Lam in the Wren

Professor Jean Khalfa (e1994) on the extraordinary livre d’artiste collaborations of Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam in the Wren Library’s Kessler Collection.

see an area of the publishing and writing world in action.

Q What did you gain from the experience and what did Liv teach you?

A huge amount. It was incredibly valuable to see someone so keen and vibrant at the point where they are thinking about future careers. She was a wonderful person to mentor as she was completely open-minded at the same time as being very focused on maintaining her creativity. It was fantastic to see that she had embraced the idea that there are many avenues open to her and she won’t need to sacrifice her passions and inventiveness when she enters the world of work.

Q What would you say to fellow alumni wondering if they could be a mentor?

Go for it! There are so many ways you can help, even if it’s just giving someone the opportunity to explore different ideas. I found it very inspiring to see someone at the beginning of their career and the positivity and enthusiasm they exude.

You can also search the members’ directory to get in touch with other alumni and ask for advice, offer others your help and expertise, and join our interest and regional groups – visit trincam.aluminate.net

Want to know more?

To discover more about mentoring and how you could be involved, contact us at alumni@trin.cam.ac.uk

Trinity College’s Wren Library holds a unique collection of modern illustrated books and livres d’artistes. At its heart is the Kessler Collection,1 and among the last books the late Nicholas Kessler acquired for the Wren is an astonishing volume entitled Apostroph’Apocalypse. It consists of a suite of 20 bifolios (550 x 450 mm) with 14 etchings by the Cuban painter of Chinese, African and Spanish origins Wifredo Lam (1902–82), 2 and texts in French by the Romanian poet, artist and performer Ghérasim Luca (1913–94), whose Dadaist word-play is emphasised here by the complex typography and the irregular folding of some of the pages, which sometimes covers certain words in order to reveal others.

The first poem (or ontophonie, as Luca called his texts intended for performance) directly refers to a nuclear destruction of the world. The visual trajectory of an apostrophe through the words in the printed text initiates an ‘apocalypse’ in both senses, of a decomposition of language and of an unveiling or revelation of a multiplicity of unseen meanings. The subsequent texts, ‘Comment s’en sortir sans sortir’, ‘Paralipomènes’, and ‘Ellipse d’ellipse’, explore in turn different processes of word

1. For a description of the collection see my article in Parenthesis Spring 2018 / Number 34: https://fpba.com/parenthesis/issue/ parenthesis-34/

2. https://www.wifredolam.net/en/biography.html decompositions. The reader will also feel apostrophé (arrested, interpellated) by Lam’s etchings, which seem to perform, like the text, a series of explosions, decompositions and surrealist assemblage of jagged forms, combining human bodies, or sexual body parts, with African looking masks and animal shapes (birds and horse-heads) equipped with a variety of sharp protuberances, beaks, horns, spikes and elongated feet or hands. All of this happens under the absent gaze of small semi-ovoid horned figures, representing Legba, an orisha or god from santería, a polytheistic religion of African origin which developed in Cuba. This mysterious world is in movement, either in flight or in seemingly urgent spinning, a dynamic which is suggested in the graphic work by directional traces on the background or intensifying ink densities in the figures, in the direction of flight. Sometimes the figures seem paused in ill-balanced poses, as if in moments of puzzlement, though eyes are inscrutable. Legba is a guardian of crossroads and the god of passages, between the natural and the supernatural, the human and the animal, and between the genders.

Reviewing the Wifredo Lam retrospective exhibition which took place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2015 and went to Tate Modern the following year, Le Monde’s art critic Philippe Dagen called this publication ‘one of the most beautiful books of the century, if one can call this immense album traversed by sharp sentences and piercing lines a book’.

This book was typeset by Luigi Maestri in a selection of upper-case founts, and the etchings were printed by Giancarlo Pozzi, both working in Giorgio Upiglio’s Grafica Uno workshop in Milan, one of the greatest of the period, where Duchamp and De Chirico had had their works printed. Design and printing took three years, and the book was eventually published in March 1967 in a print run of 135 copies, including a tirage de tête of 25 copies that included the suite on japon nacré It is perhaps the greatest of Lam’s books and certainly one of the highlights in exhibitions of the Kessler collection. But Lam contributed to many other artists’ books, in a great variety of formats, of which most are also in the Wren, making it, with the Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe originale, in Gravelines, the greatest collection of books with illustrations engraved by Lam.

Lam came to printmaking comparatively late. By that time, he was already a well-established artist, whose famous La Jungle of 1943 had been acquired by New York’s MOMA in 1945, and was displayed next to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. As a painter he was astonishingly prolific, with works held and displayed in public and private collections worldwide, and he was represented by the major international galleries.

Another great work is his collaboration with René Char, whom he had met in 1947 during the first post-war exhibition of his work in Paris, and who is generally considered the most significant poet of the period in France. The Wren holds not just a beautiful copy of Contre une maison sèche as part of the Kessler collection, but also the only copy in public collections of a posthumous volume derived from illustrations made for it. When Lam and Char started to work on their book, Lam first planned his etchings to be printed in a portrait format, but it was later decided to publish the book in a large landscape format, proportions better suited to the structure of Char’s aphoristic poetry. Lam therefore created a new set of plates for the book but the original plates were kept. When Jacques Dupin (1927–2012), one of the most significant poets and art critics of the generation that followed Char, and who had already published on Lam’s work, saw the prints made from these earlier plates, he decided to write a series of texts which in effect served to illustrate these images. The resulting book was eventually printed in 2011, almost 30 years after Lam’s death, again by Grafica Uno, two years before Upiglio’s death. The limited edition of only 35 copies plus five hors commerce remained unpublished following Dupin’s death in 2012. In 2019, the estates of Jacques Dupin and Wifredo Lam jointly presented the Wren Library with the first copy to be released of this hitherto unknown artist’s book by Dupin and Lam, La Nuit se découvre (‘Night unveils’). Dupin’s poems are astonishing reflections on the materiality of the printing process in the hands of Lam: ‘le trait qui se grave m’entame’ (‘etching itself, the line cuts into me’).

René Char, Contre une maison sèche Jean Hugues, Paris, 1976. 11 bifolios in a marbled sand coloured Richard de Bas paper cover in an off-white raw silk covered folder with an off-white raw silk covered slipcase. 9 etchings by Lam. CR 322. Trinity College Library, Kessler.bb.24.

Another rarely seen volume worth mentioning is the last one Lam produced during his lifetime, a collaboration with the poet, art critic and writer Jean-Dominique Rey (1926–2016). This publication was Rey’s first collection of short stories, a genre in which he was to become well known. It was published only weeks before Lam’s death. The title of the collection, L’Herbe sous les pavés, refers to a saying from the revolutionary events of May ’68, ‘there is grass growing under the cobbles’, but it refers also to the structure of the stories where a surreal reality is revealed under the appearances. Since becoming confined to a wheelchair, following a stroke, Lam drew a lot in notebooks, and the drawings were often covered in hatched patterns, out of which figures emerged beautifully, as in some his very early work. For this book Lam drew on small copper plates in his apartment in Paris. The plates were heated in his kitchen oven by Upiglio and then etched at the studio of George Goetz. The text was printed in Paris and the plates in Milan, by Upiglio. Lam signed the colophon of all the copies in July 1982, and a notice of his death on 11 September was added in a second colophon. Each of the five short stories in the book is accompanied by an etching. The penultimate plate is an astonishing mise en abyme, the self-mirroring of the artist as one of his own creatures, a hybrid of human and animal, male and female, holding on his hand his own deity, the god of passages, and contemplating a neoclassical representation of his own models, a mother and a child, as if to stress, for us, a last time, on which side reality truly is.

This is the paradox that attracted all these writers whose main purpose was to reinvent a language sullied by dominant stupidity: Lam shared with astonishing strength a vision grounded in an experience that was foreign to most of those whom his work touched. In doing so, he managed to reverse our position, from viewers to viewed. The world he invents is the staging of experiences of possession and at the same time a lucid, detached observation by the figures represented, which seem to interrogate us with puzzlement, destabilising the gaze of the spectator who can no longer observe through the frame of the classical canvas a world to be owned.

No systematic scholarly work has been produced on these extraordinary books. I am currently finishing editing a collective volume on them which considers all of their aspects, the evolution of Lam’s aesthetics, the interactions of text and image, their spiritual dimension, the cultural history of the period, and the history of printmaking. It will be published in a fully illustrated, bilingual edition by Éditions du Tout Monde in Paris, a publishing house created by Édouard Glissant, a poet and critique who was close to Lam.

The Kessler collection started with the dream and passion of an alumnus, Nicholas Kessler (1937–2018, matric. 1955). This project is also made possible with alumni support, for which we are deeply grateful.

TRINITY CRYPTIC CROSSWORD NO. 9

ACROSS

1 Following “Starters from all menus inedible”, surely he’ll starve (6)

4 River returns poor killer of Shakespeare (7)

8 Beloved Welshman’s capital needed after 500 (3)

9 Famous English physician sees a King in queue (7)

10 Teaching of perception twice cancelled from the start (7)

11 Cryptically examine an unspecified number of fair crossword-setting rules (8)

12 Region of Kazakhstan also known as home for 7, symbolically (6)

14 Metre or centimetre essentially (4)

16 Intense dislike regarding dog with grandmother nowadays (10)

18 Wished to go out to get fridge/freezer etc (5,5)

21 King left terms of reference for produce (4)

24 Tug swallowed by river flood (6)

25 Irishman briefly to the East of Paris – well, every two years (8)

27 Berry’s up-to-the-minute broadcast (7)

28 Straw hat on South American cape (7)

29 Look to left and right (3)

30 Celebrity Rod’s playing absorbed by endless beat (7)

If you are interested in discovering more about supporting projects such as these, please contact the Alumni Relations and Development Office alumni@trin.cam.ac.uk

Jean-Dominique Rey, L’Herbe sous les pavés 16 bifolios in a sand coloured cover in a blue paper covered card folder with a blue paper covered card slipcase. 6 etchings by Lam. CR 401. Trinity College Library, Kessler.a.68.

31 It’s fashionable to follow coronation that’s been on TV for ages! (6)

DOWN

1 Suffolk town cuts off a Trinity source of income (10,5)

2 Short dress mother has on, showing bottom (7)

3 Back in 7 (6)

4 Small child’s film I’m reviewing (4)

5 Timid bird (7)

6 Valuable tech start-up company engaged in complicated run-in (7)

7 Maybe 3 doctors untainted with man-flu (11,4)

8 Delaware director making Boccaccio’s book of a hundred tales (9)

13 Both naked squads drilled in dance (9)

15 Take in repast regularly (3)

17 Live over age (3)

19 Twelfth Night’s location not rightly cheerful when upset (7)

20 Travelling stoic departs from long-distance supply nation (7)

22 Encota’s cook halving more stale Portuguese bread (7)

Further reading: trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress. com/2018/05/29/wifredo-lam-livres-dartiste-1/ trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress. com/2018/06/04/wifredo-lam-livres-dartiste-2/

23 Evening in conversation evokes Sir Christopher Wren perhaps (6)

26 Couple has sex with them informally (4)

Please email your entry to alumni-comms@trin.cam. ac.uk or send it to us:

The Editor, Alumni Relations & Development Office

Trinity College, Cambridge

CB2 1TQ

Entries are due by

30 September 2023.

Winning Entries

Alumni competition

The first correct entry drawn will win a copy of Trinity Poets, and the winner will be announced in the next issue of The Fountain

For the solution to Cryptic Crossword No.8 visit The Fountain web page listed below’, or email us at alumnicomms@trin.cam.ac.uk

Congratulations to Hugh Everett (1982) who successfully completed Trinity Cryptic Crossword No.8, winning a copy of Trinity Poets.

Student competition

Congratulations to John Crump (2020) and Maraia Pickering (2019), winners of the fifth student crossword competition in memory of avid crossword fan John Grenfell-Shaw (2011). The prize of a generous Trinity catering credit is kindly supported by John’s parents, Jenny and Mark.

Tim King (1980) is the Ipswich-based professional crossword compiler Encota. Tim also sets personalised puzzles as unique and thoughtful gifts. If you’d like to know more, contact him at: specialisedcrosswords@gmail.com and visit his website: www.specialisedcrosswords.co.uk