Retornos maravillosos. Lecturas de Wifredo Lam en Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier y Aimé Césaire

Cuban painter Wifredo Lam (1909-1982) returned to the Caribbean in 1941 after spending eighteen years in Spain and France. In the following four years his painting practice transformed, generating the iconic imagery that he would become known for inventing. His return from Europe figures prominently in essays that Lydia Cabrera, Alejo Carpentier, and Aimé Césaire wrote about him soon after his 1943 completion of La jungla, his most famous painting. These Caribbean writers had close relationships of friendship and collaboration with Lam, and while their essays have become important sources for Lam criticism, they rarely receive critical analysis. In my analysis, I am interested in how they illuminate the role of return in shaping the dichotomy that Alejo Carpentier went on to establish between surrealism and the Americas-located aesthetic he dubbed “lo real maravilloso.” For Carpentier, the aesthetic of the marvelous that the surrealists sought to render emanated readily from social reality in the Americas. I understand this idea to be predicated upon his own return from Europe, and I argue that his earlier work on Lam, alongside Cabrera’s and Césaire’s, offers coordinates for a theory of return, from Europe and surrealism, through which to understand the real-marvelous aesthetic in Lam.