Suffering perhaps from tunnel vision, the Western intellectual establishment has been slow to recognize signs of emerging cultural identity in the Caribbean. Concentration on politics, and in Britain the difficulties of mutual adjustment to ethnic minorities, have minimized appreciation of the lifestyle, the cultural heritage, and the burgeoning literary and art movements associated with the former British colonies in the Caribbean. These attitudes have had to undergo modification, however, as a result of a major program of events in London and throughout Britain organized by the Commonwealth Institute in London, which included two major art exhibitions: Caribbean Art Now in the summer, and Jamaican Intuitives in the autumn.
The Commonwealth Institute has a very wide scope of responsibilities, as there are forty-nine different peoples in countries within the Commonwealth of Nations, and the Institute exists to foster mutual knowledge and understanding, particularly of each others' culture, aspirations, and achievements. It has a splendid new building with a useful library and information room, well-organized display galleries, and a separate exhibition room designed specifically for the display of paintings. The 1986 program, entitled Caribbean Focus, concentrated on works from the former British colonies of that area, and though it finished in November, it is greatly to be hoped that the impetus will not be lost and an ongoing interest will be maintained.
Though the former British colonies have not achieved political integration and display a multiplicity of coalescing traditions, it seems there is now a cultural surge, a search for an authentic voice, a crisis of identity. This is a period of creative tension between old and new, local and cosmopolitan, African, European, and American. The slave population of the islands did not arrive divested of cultural baggage and should not be assumed to have acquired none since.
Freedom and independence do not demand repudiation of history. That leads only to intellectual impoverishment. Instead, they allow the reassertion--the dynamic reassertion--of traditional values and experience. Bruising centuries of oppression, slavery, struggle, life itself, may have provided a reserve of energy and power for artistic creation. Of the music, vernacular poetry, and painting from this part of the world, too much has been dismissed as superficial, popular, and ephemeral. As Rex Nettleford of the University of the West Indies wrote in a very illuminating introduction to a 1979 exhibition of Intuitive painting at the National Gallery of Jamaica in Kingston, "we are challenged to a deep, if not painful, reassessment of received aesthetic perceptions," and this is because the Intuitive painting is intuitive, and because it is Caribbean.
The first 1986 exhibition in London, Caribbean Art Now, included work by seven mainstream Jamaican artists. The second, Jamaican Intuitives, presented paintings and sculptures by eighteen other Jamaican artists who certainly cannot be called mainstream, not even sidestream, because their work springs from no one single source.
The word Intuitive was carefully chosen by Dr. David Boxer, director of the National Gallery of Jamaica, who has done much pioneering work to promote knowledge of Jamaican art. He writes, "These artists paint, or sculpt, intuitively...not guided by fashion...their vision is pure and sincere, untarnished by art theories and
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