Latin Americans in Paris

For my third and last post on the lithographs published by Situationist Times in 1967, I’d like to look at the surprising number of artists from Latin America who were involved. At a guess, this reflects the influence of the Haitian artist Hervé Télémaque (see previous post), who was a very active mover and shaker on the Paris avant-garde scene, though the list of artists also includes two giants from an earlier generation, the Surrealists Wifredo Lam and Roberto Matta.
José Gamarra (Uraguayan, 1934- )Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Mariano Hernandez (Spanish/Argentinian, 1928- )Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Wifredo Lam (Cuban, 1902-1982)Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Wifredo LamSurrealist compositionLithograph, 1979
Lea Lublin (Argentinian, 1929-1999)Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Alejandro Marcos (Spanish/Argentinian, 1937- )Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Cristina Martinez (Argentinian, 1938- )Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Roberto Matta (Chilean, 1911-2002)Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Roberto MattaMusiciansLithograph, 1979
Antonio Seguí (Argentinian, 1934- )Untitled compositionLithograph, 1967
Jack Vanarsky (Argentinian, 1936- )Untitled compositionLithograph, 1936
There is vivid colour, here, to be sure, and echoes of South American folk art. But there's also a note of protest (also present in Hervé Télémaque's work, with its strong sense of "négritude"). It's interesting to note how strongly and immediately Latin American artists were drawn to Surrealism. Cuban Wifredo Lam's grandmother was a voodoo priestess, and he fitted naturally into a surrealist state-of-mind, but there were at least two other significant Cuban Surrealists, Joachin Ferrer and Agustín Fernandez. Roll on a few years, and the immediacy and vibrancy of Pop Art was the obvious home for the Latin American artists of the next generation.