JEFFREY RUTH

Modernism in Europe and in Latin America:

Emiliano di Cavalcanti and Wifredo Lam

It is tempting to suggest that modernism actually originated in Latin America. The literary renovation begun by Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío in the 1880s quickly spread to Spain, where it took root among writers who were increasingly hostile to the realism espoused by conservative authors of that time. Dubbed "modernismo" for its vigorous embrace of a new, emotional style, the movement in fact preceded by a few years the much broader, multi-genre movement of artistic renewal throughout Europe which came to be known as modernism. In this sense, Darío’s modernismo might be seen as a forerunner of the modernism which all of Europe and much of Latin America would come to know during the 1890s through (depending upon the country) as late as the 1940s.

Yet the modernismo of Darío and his principal followers in Spain-Antonio and Manuel Machado, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and Juan Ramón Jiménez-would remain basically a literary movement, mostly in Spanish, and primarily concerned with verse. Its influence on writers had waned by the 1920s, when another wave of poetic innovation emerged in Spain, led by Federico García Lorca.

In the 1890s modernismo could already be seen as just one of a number of artistic tendencies, which collectively would come to comprise modernism. Other such tendencies included art nouveau in Belgium and France; the "modern style" in Great Britain; the Jugendstil in Germany; and the Sezessionstil in Austria. These currents took common inspiration in the sensual appreciation of nature and, less so, in linear, geometric design.

By the first decade of the 1900s, modernism was becoming a different bundle of artistic currents. The vanguard artists of Europe were now less concerned with expressing the sumptuous qualities inherent in nature as they were with the desire to convey-through formal innovations-more personal, subjective interpretations of themselves as perceivers of the world, as individuals. These were the Fauves, Cubists and Expressionists. During the decade of the Great War, Cubism and Expressionism evolved and were joined by Italian Futurism and the art of Dada and Constructivism.

Even as modernism in Europe was winding down by the 1920s, it had not yet arrived in most countries of Latin America. And although modernism was born of specific European innovations in art-with the important exception of Rubén Darío’s modernismo-those innovations would eventually be transmitted to Latin America in modified form. The pattern was this: A Latin American artist would travel to Europe at some time during the period 1900-1940, study with European masters, then return to the home country, where his or her particular adaptation of modernism was in turn adapted in different ways by that nation’s artists. So as European artists were finally settling into a less strident period after World War I (even the initial, noisy proclamations of the Surrealists following their founding in 1924 gave way to a more subdued phase), many Latin American art communities were just discovering their own forms of modernism. Surrealism itself, though a long-lived post-modernist movement in Europe, would come to be included as a major influence in Latin American modernism.

Mexico, Brazil and Argentina were the Latin American countries most quickly and deeply affected by modernist trends, from as early as the late 1910s. Others which followed in the 1920s and 1930s included Cuba, Chile and Uruguay. To different extents, these and the roughly two dozen other countries of Latin America continued to adapt and evolve modernism through the 1940s and 1950s.

Emiliano di Cavalcanti: a Brazilian Modernist

One of the most important figures in Brazilian modernism was Emiliano di Cavalcanti. Born in Rio de Janeiro, through study on his own he learned the craft of newspaper illustration and caricature during his teens. By 1916, at the age of nineteen, di Cavalcanti exhibited cartoons at Rio’s Salão dos Humoristas. The following year he moved to the much larger metropolis to the south, São Paulo, where he studied law for a year. Soon he came to know journalists, poets and essayists, including the budding modernist Oswald de Andrade. In 1917 di Cavalcanti mounted another show of caricatures, this time in São Paulo, and began illustrating books of literature, as well as literary reviews.

It was in some of the reviews of the 1910s that the modernist writers had begun to publish their rebellious new work. São Paulo had long been the intellectual center of Brazil, and from 1890 through the 1920s received an extraordinary number of immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe. European modernism came more quickly to Brazil, via São Paulo, than to any other Latin American nation.

Chief among Brazil’s literary modernists was Mário de Andrade. In 1920 he wrote a manifesto for Brazilian artists of all kinds, announcing a new aesthetic that was anti-academic, anti-traditional, and pro-Brazilian. Andrade and others would labor with great energy during the 1920s, challenging Brazilian writers to abandon their immediate European heritage of Naturalism, Parnassianism and Symbolism. Andrade adopted the colloquial, Brazilian usage of “você” (you, informal); wrote poetry in Portuguese with syntax from the Tupi-Guarani language of the native Tupinambá people; revived pride in native (and, to a lesser extent, African) folklore with his short, comic-surreal novel Macunaíma; foresaw the Surrealist movement with the claim that “our reality is the subconscious”; and welcomed the mechanization of the modern world. Andrade’s renovating spirit was clearly derived from boisterous European modernist movements, including Futurism and Dadaism, but was carefully and consciously applied by him as a proud Brazilian.

In the 1910s, Mário de Andrade worked within an emerging climate of modernism in São Paulo. There, in 1917, Anita Malfatti (1889-1964) exhibited paintings inspired from her recent studies in Europe and New York. (Di Cavalcanti, himself newly arrived in São Paulo, had actually prodded her into doing so.) Malfatti’s modernism-rather tame by European standards-provoked an uproar among established, academic painters, and inspired other younger ones, such as di Cavalcanti himself, to continue experimenting in their work.

With an individual exhibition in 1921, di Cavalcanti showed his first oils, indicating growth away from illustration and toward fine art. One of these works, “Retrato de Moça” (“Portrait of a Girl”) is a work painted primarily in shadowy tones, with an appreciation of indistinct outlines common to Impressionist painting, and with a slight brooding quality more like the expressionists. The subject, who is white and clearly aristocratic, would more likely be European than Brazilian. Later in the 1920s and in the 1930s, di Cavalcanti would evolve toward the conscious depiction of Brazilian people and places. This was the kind of evolution common to Latin American modernists in general.

Not surprisingly, Andrade and di Cavalcanti worked side by side to help produce the seminal Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in February of 1992. Members of the original planning committee were so rocked by the challenges and insistence of the young modernists that they abandoned the program just before the opening. The Week of Modern Art became a celebration of modernism in literature, visual arts and music, leading to a great cultural opening in Brazil until the early 1930s. During the 1920s, especially, artists and writers collaborated on nationalistic and primitivistic literary reviews which exalted “Brazilianness.” Tarsila do Amaral parlayed her novel techniques learned in Paris into a hugely popular body of work celebrating Brazilian subjects--women, houses, and landscapes in particular. By the 1930s the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre had given motion to a movement to validate the popular art and folklore of the impoverished northeast region of Brazil. Colleges of philosophy and of arts and sciences were opened, and the Brazilian publishing industry flourished.

Soon after the Semana de Arte Moderna, Emiliano di Cavalcanti had established himself in Paris as a correspondent for the newspaper Correio da Manhã. There, studying at the Académie Ranson, he produced little painting but became part of the extended circle of important modernist painters in Paris. These included Braque, Picasso, Léger and Matisse. Di Cavalcanti returned to São Paulo in the late 1920s, and there began using and personalizing the many stylistic influences he had experienced while in Paris, chiefly Cubism.

In “Mulatas”, from the late 1920s, the artist presents a scene not from Europe, but rather from Brazil. The four mulattas are dressed lightly, appropriate for the hot climate prevalent in most of Brazil. Activity is absent; in its place is a languid sense of idleness in the evening hours. One woman sleeps on a bed in the background, while the others sit, embracing or kneeling, toward the front. Di Cavalcanti’s use of color has changed radically from his earlier work “Retrato de Moça,” so that now we see not indistinct, brown clothing but bright yellow, red, lavender and blue. Even the legs have been colored with yellow, blue and green. Certainly this could not be called a Cubist work, yet just as certainly di Cavalcanti learned from the Cubists in Paris to become less literal in depicting space. The bed at rear is not formally connected to the women at front, and the jar and glass at lower left don’t “fit” in a realistic sense. In addition, it is possible that the large, inflated look of all four women was inspired by Picasso’s paintings of such women-the bathers-from the early 1920s. Di Cavalcanti would have encountered Picasso at that time.

During the early 1930s di Cavalcanti increased his output of cartoons, now inspired by the growing, anti-foreigner nationalism in Brazil. The sarcasm of his cartoon “Associação dos Amigos do Brasil” from this period shows a mature sense of political identity-with the left, in his case--and dynamic linework.

Although di Cavalcanti had followed the usual trajectory of Latin American modernists by working in Europe as a young artist, then returning to adapt modernist techniques to the reality of his country, his development beyond the early 1930s was insignificant. From 1934 until 1940 he lived in Paris, exhibiting work in Brazil but not growing artistically. Despite retrospectives in 1954, 1963 and 1975, di Cavalcanti’s best work was behind him by age forty.

A Cuban Modernist: Wifredo Lam

During his long and celebrated career, Wifredo Lam confronted and resolved difficult questions of identity. Born in 1902 to a Chinese immigrant father and a mother of mixed European and African descent, Lam would spend much of his twenties and thirties in Spain and France. There he painted prodigiously, acquiring modernist techniques and a surrealist sensibility but ultimately rejecting Europe as a backdrop for his subjects. The rest of his life was spent in Havana, and Paris, painting the reality he felt most strongly as an Afro-Cuban. Lam would recall: "From childhood I didn't know what was the basis of my ethics or my joy. I was not considered an African nor a Chinese nor a Spaniard nor a creole, because I was a cross-breed with many races." It was through his pursuit of painting that he eventually resolved this question of identity.

At age twelve Lam already showed artistic promise. He moved from his native town of Sagua la Grande to Havana, where he lived with relatives. From 1918 until 1922 Lam trained as a painter at Havana's Academía San Alejandro, where he focused on European realism. By 1923 he had decided to pursue painting above all else, and moved to Madrid, Spain.

Lam's initial study in the Spanish capital was with the conservative painter Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor. Lam worked mainly in the Spanish baroque style, frequenting the Prado Museum and admiring there the works of Hieronymus Bosch and El Greco. He also studied at the more openminded Academía Libre.

During these first years in Madrid Lam often travelled to the countryside to make highly realistic pencil portraits of Castilian peasants. One of these, "Campesino Castellano" (1925) reveals a fine hand and a near-photographic accuracy. There is little attempt in this or other peasant portraits at interpretation of his subjects. An oil painting from the year before-"Paisaje" ("Countryside")-shows a similar concern for realism in a village street scene.

The 1920s was a tremendously rich decade for culture in Madrid, despite the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. The innovative poets and dramatists of Spain's so-called Generation of '27 were thriving then. At this time Wifredo Lam was coming to know-and slowly practice-techniques of non-realistic painting. Like the poets of his day, Lam was aware of, but not immediately given over to, the articulation of the surrealist movement in 1924. Like most of the early modernist movements, it too was focused in Paris.

Lam married in 1929, but lost both his wife and young child the following year to tuberculosis. During these and the next few years he apparently travelled little, for it was with some shock that he discovered the painting of Picasso and Matisse at a Madrid gallery in 1936. That year he painted "La Ventana" ("The Window"), a work showing Lam's departure from strict realism. He is less precise with perspective, and has adopted the technique of outlining patches of color with black line. "La Ventana" shows the coloration of Van Gogh, while the subject-an interior, looking out-is similar to some done already by Matisse (e.g. “Red Room,” 1908-09). Lam had now entered a critically important phase as a painter, a time during which he would actively test and sort the most radical modernist techniques pioneered in Europe since 1900.

When the Spanish Civil War erupted in the summer of 1936, Lam joined the Republican, anti-Fascist side. After serving for two years, he fled to Paris in 1938. There, with a letter of introduction from a Spanish friend, he met Pablo Picasso, who befriended him and introduced him to his own circle. Among these artists were Bellmer, Braque, Brauner, Breton, Chagall, Duchamp, Ernst, Léger, Matisse, Matta, Miró and Tzara. For two years Lam painted prolifically, encouraged principally by Picasso. Picasso also was the first to reveal the spare, angular sculpture of Africa to Lam. Although Picasso had incorporated African masks in his painting since the pathbreaking Cubist work of 1907, "Les Demoiselles de Avignon," Lam would later adapt African motifs in a more personal way through his Cuban paintings.

In 1940 Lam again sought refuge from invading fascists, this time the Nazis. For nearly a year he awaited passage to the Caribbean in Marseilles. There he came to know especially well the surrealist leader Andre Breton and the Chilean surrealist painter Matta. Lam illustrated Breton's recently completed free-association text, "Fata Morgana," and learned the surrealists' automatist techniques for revealing dreams and the subconscious. By 1941 Lam, Breton and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss arrived together in Martinique, and three months later Lam set foot once again in Cuba.

A rich period of painting ensued. From 1941 until 1946 Lam worked to weld his cubist and surrealist influences to his Cuban environment. He was keenly observant not only of Cuban flora and fauna, but also of African rituals as practiced through the santería religion.

In 1943 Lam used gouache on paper to create his best known painting, "The Jungle”. In it he depicts a predominantly green thicket of stalks and leaves, reminiscent of the lush growth of Cuba, but animates the trees with voluptuous hands, feet, breasts, buttocks and faces. "The Jungle" includes faces modelled from African masks-as Picasso once had-and conveys a natural world alive with spirit personalities, drawn clearly from the santería traditions. More than any other work by Lam, "The Jungle" shows the artist successfully adapting a foreign, modernist aesthetic to his native environment. Shortly thereafter, in 1945, Lam and Breton made a trip to Haiti to observe voodoo ceremonies. Lam later remembered that:

The Negro ceremonies of Cuba could not compare with these, which were prodigious. One of them began at dusk and ended at nearly five o'clock in the morning. It included sacrifices of animals and the calling forth of the dead. Unforgettable. Women dressed in white danced in a state of trance. Enormous drums almost deafened us. What wild, savage beauty! A non-intellectual beauty, skin-deep, an absolutely naked human emotion.

Increasingly Lam chose to represent aspects of the Yoruba culture of santería in his art. Both surrealism and santería aimed to unlock hidden forces at work within their practitioners, a link which was not lost on Lam. As he developed his images into the 1950s, living and working in Paris as well as Havana, Lam was strongly influenced by a number of other intellectuals, primarily Cubans. These included Fernando Ortiz, an anthropologist of the Afro-Cuban movement; Lydia Cabrera, writer and student of Afro-Cuban folklore and religion; Alejo Carpentier, Cuban novelist whose The Kingdom of this World presents a surrealist, Afro-Cuban setting; and the Negritude movement operating throughout the African diaspora, led by Aime Cesaire (Martinique), Leon Damas (Guayana) and Leopold Senghor (Senegal).

Lam's work of the late 1940s and 1950s increasingly shows santería themes, even as his modernist style became even more attenuated, more linear. The print "Cuarto Fambá" ("Initiation Room"; 1947) reflects a respect for African ritual practice, conveyed through scratchy black line alone. In "Femme Magique”, features of women are combined with those of a horse in dynamic curves with hornlike extensions. For Lam the horse constitutes an allusion to the santería term caballo, meaning a devotee who is being "ridden" or possessed by his or her orisha, or god.

From 1955 through 1957 Lam travelled to Venezuela, Brazil and Mexico. Retrospective shows in his honor were mounted in Havana in 1966 and 1977, in part surely because Lam remained a supporter of the revolution, if sometimes from afar. His death in 1982 marked the end of an odyssey of identity which had been thoroughly transformed through contact with European modernism, and typical of many other Latin American artists of Lam's time.