The Caribbean artist Aubrey Williams defies simple British or Caribbean classification

Evidence

Their modernity needs, above all, to be emphasized. In 1998, the Institute of International Visual Arts and the Whitechapel Gallery organized the first major retrospective of the work of a major Caribbean visual artist, Aubrey Williams (1926–1990). Williams was born and worked for many years as an agricultural officer in Guyana. He subsequently lived and painted, at different stages of his career, in England, Guyana, Jamaica, and the US. His paintings embrace a variety of twentieth-century styles, from the figurative and the iconographic to abstraction. His major work demonstrates a wide variety of formal influences and inspirational sources—Guyanese myths, artifacts, and landscapes; pre-Columbian and Mayan motifs; wildlife, birds, and animal figures; Mexican materialism; the symphonies of Shostakovich; and the abstract-expressionist forms characteristic of postwar British and European modernism. His paintings defy characterization, as simply either Caribbean or British. These vibrant, explosively colorful canvases, with their cosmic shapes and the indistinct traces of forms and figures faintly but suggestively embedded in the abstract surfaces, clearly belong to, but have never been officially recognized as part of, the essential story of “British modernism.” No doubt his flirtation with European music and abstraction, in some minds, qualified his credentials as a “Caribbean” painter. Yet, it is the two impulses working together, his translation position between two worlds, several aesthetics, many languages, that establish him as an outstanding, original, and formidably modern artist. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 849

Categorization

• DEFINE: Refraction point: Williams’ work demonstrates concretely how the translation position between worlds defines the modern diaspora artist — not a single national tradition.