Wifredo Lam and the international avant-garde, 1947-1982.
Item
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Title
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Wifredo Lam and the international avant-garde, 1947-1982.
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Identifier
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AAI9530920
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identifier
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9530920
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Creator
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Sims, Lowery Stokes.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Robert Pincus-Witten
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Date
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1995
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Art History | Biography
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Abstract
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With the emergence of multiculturalism and the interest in cross-national cultural identities in the 1980s and 90s, the career of Wifredo Lam--a Cuban artist of African, European and Chinese descent--has received wider attention in contemporary criticism. Lam's work is usually seen in the context of the School of Paris of the late 1930s, i.e. Cubism and Surrealism. His engagement of his Afro-Cuban heritage in his work between 1941 and 1946 has been recognized as a watershed moment in the evolution of the concept of primitivism, and to date has been the focal point of most Lam scholarship.;This dissertation will examine the artist's later career (1947-82). The first chapter will summarize Lam's early career in Spain, his first contact with the School of Paris, and the developments in his art in the context of the modernist movement in Cuba in the 1940s. Chapter Two will focus on Lam's relationship to the School of Paris after World War II. It will chronicle his contact with the younger generation of artists, i.e. the CoBrA group, the "Arte Nucleare" group in Italy, the Swedish Imaginists, and how these relationships enabled him to find a new context for his work. Lam's career in Cuba and Latin America will be the focus of the third chapter, and will elucidate the particular nature of his relationship with the post-revolutionary government in Cuba. The lesser known relationship of Lam to the New York School in the 1940s, his parallel exploration of mythic subject matter will be the subject of Chapter Four, which will include a consideration of the situation of Surrealism in the United States after 1950. In Chapter Five an analysis of Lam's work from 1946-1982 will be undertaken, summarizing the issues usually brought to bear on his work, analyzing the stylistic changes in his work, themes and motifs, and his new interest in graphic, ceramic work and sculpture. The sixth chapter will evaluate Lam's position in 20th Century Art, analyzing new critical paradigms such as multiculturalism, decolonization, and identity, that provide new contexts for his career.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
