Tag Archives: Picasso

Wilfredo Lam’s The Jungle

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The Jungle, 1943

At 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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Picasso Notebook Stolen in Paris

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Via the BBC:

A sketchbook of some 32 drawings by Pablo Picasso worth about 8m euros ($11m; £6.8m) has been stolen from a museum in Paris, police have said. The theft from the Picasso Museum was discovered on Tuesday afternoon but the exact time and circumstances have yet to be determined. Initial investigations showed the sketchbook was held in an unlocked display case on the first floor.

Police sources told the Agence France-Presse news agency that the theft would probably have been committed between Monday evening and noon on Tuesday. There were no signs of a break-in an no alarms were set off. The museum was closed at the time, although there was a private viewing on Tuesday.

My first thought is: how awesome would it be if the theif were some rich, old lady with cleptomaniac impulses at the private viewing? The kind with embarrassed younger relations who had to keep returning silver spoons from dinner parties. She would just have to nod drowsily as if she were falling asleep, then quickly stick her hand in there and put the notebook in her pocketbook.

While that’s a ludicrous scenario, you would think museums could spare funds for security. A lock would be an especially low-tech way to go. While I gloried at how close you could be to so many Picassos at Gagosian’s new space in Chelsea, now I wonder if the small white box can provide enough security.

K

The Green Fairy Resurrected

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Absinthe, ah the decadent wonder of late nights and green fairies. Ah the miraculous release from life’s troubles. The scintillating pleasure of dissolving sugar in its neon depths.

Absinthe has saturated bar menus in Manhattan of late as the drink du jour. As far as I’m concerned, that jour is past.

However cool it may be that Van Gogh might have cut his earlobe off because of it, it doesn’t taste so delicious. You see the face of the woman in Picasso’s 1901 Absinthe Drinker? Nobody smiles in the paintings of absinthe drinkers. It’s because a vile green herbal liquor is sitting in front of them, reflecting a sickly pallor upon them. Absinthe was deliciously illegal and hard to obtain in Manhattan (which would make even toadstools a luxury good) but now it’s plentifully available. It tends to taste like anise, a flavor that I’ve always detested.

So what is there to be said in favor of this over-available, under-tasty liquor? Vintage poster art for one, and paintings like the one by Picasso for another. Artists seem to love portraying absinthe, whether its advertisements of smiling people and lascivous green lady fairies or paintings of sallow, dejected loners in bars. Could absinthe have been different then?