guiana), Aimé and Suzanne Césaire (Martinique), and Wifredo Lam (Cuba) left Europe to return to their native islands, or, as in the case of the Spanish surrealist Eugenio Granell (Dominican Republic), exiled themselves to the Caribbean. They brought with them the ideals and concepts of surrealists and directly transplanted them in the Caribbean. This set the stage for the second direct encounter of the surrealists with the Caribbean on Martinique. When the Germans entered Paris in 1940, several of the surrealist group fled first to Marseilles. Within a year Breton, Lam, and several of the surrealist group were aided by the International Rescue Committee run by Varian Fry to secure passage to the Americas. En route they were detained on Martinique before they were allowed to proceed to various destinations in the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States. On Martinique Breton and Lam made the acquaintance of the Césaires, who along with René Ménil had begun to publish a surrealist‐inspired journal, Tropiques.

Journals such as this became important vehicles by which ideals of self‐affirmation, political change, and cultural hegemony were promulgated. In the pages of Tropiques and La Poesía Sorprendida, founded by Granell in the Dominican Republic, writers and artists explored the parameters of a Caribbean or Antillean identity that accompanied the protracted struggle for liberation and self‐identification from the late nineteenth century through the mid‐1950s. Interestingly enough, however, the language, images, and sounds of those paradigms of a postcolonial Caribbean were frequently adapted through a strategy of deconstruction, where the very stereotypical views of the Caribbean that bolstered colonial occupation and economic exploitation would be turned on their head or transformed by an insider's perspective.

The aforementioned nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century romantic landscape paintings and prints of the Americas find their antipode in Suzanne Césaire's model of l’homme‐plante (man‐plant), which was the literary correlate of the hybrid, anthropomorphic “jungle” that – as we've seen – Wifredo Lam first conceived in his paintings of the 1940s (Figure 6.1). These images not only presented a more “indigenous” and self‐affirming identity for the Caribbean but also turned the picturesque on its head by positioning the landscape and man/woman within that landscape as an image of reclamation. The redemption potential of that position – artistically and politically – was indicated by the Cuban critic José Hernández Meneses in his 1946 profile on Lam. Meneses spoke to the message Lam's work had for Cubans who focused on their European heritage:

We have completely separated ourselves from our own land, and have replaced its dynamism with a false sense of order that is derived from Europe … Wifredo Lam … has come to show us our own essence. Are we able to see it?

(Hernández Meneses 1946)

Like Lam, the Césaires used such notions of Caribbean life and culture as metaphorical concepts to problematize the usual colonial images of the Caribbean. The fruition of Lam's formal experimentation is seen in his aforementioned monumental 1942–1943 composition, The Jungle. Lam inscribes a spatial realm in which the perspective systems do not apply. Nature in The Jungle is uncultivated, wild, and impassible, located in what art historian and critic Marta Traba describes as “a sort of anti‐space, an amniotic fluid” (Traba 1980, p. 69). Lam's work encapsulates the character of the drawings, that resulted from sessions of producing cadavre exquis drawings, where individual artists would produce a fragment of an image, conceal it, and pass it on to the next individual, who would add their own image. The result would be an entity that was a hybrid of individual imaginations.

Figure 6.1 Wifredo Lam, La mañana verde (The Green Morning), 1943.

Source: © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Lam once cast his art as an “art of decolonization,” calling on all artists like himself to “sever all ties with the colonial culture” (quoted in Mosquera 1983, p. 179). In a parallel gesture Suzanne Césaire's “l'homme‐plante” not only described an individual in balance with the rhythm of the life of the universe found in nature (Césaire 1942) but also countered stereotypes of black Antilleans as “lackadaisical,” “innocent,” or “childlike,” which appeared in the numerous popular images of black Caribbeans (as well as African‐Americans and Africans). This hybridity, as she asserts, demonstrates that, on the contrary, black Antilleans were “doubly true to themselves,” being “close to a universal life force – nature.” Then, like the tropical landscape, they must be left “to find their own nature inside and outside themselves” (Césaire 1942, p. 45). Breton would echo such ideas in his 1948 publication Martinique, charmeuse de serpents (Martinique, Snake Charmer), where he declared that the surrealist landscape was embodied in the tropics, where a natural balance between the physical and the metaphysical is attained (Breton 1972).

John Yau indicated the profundity of this idea of the “tropics” when he noted that Lam had reversed the relegation of appropriated forms from African art to being mere “reductive artifacts to be absorbed into Western perceptual systems” and “reintegrated” them “within nature,” where they could reclaim “their original and rightful place” (Yau 1988). Even the great appropriator Pablo Picasso would acknowledge the authenticity of the work of artists like Lam. During his first meeting with Lam in Paris he asserted Lam should find pride in a horse‐headed African mask in his collection because the African blood Lam shared with the unacknowledged carver of the mask was a marker of an authenticity that even Lam (Wifredo Lam 1902–1982, 1983) would not acknowledge until he returned to Cuba.

These developments accompanied the sense of “cultural renaissance” in Cuba and other locales, which paralleled the situation in Mexico, where artists of the government‐supported mural movement “documented the pre‐Columbian and folk heritage of their country” (Blanc 1992, p. 94), and Jamaica where – as is discussed further in this essay – there was a revival of interest in African roots and sources. It was this indigenous, nationalistic element that distinguished New World modernism from that of Europe (Ades 1989). As seen in the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rivera and other members of the Mexican mural movement, Kahlo, and Lam, there was an emphasis on the unique contribution to culture that came out of the racial mixing in the Americas (Aranda‐Alvarado 2001).

Furthermore, as art historian Rocío Aranda‐Alvarado noted, Vasconcelos saw racial mixing as “the creation of a new race,” a view that “underscores the vision of the Americas as the society of the future” or what Raúl Roa characterized as a “new time in history and a new time in life” (Aranda‐Alvarado 2001, p. 280).

The new nationalism that accompanied this cultural renaissance was therefore encapsulated in racial self‐affirmation, which would be a key issue in the 1940s. It provided an important political and psychological gateway to independence movements in the 1950s and 1960s for those islands still under the colonial control. In this context Lam's infusion of Afro‐Cuban motifs into the landscape firmly positioned the Cuban landscape as a symbol of national identity that we can compare to strategies pursued in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States and Canada (Sims 2002). This can be seen as the basis of art historian Suzanne Garrigues Daniel's reading of The Jungle as extrapolated metaphors comparable to those found in Fernando Ortiz's 1940 publication Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. Encoded social and political nuances allow the leaves in this painting to be read as tobacco (which Ortiz associated with “liberty” and the national and political hegemony of Cuba) and the cane elements as sugarcane: “a symbol of femaleness, fertility, and carnality” but also “a symbol of slavery, exploitation, colonialism, and capitalism” (Sims 2002, p. 64).⁴

The image of creole cultures of the Antilles that was being promoted by the Césaires and René Ménil coalesced into the concept of an “Antillean identity” heralded by Césaire in his book‐length poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Here Césaire evokes the hyperbole of tropical Caribbean life when he writes:

I dream of a beak swollen with hibiscus and of virgin sentences in violet, which makes itself heard by lizards that fly to the sun.

(Césaire n.d.)

The reader hears and smells the nostalgia for things uniquely Caribbean. This quality in Lam's work undoubtedly prompted his contemporary René Portocarrero to observe that in distinction from the work of their Cuban contemporaries, Lam's paintings evoked:

… the delirium of the tropical. The Caribbean tropical above all … What might be called a Cuba in which the black rules decisively a new time in history and a new time in life Altogether, something we have within us and that has been submerged until now.

(Aguirre 1946)

During this period and in these contexts, Lam and his work become the flashpoints for notions of this Antillean identity. In an article published in Cahiers d'Art in Paris in 1947 Aimé Césaire notes Lam's achievement of a physical union of humankind and the world around it. This act repudiates the perception of Antillean culture as a bastardized amalgam of others (Césaire 1945–1946). Césaire echoes the sentiments of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, who in a 1944 article on Lam described the painter's blending of human, animal, and plant forms as animating “a world of primitive myths with something that was ecumenically Antillean – myths that belonged not only to the soil of Cuba but also to the larger chain of islands.”⁵

Lam himself referred to acts of problematizing the picturesque in an interview with the Cuban writer and intellectual Carlos Franqui in 1945, noting about his work that his paintings:

… reflect our life, our complexes and the idiosyncrasies of our people, with their rhythm and sensuality manifested in our music and dance; the sugarcane which alternately represents our misery as well as our wealth; our beliefs and superstitions; the inequality among races; the lack of integration between our economic situation and our psychology; and our climate and geography with their beauty and violence; the cacophony which characterizes our common condition.

(Franqui 1945) [translation by the author]. Archives SDO Wifredo Lam, Paris.

Lam then delivers the coup de grâce to the picturesque:

There is no equivalent for the well‐known phrase “No problem” in my paintings. There are problems in them … If certain people wish to ignore such terrible truths, we can't take them seriously. They deserve only our compassion.

(Franqui 1945)

Alejo Carpentier revisited this ecumenical Antilles in his 1948 article “De lo real maravilloso americano,” (The Marvelous Real of America) again evoking the surrealist celebration of the “marvelous” (Carpentier 1948). He observed the effect of this contact with the Caribbean on drawings by André Masson, published in Martinique, charmeuse de serpent, his collaboration with Breton. The unexpected hybrids in Masson's drawings mirror some of Lam's own trans‐species inventions. Carpentier contrasts Masson's and Lam's work and observes that it is in Lam's work that one finds “the magic of tropical vegetation, the profuse creation of our nature – with all its metamorphosis and symbiosis” (Carpentier 1948). Carpentier predicts postwar exhortations to recover humanity's lost innocence through exotic escape. The quasishamanic persona that he conferred on Lam within the context of the School of Paris after World War II continues a metaphor introduced by Césaire and Carpentier to distinguish authentic from appropriated primitivism. Over the next four decades this would become a critical point in Europe and the United States as growing numbers of artists from non‐European backgrounds established a strong presence within the international art market.

By this time Caribbean artists from this era show the impact of surrealist ideas in their own depictions and narratives of the islands. In this enterprise they may more or less reflect some of the more radical image‐making strategies of surrealism and other European modernist movements seen in the work of Lam. More often than not, however, we can see how Caribbean artists brought new nuances to the themes of the picturesque through the creation of affirmative images of the black body and the Caribbean landscape. These images pointed to the struggle for ownership and agency that, as Krista Thompson has noted, was constantly subverted by lingering social and economic dynamics, as well as critiques of the Caribbean as the tropical paradise (Thompson 2006).

An indication of the new affirmative spirit in the Caribbean was potentially declared in the 1935 sculpture Negro Aroused by the Jamaican artist Edna Manley. It brought the formal characteristics of Art Deco to a power image of aspiration. A black male figure is seen in three‐quarter view, pressing himself upward with his arms off a plinth. At the same time he raises his head upward, aroused as he is by the clarion call of independence and self‐determination. The fact that Manley was married to Norman Manley, one of the architects of Jamaican independence, validates the description of Negro Aroused as capturing what the Jamaican poet‐anthropologist M.G. Smith described as “the inner spirit of our people” that “flung their rapidly rising resentment of the stagnant colonial order in a vivid appropriate sculptural form” (Boxer and Poupeye 1998, p. 15). What we also see in the art of the Caribbean at this time is a reprise of the presentation of natives either posed or engaged in their daily activities. As mentioned previously in the case of Cuba and Mexico, art from this era in Jamaica represented a “new awakening, a new nationalism” (Boxer and Poupeye 1998, p. 17). Norman Manley indicated this in a 1939 speech when he noted that:

National culture is a national consciousness reflected in the painting of pictures of our own mountains and our own women‐folk …

Norman Manley then goes on to reaffirm and reclaim a sense of connection with the African past of the Caribbean, mirroring the message of Alain Locke, the magus of the Harlem Renaissance, in his essay “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” first published in 1925 in the anthology The New Negro. Locke encouraged African‐American artists to look to African art for inspiration and guidance in their search for an art connected to their African heritage. However, rather than encouraging a mastery of traditional styles, he focused on the more conceptual aspects of African art for their emulation: its “classic background,” “discipline,” “style,” and “technical control,” its “abstract decorative forms” (Locke 1992). Manley, on the other hand, embraces a more emotional and psychological approach, noting:

The immediate past has attempted to destroy the influence of the glory that is Africa, it has attempted to make us condemn and mistrust the vitality, the vigor, the rhythmic emotionalism that we get from our African ancestors.

Mirroring the surrealists' psychoanalytical approach, Manley notes that Jamaicans “must dig deeper” into their “own consciousness” and use their art to “stir a country into a state of national consciousness” (Boxer and Poupeye 1998, p. 17).

Such developments are seen in the work of the generation of artists who grouped around Edna Manley and were trained at the Junior Centre of the Institute of Jamaica. Artists such as Albert Huie, Henry Daley, Ralph Campbell, David Pottinger, and their more independent contemporaries Carl Abrahams and David Miller Sr., combined the treatment of form that reflected modernism's break with academic illusionism and conventions inherited from Europe with anecdotal scenes and depictions of daily life and the individuals living those lives. They reveal a sense of belonging and innate experience that personalizes the work more than those done in a picturesque mode.

The third Caribbean encounter for the surrealists in the 1940s was with Haiti and the newly developed style of Haitian painting. The particular style of that work with his straightforward narrative approach to both historical and metaphysical content was nurtured through the Centre d'Art, which was founded by DeWitt Peters, an American art educator. Breton, who had settled in New York City after the stopover in Martinique, returned to the Caribbean in December 1945 on an official visit to Haiti, where his associate Pierre Mabille had assumed the post of cultural attaché. At this time in an interview with the young Haitian poet René Bélance – published in the journal La Ruche – Breton defended the political and cultural aspirations of black people and reiterated his belief in the role of poetry in the political sphere:

Poetry must … explore in every direction the full range of possibilities, manifesting itself … as a power of emancipation and a harbinger. Beyond the convulsions which seize regimes and societies, it is necessary for poetry to retain contact with the primeval foundation of the human being – anguish, hope, creative energy – the only unfailing reservoir of resource.⁶

He additionally affirms surrrealism's commitment to “abolish” the “barriers” between people and brings 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 Lam was also in contact with a younger generation of Italian artists such as Enrico Baj, Sergio Dangelo, and Roberto Crippa (Sims 2002). At their invitation and instigation he would eventually come to establish a studio in the ancient ceramic village of Albisola, outside of Genoa, where Asger Jorn also settled. In this context Lam would find the respect and stature commensurate with his achievement and a new home basis after the political changes in Cuba in 1959 with the Castro revolution. Indeed, the Cuban critic Mario López Oliva would suggest that in Albisola “Lam found a climate and landscape similar to that of Cuba … a locale” which “corresponded with his vision of nature and of Cuban life and culture” (1986, p. 7). Lam himself once cast his presence in Albisola as a matter of historical imperative. Noting the proximity to Genoa, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, he noted: “I have made the journey of Christopher Columbus in reverse: from the Antilles to Liguria.”²⁰ Although Lam maintained an active relationship with Cuba, particularly after 1963, he would never again establish a permanent residence in his native land.

What this essay has attempted to show is that the artistic, cultural, and political movements in the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s were given added impetus by the surrealists’ promotion of non‐Western culture on their own terms. This art movement has distinguished itself through the key role it played in encouraging the burgeoning self‐redefinition of black peoples in the Caribbean. The result was a sense of autonomy that was integral to the independence movements. In turn, as Rosemont notes, the Caribbean was to have a great influence on Breton. He writes:

Breton's West Indian adventure was a decisive event in his life and in the evolution of the surrealist movement. Years later Césaire remarked that for him, as a West Indian, surrealism had been not so much a revelation as a confirmation. We can say that the West Indies provided Breton … with a confirmation, one of such depth and scope that it helped establish the surrealist project on a more truly universal foundation than had previously been possible.

(1978, p. 95)