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Lot Essay
“In Paris I discovered what a man is…what African culture is…what it is to be a Negro,” Cárdenas declared in 1967, twelve years after his arrival on Christmas Day of 1955 (in J. Pierre, La sculpture de Cárdenas, 1971, p. 132). That same year, the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire described his “joyful acceptance of Surrealism” as “a process of disalienation. . . . a plunge into the depths. It was a plunge into Africa for me” (in Black, Brown, & Beige: Surrealist Writings from Africa and the Diaspora, 2009, p. 298). For both men, the elisions of Surrealism and Africa, betwixt and between existential Paris and the Black Caribbean, situated their work within a nascently diasporic mode of creation. For Cárdenas, as for Wifredo Lam a generation before, his encounter with West African culture in Europe marked a watershed moment in his artistic development. Although the presence of African culture was ubiquitous in Cuba, spread through the santería and palo monte religious cults, few visual remnants survived the colonial period. A descendent of slaves from Senegal and the Congo, Cárdenas had first encountered a Dogon totem in a published reference in Cuba, but only in Paris did he discover firsthand the vitality of Africa’s artistic tradition, powerfully awakened through his search for dynamic and universal form.
“I did not earn very much until the surrealists found me, and we organized exhibitions together,” Cárdenas acknowledged years later of his beginnings in Paris. “One day, they showed a photograph of one of my sculptures to André Breton, and at that point things started to get more complex. They decided then that my work was surrealist and that it had to be exhibited right away!” (in M.-P. Colle, Latin American Artists in their Studios, p. 74, 77). This signal acclamation brought Cárdenas within the subdued Surrealist circle that had reassembled following Breton’s return to Paris in 1946. In Cárdenas Breton recognized a kindred mind, and his oft-quoted, free-associative praise—“his fingers have sprouted the great blossoming totem which outlines the curves of a beauty-queen’s waist better than a saxophone”—discerned the animist erotics already apparent in his early sculpture (“Agustín Cárdenas,” in Surrealism and Painting, 2002, p. 323). The reprise of Surrealism within the Black Paris of the 1950s and 1960s, in the legacy and work of Césaire and the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, among others, provides an important context for Cárdenas’s adoption by the Surrealists and the progression of his sculpture. “We accepted Surrealism as a means, but not as an end, as an ally, and not as a master,” Senghor explained of its bearing on Black consciousness. “We were willing to be influenced by Surrealism, but only because Surrealist writing rediscovered Negro African speech” (in L. Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, 1974, p. 86).
Cárdenas arrived at his first “totems” in 1954-55, and he continued to explore totemic subjects throughout his career as his sculpture took on myriad archetypal and anatomical dimensions, both in wood and later in marble. The articulate alternation of fullness and void, elongated in the vital upward impulse of his mature work, suggests important sources in the visual traditions of African as well as Oceanic tribal arts. A citation of Dogon sculpture—as well as contemporary appropriations by modernist sculptors, among them Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti—the totems instantiate divinity and ritual belonging. A monumental axis for the universe, not unlike Brancusi’s Endless Column, the present Columna de fuego gravitates upward in measured movements, revealing itself fully in the round through carved, serpentine shapes and elongated vertical openings. Its ascendant energy, syncopated by organic contours and cavities within the charred length of wood, creates a vital plastic rhythm, suggestively enkindling the space around it. Cárdenas embraced direct carving and “truth to materials” integrity in his sculptures. The rough luminosity of their blackened (burnt) surfaces accentuates the grain of the wood, echoing its vertical form and implicit figural presence, conveyed through an abstracted syntax of tissue and bone.
“Cárdenas’ universe radiates from the sun, evoking centuries and centuries, here and now,” observed the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, remarking upon the early totems. “It is a phenomenon rare in the world of invented forms: a universe which reveals the organic from the outset, light and shade knit together, patience behind the material, the inexhaustible alliance of the torrid and the nocturnal. A universe which illuminates its own past, exalts its eternity” (“The Legendary World of Cárdenas,” Cárdenas, Richard Feigen Gallery, 1961, p. 10).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“I did not earn very much until the surrealists found me, and we organized exhibitions together,” Cárdenas acknowledged years later of his beginnings in Paris. “One day, they showed a photograph of one of my sculptures to André Breton, and at that point things started to get more complex. They decided then that my work was surrealist and that it had to be exhibited right away!” (in M.-P. Colle, Latin American Artists in their Studios, p. 74, 77). This signal acclamation brought Cárdenas within the subdued Surrealist circle that had reassembled following Breton’s return to Paris in 1946. In Cárdenas Breton recognized a kindred mind, and his oft-quoted, free-associative praise—“his fingers have sprouted the great blossoming totem which outlines the curves of a beauty-queen’s waist better than a saxophone”—discerned the animist erotics already apparent in his early sculpture (“Agustín Cárdenas,” in Surrealism and Painting, 2002, p. 323). The reprise of Surrealism within the Black Paris of the 1950s and 1960s, in the legacy and work of Césaire and the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, among others, provides an important context for Cárdenas’s adoption by the Surrealists and the progression of his sculpture. “We accepted Surrealism as a means, but not as an end, as an ally, and not as a master,” Senghor explained of its bearing on Black consciousness. “We were willing to be influenced by Surrealism, but only because Surrealist writing rediscovered Negro African speech” (in L. Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, 1974, p. 86).
Cárdenas arrived at his first “totems” in 1954-55, and he continued to explore totemic subjects throughout his career as his sculpture took on myriad archetypal and anatomical dimensions, both in wood and later in marble. The articulate alternation of fullness and void, elongated in the vital upward impulse of his mature work, suggests important sources in the visual traditions of African as well as Oceanic tribal arts. A citation of Dogon sculpture—as well as contemporary appropriations by modernist sculptors, among them Constantin Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Alberto Giacometti—the totems instantiate divinity and ritual belonging. A monumental axis for the universe, not unlike Brancusi’s Endless Column, the present Columna de fuego gravitates upward in measured movements, revealing itself fully in the round through carved, serpentine shapes and elongated vertical openings. Its ascendant energy, syncopated by organic contours and cavities within the charred length of wood, creates a vital plastic rhythm, suggestively enkindling the space around it. Cárdenas embraced direct carving and “truth to materials” integrity in his sculptures. The rough luminosity of their blackened (burnt) surfaces accentuates the grain of the wood, echoing its vertical form and implicit figural presence, conveyed through an abstracted syntax of tissue and bone.
“Cárdenas’ universe radiates from the sun, evoking centuries and centuries, here and now,” observed the Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, remarking upon the early totems. “It is a phenomenon rare in the world of invented forms: a universe which reveals the organic from the outset, light and shade knit together, patience behind the material, the inexhaustible alliance of the torrid and the nocturnal. A universe which illuminates its own past, exalts its eternity” (“The Legendary World of Cárdenas,” Cárdenas, Richard Feigen Gallery, 1961, p. 10).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park