The Untimely Experience of the Contemporary

It is now a commonplace of Jamaican art historical discourse that, right around the time of political independence in 1962, three Jamaican artists—Barrington Watson (1931–2016), Karl Parboosingh (1923–75), and Eugene Hyde (1931–80)—returned to Jamaica after completing their art education abroad: Watson in London, Paris, and Amsterdam; Parboosingh in New York, Paris, and Mexico City; and Hyde in Los Angeles.¹ Together they would inaugurate a new chapter in the history of modern art in Jamaica—an assertively avant-garde, resolutely cosmopolitan, and willfully professional art modernism. Each, needless to say, articulated in his own canvas-oriented work a contrasting visual grammar now familiar to many: Watson, a painter of sensuous and poignant figurative realism; Parboosingh, a painter driven by a vividly militant expressionism; and Hyde, a painter of graphic figurations and reflective abstractions. But however contrasting they were in their visual styles, part of what shaped their motivations and commitments was...