The Dance, 1909, Henri Matisse
I’m in an inexplicably good mood this morning. These dancers of Matisse came to mind. While I have seen the work at MoMA, I never took especial notice of it. I’m not sure why my mind landed on this, but it is indeed a joyful work. And the colors!
If you’re in need of a color surge to wake you up, may I recommend googling images of Matisse?
Here was my thought while driving yesterday: there are two kinds of creative people. Those who visualize the ideal and then try to create something that resembles their ideal as completely as possible, and those who take bits and pieces of reality as starting blocks and see what they can create from that.
Top Down People….
Those who visualize the ideal might create a reasoned-out guideline to how the work should be organized. They know what they want, but not necessarily how to create it. Theirs is a world of symmetry and order with a rational mind at work behind it trying to approximate the perfection they imagined. They can be dissatisfied when their creation isn’t perfect according to their pre-determined ideal.
Bottom Up People…
are realists, in a sense. They work from the bottom up, with pieces of reality whether it be an overheard sentence, the look in someone’s eye, or an old car part. They imagine the potential of that thing in connection with this other thing. Their world is forever in pieces that they are trying to put together, which can be chaotic but also full of endless possibilities.
That’s not to say people can’t behave either way at different times, but I definitely lean toward the latter. What do you think? Does the top down/ bottom up distinction make sense to you? Are you a top or a bottom?
The Jungle, 1943At least the name was familiar. Reading a survey on Caribbean art that I found at the public library, Wilfredo Lam came up at least half a dozen times before I even got to the section on Afro-Cubanism. The Jungle, above, is the most famous example of his work and displays the merging of European painting tradition in its Cubist perspective yet the masked figures amidst the sugarcane and bamboo also reflect the painter’s inclusion of his African heritage and culture.
It should be noted that The Jungle was not intended to represent Afro-Cuban traditions literally–the masks are African-inspired rather than relating directly to his experience in Cuba. It is, in fact, a critique. His intention was to describe a spiritual state, most particularly that of an Afro-Cuban culture that had been reduced to absurdity by panning to tourist trade.
“I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”– Wilfredo Lam
La Silla, 1943
Lam was born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a half Congolese, half Cuban mulatto mother. After studying in Cuba, he moved to Madrid and then Paris to continue his training. He became friends with Picasso and his circle and was influenced by them. He later traveled through the Caribbean with Andre Breton, another influential person in the Caribbean arts scene of the time.
When he returned to Havana in 1941, Lam became newly aware of Afro-Cuban traditions, which he felt were being lost and made picturesque for tourists. He wished to free Cuba from cultural subjugation and to rediscover its African heritage. Many great artists of the 20th century combined radical style with “primitive” arts. Lam did so by synthesizing the Surrealist and Cubist forms to express the iconography of Afro-Cubanism. Authenticity was perhaps more created than discovered in his work. A successful artist internationally who supported his ingenuous roots, he died in Paris in 1982. He remains widely influential in Cuba and throughout the Caribbean.
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