Taking Back His Own Gods

By ROBERT HUGHES

EXHIBIT: WIFREDO LAM AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES, 1938-1952

WHERE: THE STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM, NEW YORK CITY

WHAT: 121 PAINTINGS, BOOKS AND OTHER OBJECTS

THE BOTTOM LINE: The Cuban artist built a bridge between the Caribbean and the avant-gardes of Paris and New York.

If you are intrigued by artists who, instead of ensconcing themselves securely in one frame of cultural reference, work at the interface of several, then you can't help feeling curious about Wifredo Lam. Lam died 11 years ago, after a lifetime spent moving between Paris, New York City and his native Cuba. But his work has rarely been shown in the past 20 years, and he is often treated as a peripheral figure on the margins of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.

He was much more than that. Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952, at the Studio Museum in Harlem -- the 25th anniversary show of that battling, indispensable institution -- offers a rare chance to see his work in some depth. It isn't a full retrospective or anything like one: it leaves out Lam's youth and age and concentrates only on his middle years, especially those spent in Cuba. Its object is to sketch the kind of relations Lam set up between his Afro-Cuban heritage, the work of other Cuban artists, and the avant-gardes (the word still meant something in the '40s) of Paris and New ) York. Its catalog, with essays by Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Lowery Stokes Sims and others, does a fine job of explicating the roots and routes of this border crosser's life.

Lam's ancestry might have been invented to demonstrate the remark of the Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado: Mestizaje es grandeza (Mixture is greatness). Lam's father was Chinese, his mother the daughter of a slave from the Congo. (Spain did not abandon slavery in its Caribbean colonies until 1886.) He grew up hearing African languages spoken all around him, and his godmother was a priestess of a Santeria cult, a hybrid form of Christianity and African worship.

After academic studies in Havana, he went to Europe in 1923; presently he came to know Picasso (whose work strongly influenced him) and the Surrealists, who took him in as a member of their group. Another black painter who knew him in Paris claimed that Lam "forged the link between African sensibility and European tradition," and he wasn't exaggerating much. But in 1941, correctly surmising that a black Surrealist who had fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War would have a short future under the Nazi occupation of France, Lam returned to Cuba; from there, his work became a cultural bridge between the Caribbean and New York.

Lam wasn't by any means the only Latin American painter to make a mark in the Manhattan avant-garde of the '40s, but to see his place one needs to remember that the New York School of the '40s was not the exclusive pantheon of half a dozen Abstract Expressionist heroes that later critics and dealers made it seem. It was open and eclectic, perfused with Surrealist influence and much more curious about other cultures -- particularly those of Latin America -- than it would be 25 years later. Lam had a strong common interest with American painters who became his friends, such as Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell: namely a fascination with totemism and the imagery of ritual.

Lam's debts to Picasso raise a certain irony. Starting around 1907, Picasso got a whole repertoire of forms from African art; Lam took some of them -- the shield masks, the displacement and distortion of limbs -- as a means of reconnecting with his own African inheritance. He was not the first "provincial" to discover in Paris a means of using his local identity; he took what he needed (not only from Picasso but also from Max Ernst and much lesser figures like Hans Bellmer, and even from Jean Cocteau's hypermannered / line drawings) to find what he was. Lam's version of Cubism was more illustrative than Picasso's. The figures in his best-known painting, The Jungle, 1943, are like renderings of sculpture standing in a space deduced from Cezanne.

Two things, however, seem unique in Lam's work. One is its pervasive, melancholy tone of dreamy eroticism, metamorphosed into "presences" that would seem monstrous if they weren't essentially benign -- horse-headed women, birdlike deities, masks conflated with breasts but equipped with phallic chins. The second is the persistence of religious motifs that no European artist was likely to grasp but that were of deep significance to Lam -- the symbols of Santeria ceremonies. Why do Lam's women have heads like horses? Not, fundamentally, because of Picasso and Guernica but because in Santeria ceremonies the medium is known as a caballo, a "horse" carrying the spirit.

Lam was no more a tribal artist than Picasso. But his primitivism came from inside, and part of the originality of his art lies in his effort to take back his gods from the man who, with such momentous consequences for art 30 years earlier, had appropriated them.