I vividly remember my first encounter with Gaston Tabois (1924-2012), at least in terms of the impression he made on me rather than for the occasion itself. It must have been in late 1984 or early 1985, when I had just started working in the National Gallery of Jamaica’s Education department, and the occasion was a function, probably an exhibition opening. A grey-haired, dapper-looking gentleman in a sharp dark suit arrived early and shook hands with all the persons he encountered, myself included. He was very formal, and I initially assumed that he was a government official, or perhaps a pastor. It turned out that he was the self-taught artist Gaston Tabois, one of the artists the National Gallery had labelled and consecrated as an Intuitive. His appearance, and formality, defied the preconceptions we often have about artists and, even more so, about self-taught or Intuitive artists. His unique story, in fact, provides us with a good opportunity to reflect on some of those issues.
Gaston Lascelles Tabois was born in Trout Hall, Clarendon, and grew up in Rock River, near Chapelton, where he attended elementary school. His sense of discipline and commitment to lifelong learning was, he later recounted, bestowed on him by his mother, who was actively involved in his early education. Tabois later attended the College of Arts, Science and Technology (now Utech) and also Dillard University, a historically black university in New Orleans. He worked as a civil servant in the Public Works Department, where he acted as Chief Draughtsman before turning to art full-time. His wife was a teacher, and the family was part of the emerging black Jamaican middle class around the time of Independence. His daughter, Alison Tabois is a graduate of the Academy Drama School in London. Alison is perhaps best known for her work as the co-creator, writer, producer and voice director of The Cabbie Chronicles, a series of short animations that was streamed on Flow TV.
Gaston Tabois’ first solo exhibition was in 1955 at the Hills Gallery on Harbour Street, Jamaica’s first major commercial gallery, where he exhibited his paintings and drawings regularly after that. The following year, he was included in an exhibition of Jamaican art at the Barbizon Hotel in New York City, which was organized by the Hills and sponsored by CBS president and MoMA trustee William S. Paley. In 1956, Tabois also exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. Tabois was, along with Kapo, one of the self-taught artists who were being promoted locally and internationally by the Hills Gallery as Jamaica’s answer to the international success of the “Haitian Primitives.” While the Hills also sought to engage and cultivate local audiences and buyers, tourists were an important part of their clientele, and this included the international celebrities who vacationed in Jamaica at that time. Elizabeth Taylor and her then husband Eddie Fisher bought three of Tabois’ early paintings.
Many early works by Tabois thus left the island and may not be recognized by their current owners as a Jamaican artworks of significance. Some twenty-five years ago, a colleague in New York City, who is familiar with his work, bought an early Gaston Tabois painting at a flea market on Washington Square for just a few dollars, and had it professionally restored, as there was a tear in the canvas. The work still had the Hills Gallery label on the back and is stylistically related to his Reaping Sugar (c1955) in the National Gallery of Jamaica’s collection.
Gaston Tabois’ early work comfortably fit the expectations the public had of self-taught artists from the Caribbean, in terms of its formal qualities and subject matter. If Kapo’s work spoke to the spiritual side of self-taught art in Jamaica, related to his role as a leader in Revivalism, Tabois represented its realist side. He mainly painted the world he was familiar with, such as country scenes with road and sugar workers, vernacular buildings, and popular cultural traditions such as Jonkonnu, with a meticulous, almost obsessive attention to detail that betrays his technical draughtsman’s eye.
These characteristics are perfectly illustrated by Road Menders (1956) in the National Gallery of Jamaica collection. The painting depicts a road paving scene, with men and women doing manual work laying down the marl, while another worker is operating a mechanized road roller, marked P.W.D. (Tabois’ place of work). The scene is set in a rural environment, with a variety of farm crops growing in the fields that adjoin the road. Every detail gets equal attention: the wattle-and-daub wall of the building on the upper left; the textures and patterns of the crops, trees and other plants; the clothing and actions of workers; the various construction activities and tools and materials used; the heavy machinery; and, more subtly, even a utility pole and line.
As is commonly seen in self-taught art, there is a strong tension between the two- and three-dimensionality of the composition and this adds a surreal quality to the image. Several strong, intersecting diagonals (mainly the strong light-coloured band of the road itself but also the boundary of cane-field and the trees that tilt in opposing direction) suggest depth but also form an intricate flat design that is reinforced by the patterns and textures of the plants and structures. This spatial ambivalence is perhaps most extreme in the roller, which seems to lift up partially from the road, while we are not sure whether we are looking at the outside or inside of its mechanisms, as it appears that we are seeing both.
With the dry wit that is typical for his work, Tabois also pays attention to the practicalities of a work site: with the sun high above, it will soon be time for lunch and a lady is already busy cooking the food on an open fire on the side of the road, as is indeed common practice at work sites in Jamaica. And of course, there has to be an idler: the distracted, mango-eating figure to the left, although he (or she) may be a passer-by or a child. Overall, the painting presents a scene of Jamaican life which is still familiar today, but it is also a fragile, disappearing world, in which the traditional is already being replaced by modernity, which is represented by the heavy machinery in the centre of the scene; the utility pole and line; and, by implication, the cars and trucks that will soon drive on the newly paved road.
The world depicted in Road Menders, and other such paintings by Tabois, is one which is at the same time momentary and curiously solidified, which adds to the scene’s surreal quality and alludes to submerged meanings beyond its cheerful, documentary impulse. David Boxer masterfully interpreted these tensions in his introduction to the Fifteen Intuitives (1987) exhibition catalogue: “It is this wistful nostalgia, a gentle railing against the passage of time that I feel is behind much of the subconscious, intuitive drives of Tabois’ art… It is an obsession, I feel, a deep-rooted desire to make the impermanent permanent: to banish time, decay and death. Consequently, the most fleeting elements in a painting become frozen into unyielding shapes. Clouds are carefully patterned; great attention is paid to shadows, and reflections in glass or water become heavy, solid and ‘real.’ Expressions of transitoriness abound: smoke being exhaled from a smoker’s lips; fluttering curtains; fleeting glances and shifting smiles – memento mori all.” From that perspective, there is nothing “naïve” about Gaston Tabois’ paintings.
It is often assumed that self-taught, Intuitive artists have a fixed, innate style which is immune from outside influence. Interactions with the market and, particularly, with tourism are often deemed inherently corrupting and something from which such artists must be sheltered, even though their livelihood often depends on it. There were, in fact, such concerns about Gaston Tabois’ work as it evolved. The critic and collector (and later diplomat) Norman Rae, for instance, wrote in Ian Fleming Introduces Jamaica (1965) that “Gaston Tabois once charmed with his fresh, naïve, gaily primitive vignettes of country and city life, but he found it hard to recover after Elizabeth Taylor had bought some of his work.”
Looking back, it is clear Tabois “recovered” just fine from his brush with celebrity patronage but there is no doubt that his style changed significantly in the 1960s and 70s, while the range of his subject matter also expanded with portraits, for instance, becoming more common. It however seems that these changes were driven less by market-pressures than by Tabois’ desire to develop his artistic skills, and to engage with concurrent developments in mainstream art. While a full evaluation of his work from that time is yet to be conducted, it seems fair to say that it has a more experimental quality, with the inevitable hits and misses.
By the early 1980s, he had settled in his highly recognizable later style, which was characterized by greater compositional clarity, less texture and detail, and a quasi-transparent luminosity, which gave his paintings and watercolours an almost stained glass-like quality, although he spatial distortions and surreal undercurrents remained. He continued painting scenes from daily life, rural and urban, and the occasional portrait, but there were also fanciful historical scenes, tributes, a few religious images, and even some bountiful “pin-up” nudes. One of his nudes was actually stolen from the Hills Gallery in 1971.
David Boxer recognized the development in Tabois’ approach and did not see his desire to improve his artistry as an obstacle to his “legitimacy” as an Intuitive. In fact, he made light of Tabois’ ambition to join the tradition of the “masters” and interpreted his statement that “the painter of the Mona Lisa” was a key influence, without mentioning the artist’s name, as evidence of his remove, rather than proximity, to the mainstream.
Gaston Tabois was however uncomfortable at his classification as an Intuitive. I spoke with him about this in 2001, in a series of interviews which also involved Everald Brown, Ras Dizzy and Leonard Daley. While the others saw the designation as appropriate and generally beneficial to their artistic career, Tabois was the only one to object. He argued that the designation “Intuitive” had been an obstacle to his desired ascent into the hierarchies of the Jamaican art world, which was an unexpected but insightful observation.
The Intuitives category indeed involves unacknowledged assumptions about the social identity of the artists in question, as being from a deep rural or inner-city background and lacking in formal education or awareness of mainstream art, and that did not sit easily with Tabois’ social background as a member of the emerging middle class. The label also assumes the artist’s willingness to “play along” with the asymmetrical patronage dynamics that have surrounded Intuitive art and to subject themselves to the sort of controlling, from-the-top-down patronage that has shaped that field, which is something that Tabois obviously resisted and even resented.
In Tabois’ admittedly unique case, however, it is the work itself, and its consistency with conceptions about “naïve” art, far more so than the person, that determined his sustained classification as an Intuitive, although that understates the complexity of his work. But there is no doubt that the Intuitive designation prevented Tabois from using his more advantageous social background to get “up there with Barrington Watson,” as he put it during our interview, in terms of his professional empowerment and social standing.
While his concerns certainly had merit, Gaston Tabois did receive significant national recognition during his lifetime and he is widely regarded as one of the most important Jamaican Intuitives. He regularly exhibited at the Institute of Jamaica, where he had a solo exhibition in 1962, and, later on, at the National Gallery of Jamaica, in the Annual National and National Biennial exhibitions. He was one of only a few artists to be featured in the National Gallery’s three specialized Intuitives exhibitions, namely Intuitive Eye (1979), Fifteen Intuitives (1987) and Intuitives III (2006), and he was included in the Jamaican Art 1922-1982 exhibition, a major survey exhibition which was toured in the USA, Canada, Haiti and, ultimately, Jamaica by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service from 1982 to 1986.
Tabois also received the Institute of Jamaica’s Bronze and Silver Musgrave awards, in 1992 and 2010, respectively, and was honoured with a small tribute exhibition on the occasion of the latter in the 2010 National Biennial. Two of Tabois’ most iconic paintings were furthermore featured on Jamaican postal stamps: Road Menders was in 1986 included in a set of four stamps dedicated to the Intuitives that also featured work by John Dunkley, Kapo and Sidney McLaren, and John Canoe at Guanabo Vale, another early work, was in 2002 used in that year’s Christmas stamp issue.
Unless their work is actively exhibited and written about, artists, however, quickly drop out of view, no matter how popular they were during their lifetime, and there is some concern that this is already happening with Tabois and other Jamaican artists of his generation. A comprehensive, in-depth assessment of Gaston Tabois’ work is now long overdue, and should ideally involve a retrospective exhibition and a well-documented publication.
This article was originally published, in two parts, in the Monitor Tribune of April 9 and 16, 2023
Perspectives 