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:: GLOBAL CROSSING ::

Unfolding this month at the Lowe Art Museum is a tale of two painters enthralled by African art.

For one, Adolph Gottlieb, such a fascination impelled him to create his own language of stripped-down forms. Then he boxed these sleek little circles and spirals into that stylish grid beloved by Modernists everywhere, as well as by graphic designers in thrall to Martha Stewart.

For the other, Edouard Duval-Carrie, the arts of Africa are part of a messy Caribbean mélange that becomes ever more complicated and dangerous. The Beginning of Seeing: Adolph Gottlieb and Tribal Art at the Lowe, incorporates paintings from the '40s and early '50s and catches the artist on his way up, before he has reached the signature forms of his career.

Gottlieb (1903-1974) was a seminal American Abstract Expressionist who began collecting tribal art objects in the '30s. The so-called "burst" paintings of his final years, produced mainly in the '60s, condense the disembodied eyes he appropriated from African masks and other non-Western art into a single, fiery explosion of color with the apocalyptic overtones of a nuclear holocaust.

Edouard Duval-Carrie: Endless Passage, also at the Lowe, is a midcareer retrospective of sculpture and painting by Duval-Carrie, a Miami-based artist born in Haiti. Deeply entwined throughout his art are the myths and arresting Creole aesthetic of Haitian Vodou.
This New World religion has been stained by the bloodied history of the Middle Passage slave trade, but it has also been fed by a stream or astonishingly varied cultural icons, from the luridly lifelike painted statues of saints at Roman Catholic altars to Masonic insignia to West African temple paintings.

MIGRATION

Unlike Gottlieb, however, Duval-Carrie has a first-hand link to the transformations African art has undergone in its passage to the New World. He is especially taken with the ritual story-telling power these objects possess.

For him, the most pressing master narrative is migration, an apparently endless passing from one place to another, a journey that can chart departure points and destinations in Africa, Haiti and the United States. In his solo show at the Miami Art Museum three years ago, he presented a tour- de-force installation, called Migrations, that was part Vodou temple and part Catholic chapel.

Though it reveled in the gorgeous sparkling surfaces of sequined Haitian Vodou Hags, this work — with its painting of one Vodou spirit morphed into an exotic SoBe dancer — was also fraught with tragedy. It showed that even spirits were leaving an island mired in fatal desperation, fleeing the legacy of leaders he has described as running the gamut from "operetta emperor to demented shaman."

Mardi Gras au Fort Dimanche is an especially caustic stab at the Duvalier dictatorship. Duval-Carrie's gripping four-part series of paintings now at the Lowe, and on loan from the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, also describes that passage of migration with an accuracy both fanciful and frightening.

In the brilliant sun drenched colors and relatively flat perspective of tourist-friendly Caribbean landscape paintings, this series, Miloucan on La Migration des Esprits, is arranged to occupy one vast wall in the museum. They aspire to the grandeur of Old Master paintings in a cathedral, and their scenes of capture, escape and paradise despoiled resonate with Biblical urgency.

During the '50s, Duval-Carrie grew up in an upper-class family typically disdainful of Vodou, but one that also looked the other way when maids appropriated leftover bottles of Anais Anais perfume for pink cake-and-candle stocked altars to the Vodou deity Erzulie.

"Everybody's aware of it," says Duval-Carrie in an interview in his Design District studio. "Even the priests that come from Europe. That's the first thing they find out, that there's this whole world of the spirits."

As the brutalities of the Duvalier regime increased, Duval-Carrie's family fled to Puerto Rico, where he spent his teenage years, though his father kept the family business going in Port-au-Prince, and as an artist Duval-Carrie has returned to the island frequently.

His sumptuously layered and colored paintings are a grand mix of history, religion and decorative arts. They offer a startling blend of transplanted West African religious lore and 18th-century French rococo, all marbled with tropical colors and grafted onto modern-day stories of corruption and displacement among vistas shaded by the Haitian royal palm.

AFRICAN TIES

Erzulie, a coquettish figure the artist has painted and sculpted frequently, may be a not-so-distant cousin to a Fon deity from modern-day Nigeria, a figure that's a quixotic combination of motherhood and sorcery. Scholars have looked at other threads connecting Haitian Vodou figures like Danbala — a serpentine spirit lushly redolent of water, wisdom and rainbows — with West African deities and they've discovered many family ties.

It's also possible that lwa, the Creole word for Vodou spirits, carries linguistic links to the Fon world of "lo" for "mystery," and to the West African Yoruba word "lawo,” meaning "secret."

Erzulie is "a totally Haitian spirit," says Duval-Came, "but you can see how French she is. She's the goddess or love, the mulatto woman born out of the illicit relationship between the master and slave."

However you parse the West African bloodlines of Haitian Vodou and their passage into Duval-Carrie's painting and sculpture, it's Vodou's syncretic layering of colors and design and sacred and secular sources that are making the most emphatic stamp on Duval-Carrie's art.

QUIET BEAUTY

The Beginning of Seeing:Tribal Art and the Pictographs of Adolph Gottlieb is a smaller, quieter show, in which narrative is gently suppressed in the favor of cool formal patterns, that the artist often likened to inscriptions or missives that would speak to the spirit rather than the mind.

Many of the streamlined shapes he adapts from tribal art are encased in a slightly uneven grid, to create what he called "pictographs." He found precedents for this grid from such divergent examples as paintings by Piet Mondrian and the cellular-like ribbon of forms woven in blankets by tribes of the Pacific Northwest Coast.

Giving this show its added eloquence are examples from the Lowe's permanent collection, especially Gottlieb's New York Night Scene, a wonderfully concise painting that splices pillars of skyscraper strips of color with the earthy, slightly ragged geometries of tribal art.

Posted on Sun, Jul. 20, 2003
Elisa Turner is The Herald's art critic.
elisaturn@aol.com

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