I'm talking today about three of the little magazines topic which was published in Martinique from 1941 to 45 V.V. V or Triple V,
which was founded by the exiled surrealists in New York in 1942,
and view a New York avant garde magazine that was edited by Charles Henry Ford, which ran from 1940s 1947.
And I think these these magazines are not the only ones I could talk about,
but they are perhaps most important in charting socialism's major encounters in the Americas and its attempts to find a new paradigm.
Following the fall of France in 1940 and the Second World War,
there's a dramatic contrast in the way that surrealism was received in Martinique and in New York,
which highlights the complexity of its anti nationalist position in the face of different nationalist and cultural agendas.
And the way in which surrealism had been presented in the USA in the 1930s has stripped the movement of its radical politics.
Influential critics like Clement Greenberg believed it was necessary to focus on saving culture rather than on politics.
And he hated the anti-war stance of the historical album Gods,
and felt the surrealism and abnegate his duty to reform high culture thinks Rosen was also
compromised by its exploitation in the advertising industry and by the success of Salvador Dali,
who by 1940 incarnated surrealism for the American.
That's the US public. Marcia Pyra reviewed the dealer Julian Levy's book, Surrealism, with the words Surrealism seems inadequate for its task.
Its imaginary mutilations appear abstract, trivial and invasive and evasive.
Moreover, there was, as we shall see, a powerful local cultural nationalism,
even amongst apparently avant garde artists in the USA, surrealism is undeniable.
Influence was systematically disavowed, as a nice, Knin said.
America is rejecting all European influences like children who reject their parental influence.
Nothing must come from Europe, but they borrow and imitate, as we did when we were young.
Only we were grateful to our influences.
This is a spread from Triple V from funders who have Triple V with a photograph of the Martinique poet Emmet's says F.
And I'm going to be talking about the founding of his magazine topic for a moment.
The encounters in the Caribbean. It is with Martinique.
Cuba particularly presents surrealism in a different light, rather, from thinking in terms of the influence of surrealism,
whether denied or acknowledged or the way it has been criticised for selectively appropriating from other cultures and imposing its name.
We find an encounter that opened up communications between different cultures and sensibilities.
And I think these encounters changed surrealism and the surrealists reframed our
earlier Parisian ideas of the primitive in favour of cross-cultural synthesis,
syncretic culture and hybrid art forms. Now, Poppy was founded by Emet and Suzanne says Out and on Immanuel in 1941 says Out was born in Martinique,
which is the most assimilated of the French colonies. And he went to the he won a scholarship to Paris.
He studied the Ecole Normal Supérieure. And then he wrote his great poem, K.A. Double Tall Le Pen, Natale notebook of Return to the Native Country.
He went back to Martinique in 1939 and in 1943 he helped organise the coup that overthrew the Vichy
administration in Martinique and the country rallied to de Gaulle says there was elected the mayor of Fort.
Of course, that's the capital of Martinique in 1945 at the end of the war, and he remained its mayor, astonishing until 2001.
He only died in 2008.
He continued to believe that political assimilation was economically advantageous to Martinique, whose inhabitants agreed with him.
And in fact, he sat in the represent communist representative in the French parliament.
But cultural assimilation was a different matter altogether,
and says our assertive throughout his poetry, his essential negritude accommodate Rue Moi.
The Macklemore depart the room he wrote in the case of a tulip pinata.
I think in some ways we freed of lamb's jungle.
And this is another spread from the same issue of Triple V PBB showing Lam in his in his some Havanas studio in front of the huge painting,
The Jungle.
And I think this painting and those related to it from the 1940s could be seen as the visual partners to says as poem of a tool, open that title.
And I quoted little from his fate, which translates, I'm afraid I'm not going to try.
Just a couple of lines. Key Achelen, some above advocate.
Admirable question is mixture of French and English. Are you sir batty, sir prêt who got Goshawk to huggin was the Santería priesthood.
Now LEMS Connexions and this is the this is the painting The Jungle, which belongs the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Alam's Connexions with surrealism have in recent years been minimised in favour of an Afro Cuban context for his work.
Placing him with an a surrealist framework has been seen as an imposition by Eurocentric art history.
The Cuban art historian and critic Karradah Mosquita has argued for a change of viewpoint for a new account of lams work.
Looking at it less as a product, I quote, as a product of surrealism or in terms of the presence of primitive elements,
then as a result of Cuban and Caribbean culture and as a pioneering contribution to the role of the Third World in the contemporary world.
Now, although this is a salutary exercise, I think these viewpoints surrealism in Cuba are not necessarily incompatible.
Surrealism became a scapegoat for the primitivism fantasies of the West.
Mascara denounced and I quote, a certain exoticism typical of the astonished Western vision, particularly amongst the surrealists,
which extends to everything primitive set, assizes, mystery, magic, night, darkness, fantastic, etc.
The assumption that Serros was an aesthetic sizing,
even anaesthetising influence in the complex story of modern art outside the Western centres ignores the political commitments of this movement,
whose anticolonial stance differentiated from an earlier avant garde which fed simply on formal inventiveness of African art.
So I think that. There's certainly a change in Lamb's work in about 1941,
which just parallels his magnificent flowering in the painting in the Cuban paintings, 1942 52.
But it would be a mistake to equate escaping Europe with abandoning surrealism.
And I would argue that, on the contrary,
Lamb discovered in surrealism unexpected resources precisely as a result of its displacement and the loss of its former centre, Paris.
And just putting up here, if a group of of them of historical photographs of France, of Marseilles,
where the Sunnis took refuge while they were waiting for a refugee ship,
they were helped by Varian Fry in the refugee centre at the end of the top right side.
There is Hitler who had by then entered Paris.
The the socialists are in the path of France was under Vichy control.
But there was still in considerable danger. I just wanted to point out in the second and that this one here,
there's land at the back and a blot on his family and land appears again in some of the other photographs.
And I think that's his greater intimacy in Marseilles of this winter, 1940 to 41 had a lasting effect on his work.
And I must say, he was in daily contact. Embleton, with artists like that to Brana, participate in collective games and projects.
And I think a special significance was the revival of automatism in surrealist discourse of this time,
which Lambis too tough, which in a distinctive way, and which he was one of the last great practitioners.
In March 1941, Lambe, together with Unfaithful, told his family, Claude Levius Tulse and other refugees embark from Marseilles for America.
The last sort of Europe was a grim reminder of its fate, and Livia's plus wrote in his memoir This topic.
I did not begin to understand the situation until the day we went on board between two rows of steel helmeted guards with machine guns at
the ready who cordoned off the key side and cut the passengers off from any contact with the relatives and friends who come to say goodbye.
350 passengers, mostly artists and intellectuals,
under threat from the Vichy regime crammed into with small steamer with only two cabins and seven berths.
Libby Strauss had a cabin in Britain, didn't show, and therefore they communicated by letter during the voyage.
That said, it was more like a deportation of convicts and slavey, Strauss said.
The end of April. The overcrowded ship reached the island of Martinique, a French colony then under Vichy control,
and many of the passengers, including Burton and Lamb,
were promptly locked up there in what was effectively a prisoner of war camp in a former Lepo hospital,
but managed to get permission to leave the camp to explore the streets of full defiance and chant seem to enter haberdashers shop.
He picked up a local publication on display that, to his astonishment,
he found himself reading texts that shared the political and aesthetic views of the surrealists.
The force in this modest journal to speak, and I quote, Brittle,
said exactly what needed to be said, not just in the best way, but with the greatest force.
All those mocking shadows were torn aside and dispersed. All the lies and derision fell in tatters.
It was proof that far from being broken or stifled here, the human voice rose up at the very shaft of light.
Amy says Air was the name of the one speaking. So this was the first issue to speak.
And its chief animator's says out. Suzanne says, Our elderly minion.
And it's your sister who happened to own the little haberdashers shop and quickly put back in contact with this group.
And it's easy to understand what's so move on.
It says as opening text for the first number, as well as the fully unexpected references throughout the review reviewed his own perfect universe.
And you can see that there's a quotation from Dumble here or one of the surrealists chosen ancestors.
I said, One must be a singer. You must become a singer.
Red also encountered a political voice that believed in poetry and opposition from within.
On a on a moral and social as well as aesthetic level to the Vichy regime, which is also a black voice,
one who spoke from within the colonised even more as a voice of vigorous protest.
Unlike the feeble and masochistic publications that I had encountered in France in the months preceding his departure,
says as text a passionate protest against a colonial power subservient to fascism and what he felt was a culture.
Void, and I quote, as silent as sterile land.
I'm speaking about arms and my hearing measures by the Caribbean Sea.
The terrifying silence of man. Europe, Africa, Asia.
I heard screaming steel drum drumbeats in the bush temples, pragmatist, banyan trees.
And I know it is man speaking. But here is the monstrous atrophied, the voice, the age old exhaustion, the incredible mutism.
No city, no art, no poetry. But he goes on.
We are the kind who refuse. The shadow and topic was censored by the Vichy regime who controlled Martinique.
And it disguised its brutal critiques in various ways. Publishing incendiary poetry, scientific studies of local flora and fauna.
Live for Banias on African civilisations. Negro Cuban folk tales gathered by Lydia Cabrera.
Poems and text by says Our Little Baby and Pepé Listeners Southern adoption of
surrealism because it was unnecessary if the jungle would change its direction.
In any sense, and with Tropic, the surrealists encountered a movement of a new kind whose championing the black population and cultures
and challenge to colonial classical French values endorsed and justified their own intransigence,
says it was himself also care about reciprocal value for him of their support.
Breteau brought us boldness. He cut short our uncertainties.
I would say that the meeting with Plato was a confirmation of the truth of what I had discovered by my own reflections.
And he also says our gives a very moving description. Little else is not just as a poet, but as one who sought out poetry.
I quote says How he literally fascinated me. He had an astonishing sense of poetry.
He sensed poetry. He sniffed it like pollen in the air.
A poet and a philosopher. The meeting of battle was a very important thing for me.
And as says Suzanne says, I wrote in her text in the eighth issue a topic in 1943.
Surrealism and thus surrealism as an activity was dynamism, process, assist, human emancipation and activity which could and I quote,
liberate man by revealing his unconscious, assisting the liberation of peoples, by clarifying the blind myths that have governed them hitherto.
I continue to quote, The arrow of history indicates our human task.
A society tainted in its origins by crime, supporting the present time by injustice and hypocrisy,
rendered fearful of its future by bad conscience, must morally, historically necessary disappear.
And amongst the powerful war machines of the modern world has placed at our disposal.
Audacity has chosen surrealism, which offers the best chance of success.
Lamb is first mentioned in the second issue to speak as the astonishing black Cuban painter in
whom we meet at the same time as the best of Picasso's tutelage aesthetic in African traditions.
Curiously and intelligently mingled. And in the sixties, you had Topete.
There was a commentary on land by Pierre-Yves Lub and I.
I quote he. He mentions an astonishing range of works with which land surrounded himself in Paris.
Ivory Coast Mask's New Hebrides Triphone Carvings. Easter Island fetishise sculptures in Papua New Guinea.
And you can see here is a photograph of LAMS studio actually after the war,
but showing some of these these extraordinary sculptures that he collected.
So it wasn't just the Cuban context. It was a much broader border one than that.
And Loeb tells a funny anecdote against himself. He while they were in Paris from what, Picasso?
He's influenced by Negro art and Picasso. Furious replied, Well, he has the right him.
He is back on May 16th, 1941, Lam Black Tar Lumber and AUB left Martinique from centre to meet.
They stopped in Santa Domingo and from there I told his family. S New York, while Lemon also left for Cuba, arriving in late July 1941.
Lamphere brought practically nothing with him.
He had to start again from scratch, and his first impression has returned to Havana was one of terrible sadness.
The whole colonial drama of my youth seemed to be reborn in me.
Cuba was the difference. Martinique was that Cuba was an independent country, not a colony.
Did it become a playground for the rich? This is this is pre Castro. And most Cubans of African descent lived in poverty.
Lam was appalled by the conditions and the cultural as well as economic forms of exploitation.
In Havana, he said, at that time, was a land of pleasure.
Sugary music, rumbas, mambos and so forth.
Poetry in Cuba then was over political and committed like that as Nick Lafsky in a few others oils written for the tourists.
The letter I rejected for it had nothing to do with an exploited people, with a society that crushed and humiliated its slaves.
No, I decided that my painting would never be the equivalent of that pseudo Cuban music for nightclubs.
I refused to paint. Cha cha cha cha. I want to rule my heart to paint the drama of my country.
But by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit beauty of the plastic after the blacks.
In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating
figures with the party's surprise to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.
And I just see a little bit about them and and says Negritude trumpet was the precursor of Negritude.
But in fact, its chief animators, Tropiques, took very different views of Negritude a while, says I was one of its foremost exponents.
Manil was one of its most trenchant critics for Manil.
It became a dangerously reductive political ideology based on an essentialist notion of identity which merely inverted black white values.
LAMS position, while still sympathetic to the pertschuk uses to which his output negritude basically agreed with Manil.
Responding to the acquisition of black racism, Lambe replied, It's a false accusation.
They say that because I don't paint like a European, because I try to paint with the idiosyncrasy of my people,
the personages in my paintings, and neither white nor black. They lack race.
I am not in agreement with the doctrine negritude either. It's not a matter of race, but of the class struggle.
So this is the jungle land painted it in 20 days in December 1942.
And what you see standing, standing out against a vibrant, pulsating canvas of yellows, blues and greens is a blanched moonlit arm with long fingers,
which gestures towards a group of strange and sometimes menacing figures, half hidden amongst the sugar canes and the papaya and the breadfruit.
Trees raised on belongs to a carrot on the left of the painting.
Who is, Lam remarked, as if it would experience a revelation at the sight of the other personages in the painting,
astonished by the discovery of this whole universe. The Jungle Frankie quotes Picasso's Demoiselle d'Avignon,
but his reference to Picasso is of a different kind from the broad formal resemblance between LAMS paintings of the late 1930s.
Such as this one here, this very simplified, flattened figure with strong black outlines, mosque like figures of mosque like features.
And I think the relationship of the Demarzo Davino, which you see on the right here, Picasso's painting from 1987, is actually all that different.
The jungle deliberately sets up a dialogue with the Demoiselle, the five figures in the jungle,
which are the sets made up of fragments of different bits of bodies with most black faces,
and one of them on the right hand side who who seems to support a large breast
or the lack of fruit and is clutching a pair of scissors and the others.
You can just about make out that they can submerge in the background and they range in shallow relief across the picture surface.
The gesture of the one on one on the left and the Demarzo that's from here whose dark head derived
from Primitivist Gugga acknowledges the scene as in the jungle and presents it to the spectators.
Picasso turns the other four women inhabitants of the brothel in Avenue and Street.
That's where the touch of the painting comes from. He transforms them into terrifying gorgons.
And it's one of his most misogynist images. It's as if they're staring a spectator into stone land.
Transposes the ambiguity of the Demarzo with its rough overlay of masks on the decadent pink bodies of the prostitutes into a tropical setting.
The figures are also lifesize and confront us with a mixture of nude sexuality, an impenetrable ritual.
Mosques like Lambe explained that he's actually condemning what happens in the jungle.
Look at my monsters. The gestures they make. The one of the right offers her Horsh seem like a great prostitute.
Look also at the scissors being brandished. My idea was to represent the spirit of the blacks in the situation which they found themselves.
I showed through poetry the reality of acceptance and a protest contrasting his jungle with those of obvious who.
So I put up the dream here. And as they had begun to discover by this time, Russo, of course,
never travelled to the jungle, he painted what was in the gendarme deployment in Paris.
But this is this is one of his most famous jungle paintings. But Lam said, contrasting his jungles with those of Rousseau.
He was a formidable painter, but he doesn't belong to my natural chain.
He doesn't condemn what happens in the jungle.
I do lamas equally remote from the celebration of picturesque Cuba, the kind of Cha-Cha he was talking about,
and a comparison with the celebrated painting by Mario Cranio Afro Cuban Dance 1943 highlights the differences.
Crania depicts two figures a bare breasted nightclub dancer and WTO on the left,
the latter a popular subject in 19th century custom costume Brister paintings is the stereotype
of the exotic tropical scene to entertain the viewer with a frisson of lust and danger.
Lambi Contrast confronts the viewer. Justice Macassar does with an ambiguous challenge to their expectations.
And this is a study for that for the jungle. A similar but not identical figure from the right hand side of the of a large canvas.
So I think the transformation lends imagery and style. On his return to Cuba involvement,
so much a rejection of his parents period as a breakthrough in which serious ideas found a wholly original expression.
There was a change in the way in which the paint painters applied and the hybrid creatures emerge out of or meld into their settings.
This is a alter to a lingua. One of the theory Chauvel spirits in the centre of religion in Cuba and altered various various objects on it.
But I think in large paintings like these. This is 1943.
Colour is applied and loose streaks, dabs and washes or in luminous shifting clouds of bright pigment dusted over the surface.
This is not to imply an abstraction or separation of colour from the subject of the paintings, but rather to point up a freeing of the hand,
a spontaneity of gesture that seems to be integral to his representation of the world of Orishas and other personages of the imagination.
Lam credited automatism with releasing memories from his Cuban childhood, and I quote, in an automatic manner.
As the surrealists say, this world leaked out from me.
That is to say, I carried all this in my subconscious and letting myself get carried away by automatic painting.
This strange world sprung out.
And I think the renewed interest in automatism amongst us to listen to the early 1940s partly emerged in their experience in Martinique,
in the in the jungle of Lamen, Cuba, in Martinique,
Brett and his family were joined by Massen and they were all bowled over by the tropical beauties of Martinique.
They published very lyrical Creole dialogue in a small collaborative book called Martinique.
Sean goes to South Pole, Martinique, Sutent, trauma.
My quote from the book, The Lliana Flower is to slender to white to be a star.
It could only slip from a silts letter when you managed to make up their forms in their entirety.
These lines and talking about visita so upright, so tall, are truly the half of the earth.
The muscles and paintings and drawings such as this one here of the vegetation,
Martinique, where a fervent rediscovery of free and spontaneous gestures.
And when when Britain arrived in New York, he immediately published his artistic genesis in perspective of surrealism,
which reaffirmed the notion of automatism with a new tolerance from automatism that was not strictly pure,
as it had rarely been anyway for the artists. And I quote, Automatism inherited from the medium's has remained once realisms to great directions,
since it is automatism that is a rass and still arouses the most violent controversy.
It cannot be too late to seek to analyse its function rather more deeply, and so try to sway the argument decisively in its favour.
Contemporary psychological research has suggested that a comparison can be drawn
between the construction of a nest by a bird and the beginning of a melody that
is in the process of establishing a definite theme without prejudice to the deep
individual tensions that graphic and verbal automatism brings to the surface.
I maintain that this is the only mode of expression which gives full satisfaction to both eye and ear by achieving rhythmic unity,
justice recognised when in an automatic drawing or text, as in a melody or a bird's nest.
The only structure that corresponds to the by now widely acknowledged non differentiation between sympathetic and formal qualities.
I will concede that it is possible for automatism to enter into the composition of a painting or a poem with a certain degree of premeditation.
But the converse holds true in any form of expression which automatism does not at least advance on.
The cover runs a grave risk of moving out of the surrealist orbit, and Lemon commented on his own paintings and drawing the same fate.
They include they contain the rhythm of the automatic work.
I just want to say a little bit about about LAMS that the painting of the Cuban Santeria religion
and so broad difference between his paintings and that of the artist Hippolyte in Haiti.
This is a painting by a by Hippolyte on the right hand side here, which shows Shangrila the story.
I'll go for I, who was the God of war. And I'm now.
When Breteau visited Haiti and spoke to Hippolyte, he asked him what he thought of Lambis paintings,
which Breton was then hanging for an exhibition in in in in in Haiti at the potted plants up centre.
And Hippolyte affirmed a vigorous and deferentially interest in them, while still retaining a slight error of reserve,
because in his view, it was Chinese magic rather than the African magic, which was, he implied, his own province of knowledge.
I think that the point really is that that hitherto there was almost no two dimensional
representation of the various spirits and ideas and beliefs in Santería or in Haitian voodoo.
On the left, I put up a typical sort of set of offerings, which is very often very syncretic.
This one, as you can see, includes a crucifixion as well as the kind of sign them, which is typical of this century.
This is from the museum at Gwyneth Bacau near Havana. But there was no tradition of painting.
Not like the Christian religion, which, of course, you know, has this magnificent tradition of two-dimensional imagery.
And typically, it was the first artist, really. And he was also a priest to try and represent the parishes.
That is the the the spirits of this world in two dimensions.
But he is, I think, more interested actually in in in in in sense making a record of them.
I mean, this this is almost like a sort of icon,
whereas Lam is drawing from a whole series of different sources and his paintings constitute a very complex imaginary,
which has the power to convey contradictory meanings and to encompass satire and humour as well as politics and supernatural.
So he was familiar with the ceremonies objects associated with Cuba's most widespread religious practises in Centera.
But he wasn't a practitioner, unlike Hippolyte. This one is painting who malem the God of the crossroads.
And this is personages, which I think.
It's stunning. Well, where you can see the.
The heads, the twin heads of the operation and has a leg war which are linked to reversible.
And they recall both the secret twins of Haitian voodoo and I think the reversible
halfling figures of the court pictures in playing cards and two of these.
The Alice and Luke Hemel are part of the game of playing cards that the surrealists invented in in Marseilles.
And all of them produced new versions of the King, Queen and Jack using surrealist heroes and heroines.
OK. So like this realist's laptop or next attitude,
the contradictions in their position of trying to combine dialectical materialism with the defence of superstition and magic.
And it's the perfect as well as the political that that lamb is is interested in.
And he didn't usually employ specific symbology.
He said, I never created my pictures in terms of a symbolic tradition, but it was on the basis of a poetic excitation.
I believe in poetry. For me, it is the great conquest of mankind. Revolution, for instance, is a poetic creation.
I say everything through the pictorial image. Now, I'm going to move now to the other two magazines, Triple V and view the Butt.
And I want to talk a little bit about Britain's Proleague Germana to a third manifesto of surrealism or for I should be or not.
Probably. The magazine was crucial for the survival and identity of the surrealist group in exile.
The that the propaganda to a thirst for his manifesto or not was the most important publication.
The most important essay in the first issue of Triple V,
Britain was faced with the bankruptcy of previous modes of knowledge and intervention, including communism.
And he speculates on what is left. And he asks, kind of society exist without a social myth.
But he's unable to give an answer.
He does, however, suggest that to begin with, it would not be a bad idea to convince man that he is not necessarily the camp creation as he boasts.
Whatever the new social myth might be, it must challenge conventional means of thinking.
He ends with a section that he calls Licorne plans Home.
The Great Invisibles, which we've had illustrations by Roberto Matter which you can, which you can just about make out here.
And here he suggests and apparently science fiction mode.
But there is no reason not to think that there exist above man beings whose behaviour is as alien to his as his own must be to the mayfly or well.
And I think there is more of dada in this than one might think that it's captured in these rather mysterious terms.
But most influential in the contents of Triple V was the shift away from the human psyche towards nature, including the tropical.
But I just love this. This is a small interlude picking up on the question of automatism and the the problem of the,
as it were, the disavowal of realisms influence in New York.
I put up here a painting by Massen done while he was living in Connecticut in the United States in the mid 1940s called Pacify,
and also one of his seven paintings, one of the earlier automative sand paintings.
And I would suggest that there is obviously a link and a relationship with Pollock's paintings, as Jackson Pollock is four thousand five,
which is a painting very difficult to see this in reproduction, but it's a painting that is encrusted with with with other materials,
with with bits of sand and other stuff that focus has stuck on.
And obviously, the free gestural movement of the paint is related to muscles work.
And I put up here, Pollock's painting could pacify the same subject as my songs above.
Maslen specify just really two to emphasise the fact which is which is one that William Rubin was always very,
very keen also to to acknowledge and to celebrate that.
Artists like Call-up did a great deal to surrealism. But really it was it was it was very hidden under the desire to create a new American painting.
And that was the rhetoric was associated with it.
And that night triggered the nor view actually reproduce any of the automatism works by by the abstract expressionist,
which is which is also quite interesting. Lenore Carrington published her extraordinary text down below about her madness in Triple V.
But I want to just spend a little time looking at another artist for whom the tropics and the jungle were very important.
Inspiration, though, in a in a much more accepting way than the land is ambivalent and slightly satirical view of the jungle.
This is an artist called Maria Martine's hootenannies, Maria.
This this page from the final issue of Triple V shows a work of hers called Macumba reproduced above a paper,
a poem by it says our called back took but took is the apparently the word for the rhythm of the TAM town in Brazil.
Britain wrote a preface to Maria's 1947 exhibition in New York, he'd first seen her work in 1943 in New York.
But he wrote in his preface of a sort of celebration of the South, by contrast with the North.
And I quote, During the last few years, the breadth of the human spirit has not ceased to blow from warm lands.
Another wind, which seems nowadays to consist of solid blocks of ice,
whistles faintly down the chimneys of Europe to discover nothing but naked grates or bars on which thin, tangled vine stalks a smoothing,
not giving off heat for little Maria's sculpture is indissolubly linked to her own,
and her country's annual resculpt to begin began by carrying on its shoulders a whole legend.
I quote, which they call it at the water itself by the veins of her land was no less than the Amazon, which sends through the works that I so admire.
In 1943 in New York, which sang the words Immemorial Voices of Man's Passion from birth to death, that the Indian tribes,
which had succeeded each other along its treacherous banks, have known better than anyone how to condense in the most encompassing symbols.
This elegant interweaving this passage from Breton's preface of the natural world.
The sculpture and the legends that inspired Maria's work concentrates in the term de Côté,
which hints at the female body disclosed as well as being a Strachey metaphore, the vegetation emerging from the waters of the Amazon.
And it's clear that that that that nature and the tropics of the hymns was seen through this this seductive sculpture and stuck to sculptress.
To accompany her exhibition that the Valentine Gallery in New York in 1943, she published Amazonia,
a series of text based on the legends of the gods and spirits of the Amazon.
The introduction by Hocking Settled situates her text in relation to the Indian people of Amazonia who have a fascinating folklore and tradition.
Now, some of the gods that she includes, such as Yemanja here, would not be thought of as Afro Brazilian.
But Marine's approach is to locate her stories in the Indian Amazon and treat income as such as Yemanja or Ayaka,
as having chosen Brazil as their new home. Iacocca's another of her characters,
came to Brazil from a distant land and quittin Maria and was so entranced by the country that she made Amazonia her domain.
In the sculpture, Cobra Grandi hit the undulating body of the serpent sprouting breasts rises to touch the vegetation,
arches up on each side, both here and with Macumba.
Maria has created in tast seen figures and animals in the tropical setting rather than showing a single isolated figure.
Brittle described Macumba as a hymn to the God of spasm,
in which the flesh yielding like the blood of a flower becomes impregnated with all the strange dendritic markings of the native metal.
And I think with his reference to dendritic will treelike structures of native metalworking,
Britain points to the arms sculptures of Haitian voodoo artists such as this work by Murat Brijesh,
who tree snake Lir in which the lower is like a Brazilian, a reesha or spirit or God, particular powers related to that arena of activity.
And I think this this this one with its snake like tentacles have branches in central stalk is is not entirely unlike Maria's work.
I'm just going to show very quickly that some of her work that was shown in the 1947 exhibition in Paris,
which was sarcasms attempt to return to its former position of eminence in the artistic and cultural world in Paris, didn't have in Paris succeed.
But it was a very extraordinary exhibition. And it's interesting that her the world, the shadow, too long, too narrow, was reproduced above.
David has suicide. The catalogue for this exhibition was designed by Marcel Duchamp.
And it had a hand painted falsey on the front of the deluxe edition with the title Please Touch.
And I should say that this is from the Eros exhibition of a 1959 1960 where Marie was included as one of today's surrealists together with up sorry,
together with with Duchamp, those Maria with a sculpture called Impossible, which I think is really her masterpiece.
It exists in plaster and in bronze. And it shows two figures.
One is a bust. They always halflings confronting each other with their heads strikingly transformed.
I would like to galvanise CNN and is from supan circumference of the two empty faces,
hence both of them desperately reaching out of shivering with aggressive force,
simultaneously attracting and repulsion repulsing above Reforger Connexions often made with Maria's
personal life at this time when choosing get involved in intense love affair with Marcel Duchamp.
And she was the inspiration behind his last major work. The room was kept secret until his death in 1968 the at on Doney.
But I think Impossible could as well have been inspired by the wider context of a world war nearing its end.
In 1944, when she began the first version, she said in 1946, just off the end of the war, the world is complicated and sad.
It is nearly impossible to make people understand one another.
Impossible is one of the most powerful images in the 20th century of the dystopian human condition of desire and conflict.
But the clash of opposing forces and a basic failure to communicate.
So I go back to Triple V and I want to end by looking at triple V and briefly at Vue magazine, which has been all squeezed up tonight.
I'm sorry about that. In in relation to their represent that that presentation of of Duvall's work and of Cornell in V V V,
very little contemporary American art was represented, in fact, almost nothing.
The emphasis is is almost exclusively on indigenous America, the tropics and Europe.
The first issue did attempt to link two American writers.
Howard Rosenberg contributed an aggressive text called Life and Death of an Amorous Umbrella, attacking some core beliefs of surrealism.
And the experiment was then not repeated, and the magazine really tended to close ranks.
But I've just shown one of the works by Ducharme here he was did the cover for this issue, which is the head of Washington.
This was actually commissioned for a cover of Vogue magazine.
And it was rejected because the the red paint on the walls was too reminiscent of wounds and bandages.
And so it's reproduced in triple V instead. And if you turn it round, you can see that it's well served the United States itself.
It's called allegory of genre, not view.
By contrast, as its name promised, took a broad view of the avant garde.
It was a very important conduit for surrealist art and poetry while not losing touch with modern American culture.
It was small, precious and chatty. Parker Tyler recalled the rivalry it was felt when VVS started up its editor.
The artist David Hare was Britain's third choice.
Had previously asked Robert Motherwell and then Charles Henry Ford, who had both refused and I quote Parker Tyler's memoirs.
Soon there appears 100 per cent surrealist rival magazine Short-Lived, though it be Triple V or V.V., as it is called.
We conclude that obvious it is meant to be three times as good as viewed.
So there was a kind of rivalry between Triple V and view and and view, as I say, included a lot of surrealists.
It dedicates specific issues to individual artists from the surrealist movement.
But it also insisted on on showing modern American artists, as you can see here.
I put on an advertisement there on the left view from Touba, an American number, and it also included like V, V, V, Tropical Americana.
And this this is the series five number two, May 1945 issue on Tropical Americana presented by Paul Bowles.
One of the most striking of the issues of view is this one from 1945 with a cover by Duchamp.
And I think Duchamp used to have such an enormous impact on post-war American art as well as on post-war European art is actually very important.
Sources for his influence was this issue of view, the cover on the others on the left, him on the right as the back cover,
which is one of the first public appearances of DU forms notion of the thing that Afan Mass, which is and it's it's.
Remember, this is somebody who has given up painting.
He's given up producing work for exhibitions. He's almost given up.
Perhaps he's noticed at all, though, clearly from this kind of this kind of activity, he's holding something.
But it's become very minimal and even liminal. And this influence here, the little statement says when the smoke of tobacco also smells of the mouth,
that it says it too smells, marry, buy in for them.
Right.
So it may be rather rather a peak, but I shall come back to talk about the influence in a bit more next week inside the this issue of the magazine.
There is an extraordinary fold-out sort of photo collage of Duchamp's work.
And because it's so difficult on stand, I've actually brought a copy with me.
If anybody wants to see how it works. Do come out afterwards and have a look at it.
It shows on the left hand side, the left page here with two flats folded in the right hands.
The facts are fold out and you can see Duflo himself sitting in this historic collage of all his works,
including tumour and the large glass set within a scene from the city of New York.
This is by the architect and artist, Kiesler.
And on the back cover, you see the name artist and long term.
That's 1887. That's due Seans date of birth.
And beneath that name, artist and volatile 1877. That was Kiesler.
And the photograph here shows the installation of the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition at it in New York.
That was the exiles witnessed first show there. And the installation was by Duchamp.
And as you can see, it was an installation that was basically a frustrating one because Duchamp.
He's. Well, could he spread?
He he entangled the works in the show in what he called a mile of string, which meant it's very difficult to get in to see what was there.
And it's like an enormous web. And I'm also going to be talking more about string string as a medium next week.
And the the final artist I want to look at from view is someone who was really up to the contrast with those I've been talking about so far,
and that is Joseph Connell. And I wanted to show him because I think it's quite interesting how whereas the surplus in Triple V on the whole book,
VTB did not take to the Natalya American Art at Cornell is one of the great masters at combining surrealism with the vernacular.
This this is two pages from his tech school, The Crystal Cage from View, the extraordinary imaginative text.
This is one of his a page from The From View in 1941 to about Hedy Lamarr.
He was he was obsessed and infatuated by the film stars and by ballet dancers.
And some of his best work, I think is is actually a way of celebrating this.
This is Hamish and Lauren Bacall. So Hollywood, I mean, he manages to to make this sort of bridge between Hollywood and and surrealism.
He uses boxes. He uses always ready made materials.
He uses photographs put together in this very alluring and lyrical way.
And this is a one of the untitled boxes, which includes all sorts of little found objects, little little bits and pieces,
little bits of Americana, little things picked up on the beach, put in this in a grid, in a formal grid.
And I think is very interesting. Also, he sort of touches on abstract art as well as on surrealism.
And I'm going to end with one of his sand fountain boxes.
One of the sad things about works of art in museums is that you can't handle them.
And with this is particularly problematic because his many of the boxes, all men in boxes are actually made to be picked up, tilted, shaken.
And so this is a SAM counter that actually belonged to Duchamp was given to him.
And the sand is is tilted into a into a cavity at the back.
And then it's turned the right way out. It pulls out onto a broken glass.
And so it's it's actually it's kind of a walk in action as well as being, you know,
sort of forming very, very, very fine piece of piece of that sort of structure, construction.
And I want to to to pick up next week and talk more about the but the ephemeral about it works that
should be handled and how these relate to a post-war sort of rediscovery of data and of surrealism.
Thank you.