Mickey Roker 1932-2017

I have fond memories of Mickey Roker and the house band, as the heyday of Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus suited some suburbanites for whether in the old city for an ‘art’ film unavailable on the Jersey side or not the location was more easily driven to from elsewhere in town, hard to get confused by ‘get on Third Street til you see it’ after which an employee guarded the cars in the parking lot before much gentrification in the area.  In those days I recall remarking to the proprietor of Serengeti in Pennsauken, NJ amid its demise ‘I’m not going to say South Jersey does not deserve a jazz club..’ at which time he interjected ‘I’ll say it!! South Jersey does not deserve a jazz club!!’  I was still drinking beer and there was hard bop coming from those who grew up in it.

What's up

In one of her most powerful works, Regina José Galindo responds to the May, 2013 acquittal of Efraín Ríos Montt of whom “in his first six months in power, 2,600 Indians and peasants were massacred, while during his 17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped off the map” (Blum) and as Allan Nairn reports “made systematic the massacres that were taking place in the countryside..  where, at that time, the majority of the Mayan population was concentrated” and whose conviction for an 80 year sentence ten days earlier was “pushed” by “the Mayan population.” As Goya’s “Bury Them And Keep Quiet"from Disasters of War represents “cadavers.. unclothed.. their classical presentation with accentuated foreshortening contrasts ideal beauty with the tragedy of death” so Galindo characteristically lends hers in a rural field in the Pays-de-la-Loire region of France until an excavator removes a square of earth around her, symbolically opening the mass graves and externalizing the alienating effect of injustice on her. 540 West 28th Street til May 27.


Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Farmacopea, 2013. from suelta suelta on Vimeo.

Nancy Spero’s War Series at 528 w26th til June 17 was not shown together during the period she created them, the late 60s and early 70s, in NYC until a small gallery hung them in 1983. The works collected here involve war as a corporeal experience but emphasizes the mechanized attack on the body in Vietnam with drawings of bombs and helicopters, which she tried to depict from the perspective of the victims, likely influenced by Artaud’s premonition of drone warfare in To Have Done With the Judgment of God “..Huge armies of tanks, airplanes, battleships/ that served as their shield..” as the series preceded the Artaud paintings and Codex Artaud. Included is Female Bomb, allegorizing female encouragement of war, and a large scale installation of the Maypole which revisited the series during the Iraq War.  Also a month before Puerto Rico’s fifth plebiscite on its political status, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz presents two paintings by Elizam Escobar, jailed in the US for alleged bomb threats on behalf of independence with her videos (not the one above) including one of a woman’s Voudou dance casting a spell for the “total and absolute destruction of the machinery of war,” Taíno objects and an early Ana Mendieta film at the Museo del Barrio til May 15.

Kiefer, watercolor, 2013

21st St: If my post from three years ago “The the Île-de-France inspires a war with Van Gogh, whom Artaud called ‘bodily the battlefield of.. the problem of the predominance of flesh over spirit, or of body over flesh, or of spirit over both..’ with Monet near by. Provence gets you Van Gogh and Cezanne: Picasso holed himself up there to do battle with Manet and Velazquez; Kiefer ties the landscape in to controversial aspects of German history" assigned to Anselm Kiefer a relatively limited function, also in relation to the “painterly focus on nature (that) helped revitalize figurative painting" I noted earlier that year, he has traversed those limits in dramatic fashion with perhaps his best show ever, til July 14 at no. 522.  Eric Fischl’s evokes Trump-era “Late America” at 550 til June 24. At 521 til June 10 I presume Martin Boyce photographic series “Partial Eclipse” was an homage to the final sequence of L’Eclisse, as the Antonioni influence has been suggested before and both Boyce and Antonioni have cited the influence of de Chirico. Antonioni followed de Chirico in lending his own neurosis to the cityscape while Boyce’s images come off more strictly referential.

Untitled (Ritual)

Raymond Pettibon used the 19th St. Zwirner gallery as a studio to supply new works for the fourth floor of the New Museum show, and ‘got an extension’ from the original opening date for this show, which turned out to be one of his best as well, til June 24.  24th: Robert Longo at 519 til June 17, Gerhard Demetz at 524 til June 3, Ray Johnson at 523 til June 17.  Lygia Clark at 531 is all Concretist.  Also on 26th, two floors of Henry Moore with views from two decks on the 10th floor, 521 26th til June 30. At 526 W 26th, Suite 718 Walther takes up Chinese performance photos including Ai Weiwei dropping a Han Dynasty urn "praised as an ironic commentary on the nationwide destruction of China's cultural heritage during the country's economic boom" but as with Yves Klein throwing gold in the Seine and people selling their feces, I see this as braggadocio about one’s own prices, much as I respect the courage of his activism in China. The Ethiopain Elias Sime's recent works from electronic waste exported to Africa (til June 17 at 533 26th).  Magnan Metz at 521 has four Mendives in the back. Leonora Carrington steals both current Surrealism group shows: The Artist Traveling Incognito (1949) at 568 25th til June 17 and The Garden of Paracelsus (1957) and 1964's Untitled (Ritual) at 744 Madison Avenue, 3rd fl. til June 2.

Loos' plan for his grave

A reenactment of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s 1992 installation Heidi, Midlife Crisis Trauma Center and Negative Media-Engram Abreaction Zone, originally made for a group show in Vienna when McCarthy was 46 and Kelly 36, is up til June 30 at 76 Grand St., including the chalet, a large Austrian landscape by each artist, kitsch Austrian postcards, two installation tables, and the hour-long film featuring at one point a voice over of the architect Adolph Loos' writings “The modern man who tattoos himself is a criminal or a degenerate. There are prisons in which eighty per cent of the prisoners are tattooed. Tattooed men who are not behind bars are either latent criminals or degenerate aristocrats. If someone who is tattooed dies in freedom, then he does so a few years before he would have committed murder. The urge to decorate one's face and everything in reach is the origin of the graphic arts. It is the babbling of painting. All art is erotic... But the man of our own times who covers the walls with erotic images from an inner compulsion is a criminal or a degenerate... I thought I was giving the world a new source of pleasure with this; it did not thank me for it. People were sad and despondent. What oppressed them was the realization that no new ornament could be created” with the visuals of Loos’ design for his own cube-shaped grave being drawn onto the right buttock of a Heidi mannequin.

Satyajit Ray wrote "it was probably the partition that brought (Henri Cartier-Bresson) to India, but he soon found himself confronted by a second political event - the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.." a floor of the Rubin is devoted to selections from Henri Cartier-Bresson's India pix til Sept 4 including the three famous shots of the Kurukshetra refugee camp are here (I, II, III) and the Punjabi refugees in transit.  Absent is the group shot at the table of  “Kashmir. Srinagar. July 1948. Sheik ABDULLAH, Prime minister of Kashmir since the Maharajah ceded the territory to India, puts improvement of the lot of the poor Kashmir natives above religious differences. Although he is a Moslem, he stands for friendship with Nehru's India. Here (in sheepskin hat) he talks to members of the UN Commission sent to investigate the position in Kashmir,” who officiated the marriage of Alys and Faiz Ahmed Faiz in 1941. They feel the need to qualify the deifying exuberance of Henri's note “While Sri Ramana Maharshi is dying in his last incarnation, and thus becoming a god, his favorite peacock (the gift of a rajah) strolls the ground of his last earthly home" and separate the shot from another of his mourners, (three related pix elsewhere) but you can't make everyone happy, and there are plenty of original prints of viewers' favorites here like the dawn prayer in Srinigar, the Jaipuri carpet maker "telling the children in a chant what colors to use,"  "Great care of all sarts of diseases," and the various 1966 classics from Ahmedabad (above right).  Y. G. Srimati sang bhajans by Gandhi's side as a teenager and her contemporary takes on Hindu tantric iconography are at the Met til June 18.  Jyoti Bhatt is also well known for photographs of rural Indian life, but it's his paintings and prints that highlight DAG Modern's selections from the Group 1890 (41 e57th 7th fl. til May 31), which didn't stay together long, including a late 1970s print that seems to be both a parody and encouragement of cultural pilgrimage to India:

Jyoti Bhatt, Beginning of the Journey, Etching, 1978

Last but not least, Acquavella has reunited all but one of the twenty-three Constellations of Miró (18 e 79th, til May 26, one owner backed out at the last minute) and seeing the originals in a group is essential by all meanings of the word, including that this is one of art history’s supreme attempts to represent essence, “the floodgates from which spurt, all one bound, love and liberty.” (Breton) Speculation on why Miró went to Fascist-controlled Mallorca in 1940 with ten gouaches for reference that he could have left with his dealer and a stack of paper mirrors the writer: the family man says he went for the family (so say the curators); the cynic (like Paul Hammond, in an exceptional essay introducing his translations), the Romantic, the nature lover, the mystic, the Catalan nationalist, the accusatory Marxist/ anarchist, etc. all recite their respective explanations.  As is often the case, I find Tàpies most persuasive: “Against a universe created and controlled by God, Miró offered us the continuous, changing, and infinite flux of nature. Against immutable laws, he offered us the spontaneous rhythm and ebb-and-flow of the waves of the living world. Against all that was closed and filled with taboos, he offered us clear open spaces. Against the monstrous pride of the powerful, he showed that we are all equal because we are all made of the same flames of stars.  To the dispossessed he showed that the whole richness of the universe was in them. For things to grow and get better he told us that love ought to impregnate all. What we had been sold as sin, perversions, and weakness of the flesh, he told us was often something beautiful, as great and powerful as the forces that rule the pull of constellations. He told us that we had to return to the search for purity and innocence of the first day; that we had to find again the unpolluted source if we were not to lose ourselves within a pretentious, spurious, and mendacious society; that life was struggle and above all renewal; that, under the axis of the Mediterranean sun, self-assured good sense had to be balanced with a healthy and irrational pagan exaltation...

“Joan Brossa.. said back then.. ‘Let’s step out of the corners! If this curtain falls again, nothing in art will receive any light and everything will darken at the high level of art, amid boulders.. NOW we sense Miró’s triumph. He has fully awoken to the highest reality..’”

Sunrise

Hammond notes the books he had in Mallorca were ‘Saint John of the Cross, Rimbaud, Hölderlin, Saint-Pol-Roux,’ and that he wrote in his notebooks he wanted ‘Apuleius, Shelley, Carroll, Engels, Jarry, Peret,’ and that “it appears that Miró arrived late at Constellations as his generic title for the series. It is something of a misnomer; or rather, another overarching image might have been used, something invoking water or effervescence perhaps.” This suggests Rimbaud‘s “Elle est retrouvée. Quoi ? - L'Eternité. C'est la mer allée/ Avec le soleil// Ame sentinelle,/ Murmurons l'aveu/ De la nuit si nulle/ Et du jour en feu.//Des humains suffrages,/ Des communs élans/ Là tu te dégages/  Et voles selon.” may have influenced the spirit of the content.  Hammond says there is no indication that Miró sketched the works first.

This would have been a much better show if André Breton’s poems were included, to replicate the historic presentation of both at Galerie Berggruen, Paris in 1959.  I tried to pretend that there was something to be said for the works to stand alone, but the second time I saw the show I was torturing myself trying to remember lines from the poems. Guston managed to get Clark Coolidge’s poems into the Morgan by putting them in the drawings (pdf), but in this case Breton’s poems were written 17 years after the paintings were finished.  I will limit myself to two of Hammond's translations:

Morning Star

It says to the shepherd: "Come closer. It is I who used to draw you as a child to those deep caves where the receding sea docks the eggs of storms that the wreck, with its myriad lowered eyelids, polishes. In the unique oblique light, as the hand is laid on the superb fossils lying by the road that seeks itself in the dynamited mountain, you burned to see spurt up the rib of a coffer of ancient handiwork that might contain (it's no problem to force it) all that is blinding in the world and that streams forth. I give it to you because it's you just as each day is so that your furrows warble and that, more flattered than all the rest, your companion might smile when finding you once more."

The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers

The benches of the outer boulevards cave in with time under the embrace of lianas softly lit up with lovely eyes and lips. While to us they appear free and easy those ardent flowers continue to flutter around and melt into each other. They traduce in concrete terms the adage of the mythographers that gravitational attraction is a characteristic of space and carnal attraction the daughter of this characteristic but which altogether omits to mention that it is up to the daughter to dress the mother for the ball. One breath is all it takes to liberate those myriad egrets bearing achenes. Between their flying up and coming back down along the endless curve of desire all the signs encompassed by the celestial score are written down.

Yesterday was Carla Bley's birthday

at 3:57

What's up for six more days..

Two excellent, politically charged shows ending this week in Chelsea, and one recently opened: Sue Williams at no. 555 w21st is the one of the three reacting to Trump’s inauguration but though she titled a 2016 canvas (not in the show) “Trump Not Funny,” the works here don’t directly reference him or cast him as a regrettable aberration from a peaceful norm but rather chronicle her emotional relation to the norm, with a large canvas bearing the inscription “All Roads Lead to Langley” (below, words at bottom)

and a five part series i. Revere, ii. 2 Horses, iii. Curtain, iv. Ronald Reagan & William Casey, v. ...Sat There Weeping, Weeping...

iv. Ronald Reagan & William Casey

Down 21st Albert Oehlen is using the large Gagosian space for an ATM with large, identical canvases (like Schnabel's recent show at Pace) but get up to 568 West 25th as also ending are four large paintings and other works by Shiva Ahmadi, who grew up in Iran around ‘kitsch’ Persian miniatures she hated but turned to the medium in American art school after the Iraq War invasion. Her works depict Middle Eastern hero worship but convey the playfulness of human life stained with blood.. monkeys symbolizing figures that beckon the political or religious leader with balloons that become bombs.  Also here is one of her first forays into animating the monkeys and balloons.

Shiva Ahmadi, The Mesh, 2016

Up til May 13 at 515 w27th is a series of three Max Ernst sculptures from 1967 he titled Big Brother: Teaching Staff for a School of Murderers which contains Big Brother, Séraphine Cherubin and Séraphin le Néophyte, like Ahmadi conveying a distressing social order.  Down at 300 Broome in a group show there's examples of different phases of Roy De Forest's "Nut Art" through this week..

Roy De Forest, Untitled, 1978

Two worthwhile shows in the Upper East Side are ending this week: (1) a collage group show at 64 e77th including two enjoyable Picassos from 1916-18, a copy of Ernst’s La femme 100 têtes, and a cleverly made Cindy Sherman film; (2) a recreation of Agnès Varda’s exhibition of photos before she made La Pointe Courte, as well as several videos of hers and assorted Vardanalia at 19 e66th, Near the Varda is early Mimmo Rotella at 130 e64th. I haven't seen Lygia Pape at Met Breuer yet but that's there.

The show of twelve Tàpies paintings at 980 Madison 3rd floor til April 22 is quite a good selection from mostly after Franco died and his works became more contemplative - I like all his periods but he entered a visionary phase from the late 1980s on.  Though I haven’t blogged about him much, Tàpies is my favorite post-WW2 painter.  Perhaps I will type more about these, but you get that I think you should see this.

Antoni Tàpies, Jo Parlo amb la Mà (I Speak to the Hand), 1999

Also Werner’s presentation of early Jorg Immendorff is a once in a lifetime insight into the development of one of the most influential post-war artists.  Here again I may type more, but this show demonstrates that in addition to his later works' influence on Neo Rauch, he gave his teacher Beuys the idea for chalkboard works.  Though the Beuys-formed German Student Party at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf had already taken up changing admissions policies, Immendorf’s neo-Dada 'LIDL' action in December of 1968 in which he created a cardboard classroom encouraged Beuys while getting them in further hot water with the administration, after which Beuys allowed all rejected students into his class which led to his dismissal two years later, 4 e77th til May 13.

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New York as Seen from Across the Body, 1913

As the Picabia show, which readers in these parts had herein been implored to see, is being taken down I’ll type some more with its glow still fresh. Amongst other things, it afforded the spectacle of Picabia quotations offered to the masses going up the Metro escalator at 53rd and 5th, a set of three or four including “I am a beautiful monster," “civilization created crime" and “live for your pleasure" rotated as Madison Avenue-style brainwashing sparing commuters a larger set that could include “Happiness is to command no one and not be commanded.”  “The world is steeped in sticky good taste and ignorance.” “There is no truth true to life” “Misery is illustrious like a triumphant god with circular gestures”  “Newspapers are daily leeches which you place in a crown around your head.” “‘Why do you write?’ Francis Picabia: I don’t know and I hope I never know.” “If you read Andre Gide aloud for ten minutes, your breath will stink.” “Art is a pharmaceutical product for imbeciles.” “War makes me want to laugh.” “I surpass amateurs, I am the super-amateur; professionals are shit-pumps.” “‘All the plants belong to me, that’s why I don’t like the country!’” “Don’t be fooled: artists are dry cleaners.”  “Life is today and today doesn’t exist.”  “Artists are the result of nature’s miserliness.”  “There is only one way to save yourself: sacrifice your reputation.” “Genius lies in ignoring others.” “Art is the worship of error.” “To fear the senses is to become a philosopher.” “Where art appears, life disappears.” “It’s better to suffer than be surrounded by scarecrows.” To Duchamp, Picabia was “a negator. With him it was always, ‘Yes, but..’ and ‘no, but..’ Whatever you said, he contradicted. It was his game. Perhaps he wasn’t aware of it.”

As with MoMA‘s wonderful presentation of Lygia Clark, the perplexed reviews tell you the artist has steered their vessel off the flat earth. I hadn’t read Financial Times’ Ariella Budick on Broodthaers, but as Clark, Broodthaers, and Picabia each added to art something it hadn’t seen before which has to this day been only partially excavated and tagged by others, her reviews have scored the trifecta of cluelessness towards anything that cannot be reduced to well-trodden art theory mantras.  “These products of Picabia’s nadir have re-emerged, not to be redeemed, but to suggest that their maker was something darker than a mere prankster or provocateur. At MoMA, he comes across as a spectacularly talented but insubstantial nihilist, an anti-artist propelled by the vacuum in his soul.”  As Picabia, the poet Max Jacob referred to as Tzara-thustra, and Bataille were the leading devotees of Nietzsche among Parisian modernists, she is parroting the lazy and inaccurate shorthand of “Nietzsche the nihilist” while anyone who actually reads Nietzsche ('Pour que vous aimiez quelque chose il faut que vous l’ayez vu et entendu depuis longtemps tas d’idiots') knows his entire oeuvre was involved in overcoming nihilism, saying art was a primary tool to do so, which drove Picabia to find belief in his own creations and discoveries rather than dogmatics, discoveries essential to both modernism and post-modernism with an impact only a handful in art can claim.

Burdick on his mid-40s works: “The mixture of turpitude and Aryan-friendly realism is troubling. It’s not clear whether he was cozying up to Vichy fascists or lampooning them, flattering through imitation or protesting with satire.”  Quoting Petras again contextualizes the source “The editors and columnists (of FT) have supported wars destroying the Libyan, Iraq, Syrian and Ukrainian economies..” in the case of the Ukraine, directly supporting neo-Nazis; in the case of Syria, supporting those who funded ISIS at a critical juncture.  Picabia: “I have no intention of talking politics, that’s something I absolutely loathe..”  Nietzsche's "Strict war discipline.. superiority of the leaders, unity and obedience among the led.. have nothing to do with culture” becomes Picabia's “A clan of nonentities .. cut off the heads of those who represent force and intelligence, who represent an aspiration of something better..” the "obedience among the led" illustrated in 1942‘s Adoration of the Calf (left). “Dear revolutionaries your ideas are as limited as a petit bourgeois from Besançon..”

Nietzsche respected Buddhism but eventually found it lacking the individual affirmation that could overcome nihilism.  Breton to Picabia in 1952: “Tell me, was not Dada perhaps, at its best, a flake of Zen wafted as far as ourselves?” Picabia’s “Andre Breton and I have never been on bad terms, the rumors going around are stupid made-up stories dictated by idiots” was by all accounts the case, but the way they agreed to disagree on aesthetic matters, in my view, reflected the latent rift between Picabia the Nietzschean and Breton the Hegelian, the source of which predates Nietzsche, commencing when his “educator” Schopenhauer loathed the popular Hegel ("the clumsy charlatan") so much he scheduled his Berlin lectures at the same time.  Hegel believed in the inevitability of the state though his has been, as Walter Kaufmann noted, exaggerated; Picabia joins Nietzsche in aversion to the herd.  Rousseau, admired by Breton, was dialectically superseded for Nietzsche by Goethe’s Faust.  The Freudian-influenced Breton wrote appreciatively in the Anthologie de l'humour noir “Nietzsche’s whole enterprise in fact tends to justify the superego by increasing and expanding the ego.. to restore to man all the power he had invested in the name of God. It might be that the ego dissolves at that temperature..”

In that 1952 letter Breton wrote Francis "I would like you to read (Daisetz T. Suzuki's Zen Doctrine of No-Mind), because if anyone has set himself the task proposed in this book, of transcending discrimination in all forms, it is certainly you." In Zen "no-mind" the innate non-discrimination of perceived entities stands apart from conditioned notions of dualism, closely resembling Breton’s “supreme point” noted in the Second Manifesto, which I’ve seen as an epigraph for a book about the Dalai Lama: “Everything leads us to a point in the spirit in which life and death, real and imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable are no longer perceived as contradictions. It would be in vain to look for any other motivation in surrealist activity than the hope of determining this point.” My immediate impressions upon reading the Suzuki doctrine was that it bore an uncanny resemblance not just to this point but also to Breton’s “communicating vessels,” first formulated in his 1928 essay Surrealism and Painting which mentions Picabia amongst many others (over twenty years before the Suzuki translation became available in French), but since he wrote Communicating Vessels thereafter during what Michel Carrouges called in 1950 “the period when Marxism exercised its strongest hold on Breton” he could not reconcile the Eastern asceticism with Hegelian dialectical materialism, relating it rather to Picabia’s version of Dada unencumbered by materialism.  Deleuze: “The dialectic is the natural ideology of ressentiment and bad conscience. It is thought in the perspective of nihilism and from the standpoint of reactive forces.. powerless to create new ways of thinking and feeling"

Communicating Vessels was published in 1932, wherein Carrouges notes that in an elaboration of the supreme point “life for the sake of life and of Revolution” replaces past/ future and life/ death, saying elsewhere “..the supreme point can remain for the surrealists the place, at once real and ideal, where all antimonies are resolved, the meeting place of all the divine energies that Nietzsche dreamed of recuperating.” In 1937, after his formal break with Moscow, Breton wrote about the supreme point “these antimonies, cruelly felt, must be gotten rid of.. this suffering..” which sounds Buddhist.  In 1955 Ferdinand Alquié, picking over Carrouges’ interpretations, went to to great pains to downplay Breton’s concern for dialectical materialism, quoting Wolfgang Paalen in 1953 “(Hegel’s) philosophy permits the justification of all the totalitarian regimes,” but concedes “Breton could not but admire in Hegel the will to negate all transcendence or, which amounts to the same thing, to project all transcendence onto a horizontal plane” which itself sounds like Zen.

Breton’s selection for Nietzsche in the Anthologie de l'humour noir was a flight of non-discrimination, Friedrich’s letter to Jacob Burckhardt in 1889:

‘I have reserved myself a small student’s room.. I pay twenty-five francs, including service, buy my tea, and do all my shopping myself, suffer from torn shoes, and thank heaven every moment for the old world for which men have not been simple and quiet enough..

‘What is disagreeable and offends my modesty is that at bottom I am every name in history..

‘Tomorrow my son Umberto will come with the lovely Margharita, whom, however, I shall also receive here only in shirt-sleeves. The rest for Frau Cosima - Ariadne - from time to time there is magic.’

The communicating vessels, as described by Breton and illustrated by Rivera..

resembles the visual schema in Doctrine of No-Mind, while Picabia’s Transparencies intuit the doctrine, applying it to modes of sacred and profane representation in the West, providing both form and content to Polke's drama of the consciousness.

Untitled (Espagnole et agneau de l’apocalypse)

Some have speculated Picabia was hinting Breton was the central figure of Dresseur d'animaux (below) and Picabia the owl, but Breton’s letter of 1952 hinted that the Zen master ‘Shih-kung Hui-tsang of Foochow’ profiled by Suzuki could have unwittingly been the main figure in Dresseur d'animaux, as Picabia intentionally interrupted the outlines of him and the animals to portray him as the lord of illusion before Magritte adopted that theme.

Becoming, important to Nietzsche, appears in Breton’s 1946 “In Haiti at night..” “Bearing witness as no other and always quivering as if weighed in the balance of leaves, like egrets taking wing from the face of the pond where today’s myths are born, the art of Wifredo Lam streams out from the point where life’s springwaters reflect the mystery tree, by which I mean the preserving soul of the race, so as to shower with stars the becoming that must be for the betterment of humanity.”  The half-Cuban Picabia’s postwar works in his final period seem to be more distantly indebted to the liberties Lam took with Afro-Cuban iconography.

Where Picabia primarily departed from Duchamp, beginning with the machine period, was his will to discover in what Marcel pejoratively called the retinal something unknown and to believe in nothing else.  “‘Mr. S.S., of high Persian nobility’ praised Francis 'the truly beautiful thing is to paint an invention well. This gentleman - Cezanne, as you call him - has the mind of a greengrocer’” recounted Breton in 1922, the same year he wrote to Francis “the more I think about it, the more I feel I have always loved you.” At one visit I saw two elderly women riding down the escalator, one pointing to the large photo of Picabia “now that was good!” What glows is a spirit that could not be consumed in him or anyone that cares about him, a treasure map that the earliest modernists held from their first steps with more surprises to come. “I prefer not to spoil the surprise.”