Book Review: Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950 by Helena Benitez

Wifredo and Helena:

My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939-1950

by Helena Benitez

      If you’ve been to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City then you’ve seen Wilfredo Lam’s painting The Jungle. It’s a work of Surrealism, depicting four figures interweaving with bamboo and leafy vegetation. The figures have bodily features that are sharply angular and round simultaneously. Their faces resemble African masks of indeterminate origin, or at least they do for those not knowledgeable about African art. The figures emerge out of the jungle background like creatures coming out of a dream, threatening and enticing at the same time. The rhythmic but disorienting painting makes it impossible to find any place of visual rest.

Wifredo Lam is Cuba’s most famous visual artist. During the decade of World War II, he and his wife Helena lived together, bouncing from Europe to the Caribbean to the United States while involving themselves in the social scene of the most prominent avant-garde artists of the era. Helena Lam, who has since changed her name to Helena Benitez, recounts the most prominent memories of those times in her memoirs Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam 1939 – 1950.

Wifredo Lam was a tall man with a striking appearance. Being an ethnic mixture of Spanish, African, and Chinese ancestry, he was an embodiment of the three dominant immigrant groups of Cuba. In photographs you can see how those physical features contrast and interact with each other in his complex face. As such, he was truly a man who lived between worlds, a theme that defined the meaning of his paintings throughout his career.

Helena was an attractive German woman with a undying curiosity and a fascination with fortune telling and the occult despite her scientific background and career as a medical biologist.

The two of them met in France just before the German invasion of World War II. They spent most of their time in Marseilles then set sail, with a contingent of other Surrealist artists, for the Caribbean island of Martinique. Eventually they moved on to the Dominican Republic and Haiti, finally settling in Cuba as refugees once they got their papers in order.

The course of Wifredo Lam’s development as an artist depended on the place he was living in and the people he knew at the time. His early works were informed by Cubism and his friendship with Pablo Picasso. After Picasso introduced him to Andre Breton, his art matured as he pursed the theories of Surrealism while developing his own visual idiom. Breton and Lam developed a strong friendship throughout their travels and their mutual interest in non-Western art which the Surrealists believed opened doorways into the dreamworld and the unconscious.

After returning to his homeland of Cuba, Wifredo Lam began incorporating elements of the African-diaspora religions of Palo, Abakua, Vodou, and Santeria into his paintings. He added another layer into his art when he began studying the Eastern philosophies of Taoism, Confucianism, and the I Ching.

Helena was all in on the adventure. She developed a good relationship with Lam’s family, was endlessly fascinated with the natural landscapes of the Caribbean islands, and took great interest in the ceremonies the couple attended. She fit in easily with the small circle of artists in Havana and maintained a fascination for Wifredo Lam’s art which peaked in intensity and innovation during their marriage.

In frustration with the perceived cultural backwardness of Havana and Cuba in general, the couple set off for New York City where many of the famous European Modernists had settled as refugees from the war. The art scene was changing at that time because a new breed of young Americans wanted to prove their worth in the world of Modernism. The old avant-garde art movements were receding and the new wave of Abstract Expressionists were taking over. The Lams naturally fell in with this crowd, but sadly Wifredo’s immigration papers weren’t obtainable and he returned to Cuba. Helena stayed behind, advancing her career in the medical field, and stone cold dumped him like a pair of old socks. This last detail is jarring considering the upbeat tone running through the rest of the book.

Throughout these memoirs, Helena Benitez emphasizes the high points in her marriage to Wifredo Lam. As such, it mostly reads like a pleasant diversion. There is a lot of name dropping when it comes to encounters with famous artists. There are nice descriptions of Caribbean travel and the lifestyle of Cuba. The observations of her husband are light, though and without a lot of depth. Taken at face value, you might think that their marriage was almost nothing but bliss. But like so many artists, she mentions he had a manic depressive temperament and was far from being a faithful husband. Other melancholy aspects include the time she spent in a prison camp during the German occupation of France and the days leading up to Arshile Gorky’s suicide. But Helena Benitez mostly keeps the negative sides of her marriage a secret. Maybe it’s for reasons of privacy. Maybe she just wants to remember the best times. In any case, these memoirs won’t entirely satisfy anyone who wants a complete biography of Wifredo Lam.

Taken as it is, Wifredo and Helena is a good introduction to one of the most fascinating, unique, and underrated artists of the Modernist movement. Of especial value are the high quality reproductions of Lam’s works and rare photographs, some of which are not available to the public anywhere else. Let’s hope that somebody somebody writes a full biography and critical evaluation of this painter and he gets the post mortem recognition he deserves.

 

Book Review & Analysis: The Skeleton's Holiday by Leonora Carrington

The Skeleton's Holiday

by Leonora Carrington

           Leonora Carrington, British citizen who adopted Mexico as home, wife of Max Ernst, and a premier female member of the Surrealist art group is also known for being a writer of fiction. Her novel The Hearing Trumpet is possibly the greatest work of Surrealist literature ever written. Her collection of short stories, called The Skeleton’s Holiday, doesn’t quite live up to her other achievements though.

In this slim collection of seven stories, spanning less than fifty pages, we get a variety of wildly imaginative vignettes. In “White Rabbits”, a girl gets invited into a home owned by an older couple whose elegant mansion is filled with rabbits. In “The Debutante”, a teenage girl convinces a hyena to take her place at her debutante ball. In “The Oval Lady”, a teenage girl gets punished by her father for magically transforming herself into a horse. In “The Skeleton’s Holiday”, we get introduced to a mischievous skeleton who likes pranks.

Certain motifs and themes reoccur throughout the stories. Houses are used as symbols of the unconscious and whatever else is hidden from public view. Animals, especially horses, are used as alter egos. Family conflict is another theme taken up by Carrington. The girl in “The Debutante” is at a crossroads with her mother because she doesn’t want to attend her own party. The magical powers of the teenage girl in “The Oval Lady” are a source of discord with her stern and unimaginative father. In “Uncle Sam Carrington”, a family dispute is solved by two women in the forest who torture vegetables. This style of irrationality is another theme in these stories since the solutions to family dysfunction involve things that make no sense. Likewise, the father in “The Oval Lady” punishes his daughter for her magical transformations by whipping an imaginary horse. One other theme is social dislocation. Some of these stories are narrated by a teenage girl who penetrates into a world she cannot understand, one in which she can only observe without participating. In “The Debutante” she outright refuses to be a participant and in “My Flannel Knickers” we have a story about a girl who gets forced out of society and publicly humiliated, again in a way that is incomprehensible to rationalists.

Carrington is a great writer. The whole problem with these stories is that they are so short that it makes it almost impossible to draw definite conclusions about what she is trying to say. They are more like sketches, vignettes, or introductions than actual stories. She feeds us scraps of information and then cuts off our nourishment just as we begin to chew on it. It’s hard to interpret these vignettes when there is just enough information to arouse our interest and then abruptly stop just when the stories should be picking up and moving along. The sense of incompleteness just makes them fall flat. It’s hard to tell if this is intentional since Surrealism is all about relinquishing control of rationality and allowing psychological content to run free. Carrington may have intended to break off the narratives just when we begin to analyze her symbolism by recognizing patterns. I’m not convinced that is the case though. These stories just feel like literary sketches that she probably intended to build on at a later date and then never got around to doing so.

In this brief volume, almost so thin it is difficult to even think of it as a book, the author gives us some unique and provocative ideas. They are so unique and provocative that it is disappointing they aren’t drawn out further. We are given canapes when we are in the mood for a banquet. If you’re interested in Leonora Carrington, then The Hearing Trumpet is a far more fulfilling read. She really developed her talents in her paintings though, and the sorely underrated book Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick gives an excellent introduction and critical analysis of her art. The Skeleton’s Holiday is an interesting diversion, but it probably works best for diehards of Carrington and devotees of Surrealism. 

 

Book Review

Anthology of Black Humor

edited by Andre Breton

Surrealism was an art movement founded between the two world wars by its figurehead Andre Breton. The theory behind it was that Western rationality had built up modern society by suppressing humanity’s emotions, dreams, passions, and desires. In Freudian terms, this meant the id was imprisoned in the unconscious by the superego, or the collective society, that demanded obedience from the individual’s ego. The result was not only the misery of industrialization with its ugly factories and pollution, the repression of individual happiness, and a disconnection from nature, but also the insanity of two world wars. Hyper-rationality was killing the human spirit. So the Surrealists set out to set the unconscious free from its prison by embracing irrationality. Their art utilized intuition and chance to explore dream imagery, altered stated of consciousness, occult practice like automatic writing and fortune telling, and so-called primitive art from Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific. In the end, they became one of the most ambitious, intriguing, and influential of the 20th century’s avant-garde art movements.

However, Andre Breton himself turned out to be a bit of a tyrant. Sooner or later, ever member of the Surrealist group got shown the exit by Breton for not being sufficiently Surrealist in the ways he wanted them to be. For a guy who claimed to embrace the intuitive and the irrational, you can’t say this was out of character. But another side of his bellicosity may have been the result of some of the other Surrealists finding more fame and commercial success than Breton. Ultimately, the Surrealists did make some incredible art, at least when taking the visual arts and film into account. Surrealist literature never reached the heights that other Surrealist mediums did. In any case, Breton put together his Anthology of Black Humor to showcase literary passages that capture and exemplify the spirit of Surrealism. As you may predict, it isn’t as engaging as the rest of the Surrealist project.

The book starts off with a good explanatory essay by Andre Breton. The purpose of black humor, in the sense of Surrealism, is to revolt against the repressive nature of society. He writes about humor that is cruel, violent, subversive, and allowed to run free with laughter being an outpouring of emotion that strikes a blow against the crushing weight of society’s superego. It is a volcanic outburst that liberates the individual from restraint, allowing an eruption of psychic energy and vitality that liberates each person so that their desires and creativity can flow freely. This humor has to be violent because its purpose is to break down all resistance to human freedom. One of Breton’s famous quotes is “beauty will be convulsive or it will be nothing at all.” What could be more convulsive than a burst of laughter at a sick and offensive joke, an explosive laughter so titanic in strength that it causes a disruption in the dreary orderliness of society? Humor has to be cruel and dark enough to be so disruptive. That is a tall demand to live up to.

Alas, most of the passages in this book do not reach those heights. At its best, this collection has some familiar names that go far in reaching the intention. It contains excerpts from Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Sade’s Juliette, and Lewis Carroll’s “The Lobster Quadrille.” There are a few other lesser known works by famous authors like Charles Baudelaire’s story about deliberately ruining the day of a street vendor selling glassware, the drunken Edgar Allan Poe having a conversation with a hallucinated man made out of wine bottles, J.K. Huysmans explains the need to harvest ptomaine from corpses to be used for perfume bases and flavorings for food to be eaten by the deceased’s family, and finally Leonora Carrington convinces a hyena at the zoo to attend a ball disguised as her and eat all the food because she prefers to stay home. These morbid passages are the funniest, the most disturbing, and the most most memorable ones in the anthology.

There are other recognizable names included like Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Salvador Dali, Arthur Rimbaud, and Comte de Lautreamont. Aside from the name recognition, these chapters don’t do much to keep the book interesting. Breton has a funny way of selecting some obscure writings by these authors that don’t come across as hilarious or even lend much to the book overall. There is also some poetry and a few passages by unrecognizable authors as well. It’s probable that the French sense of humor does not translate well into English and Surrealist humor, which is intended to be irrational, makes it all that much more opaque and incomprehensible.

Anthology of Black Humor is, overall, an underwhelming collection of writing. There are very few laugh-out-loud moments and even the funniest parts aren’t the kind of humor that will make you laugh until you break out in tears. Also, too many of the chapters are simply beyond comprehension; a lot of them read like smug inside jokes that most of us will never be privileged enough to understand. This collection fails to reach the earth shattering intentions that Andre Breton lays out in the introduction. Yet again, this is one of those books that I love the idea of, but don’t feel satisfied with its realization. And if you really are still wondering what black humor is all about, just remember the cannibal who bit into the arm of a clown. With a look of disgust on his face, the cannibal said, “This tastes funny” and spit the clown meat out.