One of the most significant artists of Jamaica's immediate post-independence period, Karl Parboosingh (1923–75), embodied in his work a new hybrid and transnational modernism that emerged in Jamaican art around independence. At a time when the island was transitioning from a colonial to a postcolonial society, Parboosingh navigated his way around the centres of an increasingly globalised art world, absorbing and appropriating the formal innovations of the avant-garde. His formative years in New York, Paris, London and Mexico made Parboosingh a master of stylistic code-switching. His oeuvre carries references to key European movements, especially the primitivism inherent in Fauvism and Expressionism, but also the historicising narratives of Mexican muralism, and an abstraction rooted in the New York School and Amerindian art. Here, I consider the transnational influences on his career, especially on his spiritual paintings, from his student days in New York, Paris and Mexico, until his return to Jamaica in the 1950s and the maturation of his artistic development in the 1970s. By combining a multitude of cross-cultural influences into a new postcolonial Caribbean aesthetic, I argue, Parboosingh disrupts Western ways of seeing and raises questions of what has historically been conceived as avant-gardist practice. Linking the transnational with the national, his migration experiences reveal the complications involved in the development of modern(ist) art in a decolonising society.