with surrealists such as Breton, Matta, and Masson would establish important relationships with individuals such as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Arshile Gorky, who would become key figures in those art movements. We can read in reviews of Lam's work at the Matisse Gallery evocations of sacred content, mythic structure, hybrid imagery, and abstracted form that placed it squarely in the middle of the dialogue of what would come to be seen as the quintessential “American” art form (A Way to Kill Space 1946).
However, by the end of the decade, as many of the European artists drifted back to Europe, the Americans eventually enacted a most Oedipal reversal, rejecting the influence of surrealism for a more existential – albeit performative – interpretation of their work. During the later 1940s and into the 1950s, therefore, the Caribbean would become an important arena for the art movement, especially as Lam exhibited in Haiti, Granell ignited the arts and literary movements in the Dominican Republic, and Breton himself visited both these locales, supporting opposition movements among the youth in the region.
In the context of the Caribbean, Lam's work and Breton's postulation of surrealist premises became beacons of resistance and revolution. As an art movement, surrealism has been described as working for the “liberation of man” (Surrealism and International Politics 2010). That liberation was to be accomplished both through artistic techniques that fostered a derailment of the constraints of conscious decision, literal narrative, and conventional materials. It was also to be achieved through the promotion of political ideals that challenged the prevailing Eurocentric domination of global politics. During the period between the World Wars, the surrealists came to champion the cause of colonized peoples. They both questioned the imposition of European values and culture on other world cultures and examined the political and economic situation of those cultures.3 Under the leadership of André Breton and the aforementioned members of the surrealist cohort in Martinique such as René Crevel, Jacques Viot and J.M. Monnerot promoted the idea that non‐Western cultures held their own integral values systems and that they should be left untouched by European colonialist impositions.
The surrealists actualized their commitment to colonized peoples in various ways. In a 1929 issue of the magazine Variétés, for example, they published a redrawing of the map of the world to emphasize regions they had designated as centers of surrealist activity (Le Monde au Temps des Surrealists 1929). Russia, New Guinea, Alaska, Mexico, and Easter Island were given outsized proportions in comparison to their mapping in conventional cartography. These locales represented realms of the “marvelous” – that elusive expression of the surrealist concept of beauty as “an impassioned fusion of wish and reality … where poetry and freedom are one.” On this same map entities that represented the acme of the political, social, and economic world hierarchy – e.g. the lower forty‐eight states of the United States and the continent of Europe – are practically charted out of existence.
Two years later the surrealists mounted a protest against the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in the Parc de Versailles in Paris. In response to this latest in a series of celebrations of France as a colonial power, they created a makeshift installation in a Parisian storefront that accompanied the publication of “La Verité sure les colonies” (The Truth about the Colonies). André Thirion, then an associate of the surrealists, describes this event in his memoir. He writes of a room “designed by [Yves] Tanguy and furnished by [Paul] Éluard and [Louis] Aragon with fetishistic and primitive objects and a few of the most foolish devotional ornaments from Rue Saint‐Sulpice” (1975). Thirion himself “installed loudspeakers to broadcast political commentaries from time to time and to urge passersby … to stop in,” and Aragon and Elsa Breton “brought records of any Polynesian or Asian music they could find at special shops … including a nice rumba (or some other Caribbean rhythm that had just become the rage)” (Thirion 1975).
Thirion's account demonstrates not only the rather kitschy nature of this earnest protest but also highlights the gap between intention and reality with regard to the surrealist infatuation with the primitive. However, in spite of the seeming naïveté of the surrealists' contrasting European culture with that of the realm of the “marvelous,” their map of the world did serve to indicate the dichotomy that existed between the reality of colonized peoples – marked by oppressive social, economic, and political conditions. This would set up rather stereotypically dyadic oppositions of the “rational” and the “irrational,” the “physical” (i.e. “empirical”) and “metaphysical,” and the “real” and “surreal.” The result was that actuality was viewed under exoticist lenses or, at worst, simply overlooked and ignored. In her 2006 publication, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Krista A. Thompson analyzes this process of “producing and policing [emphasis this writer's] the picturesque” (2006, p. 132). These are particularly seen in the painted or lithograph landscape depictions that played into the notions of eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century romanticism with which unsuspecting visitors, immigrants, or transplants couldn't help but be impressed once they crossed the Atlantic to inhabit this “new” world.
However, it is clear that initially the Caribbean was not specifically on the surrealists' radar when they conceived their new map of the world. As a result, on the 1929 map the Caribbean was just a summary series of dots and dashes. But when the surrealists – specifically André Breton – finally came into contact with key individuals, they recognized qualities of the marvelous that existed in the region. It is also pertinent to note that the 1932 surrealist manifesto, “Murderous Humanitarianism” – with its powerful expression of anticolonial rhetoric and proletarian politics – has been associated with a “Black Surrealism” (Black Surrealism 2018). Drafted by René Crevel and signed by Breton, Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, Yves Tanguy, and the Martiniquan surrealists Pierre Yoyotte and J.M. Monnerot, it is a powerful indictment of Europe, from the decimation of the indigenous populations in the “Antilles” to the lynching of blacks in the United States. No longer, the document notes, will “the proletariat of today, whether metropolitan or colonial … be fooled by fine words as to the real end in view, which is still, as it always was, the exploitation of the greatest number for the benefit of a few slavers” (Murderous Humanitarianism 1932).
Prior to the detention in Martinique noted at the beginning of this essay, the first direct contact of the surrealists with the Caribbean basin came in 1938 when André Breton visited the renegade communist Leon Trotsky, whose conflicts with Stalin had led him to flee to Mexico. Surrealism had tended to align itself with Trotskyism, which accommodated culture within the realpolitik of the party (Surrealism and International Politics 2010). Trotsky had been given refuge in Mexico by the noted muralist and painter Diego Rivera and his wife, painter Frida Kahlo. One of the highlights of the trip was Breton's encounter with Kahlo's paintings, to which she brought her unique artistic persona as a vivid and emotional dream imagery that chronicled her physical travails and relationships. Kahlo's work mirrored more vernacular, “folk” sensibilities that would have triggered in Breton an association with nonacademic artistic communities that the surrealists especially championed for their fresh unfettered expression: that is, the self‐taught, the emotionally challenged, and children. Her work also illustrated the particular hybridity of Mexican culture, in which African, European, and Amerindian societies had been intermixing for over four centuries. Upon seeing her work, Breton declared Kahlo to be an “innate surrealist.” She would be one of the artists profiled in Breton's 1942 publication Surrealism and Painting, which was published in the United States (Breton 1945).
Following this initial meeting in 1938 Breton invited Kahlo to Paris for an exhibition of her work that same year. At the same time Wifredo Lam, who had been living and working in Spain since 1923, found his way to Paris fleeing the ultimately triumphant Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. Lam first reached out to Picasso, whom he naturally considered his artistic mentor and predecessor. Picasso was clearly fascinated by the Afro‐Chinese Cuban artist who came to represent the living avatar of the “primitive artist” whose art Picasso had appropriated for his own stylistic innovations at the beginning of the twentieth century. Interestingly enough, Picasso introduced Lam to Breton, and in the context of the surrealists Lam would then find his unique signature as he participated in the various artistic