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Review
The One-Man Crisis in
Modernism
In the early 1950s, the French
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
noted that having "accepted
primitive art into itself,"
European culture was being
"colonized in reverse," as "Third
World artists were themselves
entering [European] culture and
... effecting a more complete
Africanization of western art."
Sartre's admission is a tacit
recognition of the inexorable
inversion of European
colonization that occurred as
global trends in the post-World
War II era were marked by
migrations of populations from
former colonies to the centers of
world economic, social, and
political power. ...
During his 60-year career
(1923-82), Wifredo Lam was to
pave the way for contemporary
artists of African, Asian,
Pacific, and Native American
descent in the international art
world. But the road was not
always easy or straightforward.
His arrival in Paris effectively
precipitated the first crisis of
modernism by introducing the
"primitive" into "primitivism."
He confronted European modernists
with a real human entity both
conversant in his traditional
culture and trained in modernist
conventions. As an
African-Chinese Cuban, however,
he was quickly subsumed under
those same romantic
characterizations of the
"primitive," marginalized to an
extent as an "authentic"
specimen. Descriptions of his
work are inevitably modified with
signifiers such as "magician,"
"master of the fantastic,"
"avatar of the jungle," and
"shaman." ...
Considerations of Lam's life and
career can now happily benefit
from critical trends that have
been in play since the 1970s,
when multiculturalism and
deconstructionism provided
paradigms for dismantling the
presumptions of primitivism by
engaging issues of "authenticity"
and "originality." These trends
have also accommodated a wider
range of non-European signifiers
with which to approach Lam's work
-- Latin American, Asian, even
pan-African American. However,
none of these is adequate to
convey the totality of Lam's
career. ...
The renewed interest in Lam's
work ... has begun to transcend
nationality and race. ... He
functioned as an intermediary
between the old world of the
formal avant-garde and that of
iconographic modernism, from
primitivist to ancestralist. When
these achievements are fully
recognized, with a greater
comprehension of the exact nature
of Lam's contribution, and as the
political clouds around Cuba part
to clarify this situation, the
significance of Lam and his work
will come to light. He will be
judged by criteria generated from
his own center rather than on the
margins of modernism.
The text and images are from the book Wifredo Lam and the International
Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, by Lowery
Stokes Sims, executive director of the Studio Museum,
in Harlem. The book was published June, 2002 by
the University of Texas Press.
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