Jean-Clarence Lambert: “Vigas/CoBrA”

The third part of my book CoBrA, Un art libre (1983, reissued in 2008 with a preface by Alechinsky) is called “CoBrA après CoBrA.” This is, of course, about the individual evolvement of the painters and sculptors of the CoBrA group, who had exhibited collectively for only three short years, 1948-1953, each time under difficult conditions. After that, it was everyone for themselves, while preserving and developing the essential thing that once united them: the elaboration of images both imagined and imaginable, as I wrote when I gathered these artists later, along with many others of their contemporaries, into a large and abundant “imaginal kingdom” (as in “the animal kingdom” or “the plant Kingdom”), for my book Le règne imaginal (1991).

CoBrA came from northern Europe-- Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam-- hence the group’s name, which is an acronym coined by Christian Dotremont, the Belgin painrer and poet who brought the Group together. They worked with no relationship to what was then called the School of Paris, which was predominantly Expressionist and/or abstractionist, at least in its more advanced corners.

Among the CoBrA artists, the “wildest” were, without a doubt, the Danish: Asger Jorn and Carl-Henning H Pedersen, the latter whom was commemorated in September, 2014 on the centenary of his birth, with a superb retrospective at the Carl-Henning Pedersen & Else Alfelts Museum in Herning, Jutland. For the Dutch-- especially the big three, Appel, Corneille, and Constant-- being CoBrA meant challenging academic education and ignoring the School of Paris as much as they could. All of them sought elsewhere: the Danish, especially Jorn, in Viking art (if such a thing exists) and prehistoric art; the Dutch in children’s art, folk art, and non-European art. For CoBrA there was no aesthetic hierarchy or cultural bias: they wanted freedom in art and in society, too. Hence their political, or rather, socio-political engagement-- but that’s another story.

Corneille, especially, went to encounter the “other”-- that is to say, the extra-European. His travels took him first to Africa, and then to the rest of the world; to North America for just a short time (for so-called professional reasons: exhibitions, etc.), and to Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Far East. We have knocked around together a fair bit, [Corneille and I]: Taiwan, Senegal, Morocco, and Mexico, and then Caracas, where we met for the CoBrA exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber.

But let’s go back to Paris, our starting point, where Corneille and CoBrA ultimately had their main studio. We came together there. Our affinities played out there.

This is clearly understood from the series of canvases Vigas painted successively-- geometrical but sensitive-- from the time of the Villanueva commission (for the University City of Caracas murals); the non-figurative materialist, which pleased our Donner à Voir colleagues so much, Jean Jacques Leveque or Raoul Jean Moulin. Then, these tropical shapes that Vigas had within him, in the chiaroscuro of the unconscious-- he found the means to let them live, both within him and on the canvas. It was a kind of “return home”—to the neighborhood, as the great Martinican poet Aimé Césaire might say. A neighbor can be defined geographically but also as someone who shares a lyrical vision....

CoBrA had what our industrial civilization increasingly forbids us: access to deep images and original, dynamic archetypes, [by] empty forms (dying or already dead) and forced repetition, which is largely the custom of contemporary art.

I wrote about Corneille in L’œil de l’été. It seems just as suitable for Oswaldo Vigas and his very personal mythology when it says, “Gather what never should have been separated. Restore some balance in the disorder of creation.”

I think that is the great challenge of his work: a “nuevo mundo Orinoco,” to cite another great Venezuelan, the poet Juan Liscano, who was our common and admired friendo: a new world.

           Dracy en  Bourgogne, May 2014

 

“Dear Oswaldo…”

[From a letter to Oswaldo Vigas from Jean-Clarence Lambert, dated TK]

These lines, dear Oswaldo, were supposed to be an “open letter” you would have received prior to my arrival in Caracas, which would have marked the half-century (or more...) of our friendship, our shared convictions. Sadly, as you wrote in true and direct form in one of the poems of your book Regreso de la noche:

 

El tiempo es más que la vida,

es sobre todo la muerte

que está en el tiempo escondida.

 

Time is more than life,

It is, above all, death,

which is hidden in time

 

What I wanted to tell you, or rather, to ask you, to ask us-- it now concerns me that our twentieth century sank in the purgatory of history-- is whether or not we have ruined freedom, the enormous freedom we achieved after World War II.

You’re no longer able to respond this directly to me as you would have certainly done, because you were an artist who questioned the conditions of your own work all your life. Well, considering its many metamorphoses, all done, completed, experienced, I would say: “Yes! We have profited from this freedom very well, especially you, and you. You Latin Americans!”

You invented a new culture, now essential to our world.

As a French man, that is, an old European, I’m not proud of what Europe has become today, not really! However, from what we can call our “good deeds,” we promoted, we helped the formation and the cultural affirmation of Latin America! Particularly Paris, in the ‘50s, when you were there, when we met: when Paris was, I dare say, the capital, at least the great rendezvous of artists, poets, and writers of Latin America.

That was half a century ago. Art was called “modern” in its ultimate conquering stage, despite its socio-cultural context and its quite detrimental and chaotic politics: the Cold War; the obscurantist dictatorships in Spain and Latin America (with the exception of Castro); the degeneration of the USSR and its unhappy satellite countries; the Freudo-Marxist pessimism... and the last flares of Surrealism.

The art that was in progress, in which you actively participated, had no place in museums and other public scenes. It had to step up to the scenario to be known, supported by avant-garde galleries: it was the work of those then called “art critics,” that is to say, “fellow” artists.

Thus, in the Gaston Diehl’s Salon de Mai (which each year changed place in Paris, just like our Donner a Voir), in the launch of the Biennale des Jeunes, the critics under the age of thirty-five (!!!) exhibited their favorite painters and sculptors.

You were present in both of these shows. Since then, the interest in your work has not weakened, as seen in many texts and testimonies that talked about the steps of your development, marked by great exhibitions where we met every time – with what pleasure!

The Latin American artists were then into several big trends: the surrealistic, the geometric abstract, the kinetic “lumière et mouvement,” and, how to call them? “the ones influenced by Picasso,” just like you.

Let me explain myself: Picasso was the great deconstructor of the European tradition: “I have established the right to dare,” he said (he said it...!). Additionally, he was the one who showed, all hierarchies being abolished, how to integrate the non-European into contemporary art. This was, among other things, the bang (the brilliant audacity) of the Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Before you, like you, the Cuban Wifredo Lam was close to Picasso: the African forms (with which Lam had, besides, an atavistic relationship), came into his paintings.

For you, the process seems to have been quite similar, with this important singularity: you declared yourself a Caribbean, with clarity and responsibility; you did not work as a more or less exotic Western, but as an artist of the age when Europe did not claim any supremacy (colonial or another kind of supremacy), [on the sometimes referred to as the anthropological Ages.] It was the ‘5Os, when you formed yourself in Paris, when the old Western humanism learned the value and the difference of “others,” those who had previously been called the wild ones.... From then, the art of the wild ones came out of the ethnographic ghetto to be welcomed just like the “civilized” art…. A truly fundamental movement, initiated by the Expressionists and Surrealists, then consecrated by Malraux’s Musée imaginaire.

For me, this was in all your work, and that’s what seduced me right away, when I saw it for the first time on Grégoire de Tours street, at the La Roue Gallery: could I have fallen a little in love with your Brujas? (They are no less than attractive!)

It was around this time when the exhibition L’art latino-américain à Paris was made, hosted (miraculously, remember) by the National Museum of Modern Art. I was the “general delegate” chosen by the organizing committee: Augusto Cárdenas (Cuba), Ronaldo De Juan (Argentina), Perán Ermini (Venezuela), Rodolfo Krasno (Argentina), Wifredo Lam (Cuba) Silvano Lora (Santo Domingo), Roberto Matta (Chile), Alicia Peñalba (Argentina), Artur Luis Piza (Brazil), Enrique Zanartu (Chile)...

It was from August 2 to October 4, 1962, and the 138 exhibitors got to know notability in the coming years. Poets and musicians were there for performances, concerts, and for controversy, too: it was the beginning of the Castro rebellion against the North American domination. There were so many visitors! As for me, I was there every day or nearly every day, and you were, too, with Krasno and the others…. Today, I can say that it was an important stage in the recognition of the Latin American creativity: it was assembled in its profuse vitality like never before.

Instead of insisting on it, let me copy the last words of my preface to that catalog: “We see the general trend of this set of plastic works as we have already seen it in the wonderful literature, poetry, essay, novel. Down South the Rio Bravo, a determining creative adventure has begun.” One that brought your work, during the half century that followed. Oswaldo, let me tell you again how much I admire your work.

  Dracy en Bourgogne, June 2014