Wifredo Lam
Wifredo Lam attended San Alejandro between 1918 and 1923; at
that time he painted mostly still lifes and landscapes, which he
showed in some of the yearly salons organized by the Association
of Painters and Sculptors of Havana. In 1923 he left for Spain
to further his artistic education. He first lived in Madrid,
where he enrolled in the studio of the academic painter Fernando
Alvarez de Sotomayor and frequented the Prado and the
Archeological museums. Lam remained in Spain until 1938,
traveling and living for periods of time in Cuenca, Leon, and
Barcelona while painting portraits, landscapes, city scenes, and
interiors in styles that ranged from realism to cubism and
surrealism. Toward the end of his lengthy stay in Spain he
joined the republican side in the Spanish civil war.
The turmoil in Spain finally drove Lam to France. He arrived in
Paris in 1938 with a letter of introduction to Picasso. The
latter put him in touch with the Parisian avant-garde, including
Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro, and Benjamin Peret. In
1929, Pierre Loeb gave Lam his first one-person show, in which
he exhibited numerous paintings on the mother-and-child theme.
At this time Lam practiced a style of simplified forms
influenced by cubism and African sculpture. Lam's Parisian stay
was cut short by World War 11. In 1940 he took refuge in
Marseilles, where he developed close ties with a group of
surrealists that included Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Oscar
Dominguez, Victor Brauner, and Pierre Mabille. He participated
in the group's activities, such as the making of the Tarot de
Marseille, and helped produce collective drawings. He also
illustrated Breton's poem Fata Morgana with six drawings that
prefigured his mature style and iconography. In 1941 he joined
three hundred intellectuals escaping war-torn Europe aboard the
Capitaine Paul Merle en route to Martinique. The salient event
of his seven-month trip to Cuba was meeting the poet Aime
Cesaire, whose exploration and affirmation of Afro-Caribbean
culture influenced and paralleled his own.
Lam's rencounter with his native land in 1941 had a decisive
effect on his art, perhaps more so than in the case of his
contemporaries due to his long absence. His paintings
immediately began to reflect his rediscovery of the Cuban
landscape and of his Afrocuban heritage. He developed a formal
vocabulary, appropriated primarily from Picasso and African
sculpture to express African deities and myths still active in
Cuba. Up to the mid-1940s he located Afrocuban signs--hybrid
figures and ritual objects or attributes--in a tropical and
symbolic landscape of sugarcane and tobacco leaves, as seen in
La jungla (The Jungle, 1943). His paintings took on a dark and
more violent tone after a visit to Haiti in 1946. The hybrid
figures became more totemic, the tropical landscape gave way to
somber, ambiguous spaces, and the bright neoimpressionist colors
turned to earth tones, black, grays, and white, as seen in La
boda (The Wedding, 1947). In Haiti he witnessed voodoo
ceremonies in the company of Mabille and Breton, which
reinforced and expanded his visual-poetic expression of
Afro-Caribbean culture and identity.
Between 1947 and 1952 Lam lived and worked in Havana, New York, Paris, and Albisola. He then settled permanently in Paris. During the rest of his long and productive career his style and iconography evolved along a steady course toward greater simplicity and abstraction, at times bordering on the decorative. From the late 19505 on he dedicated increasing attention to graphics and ceramics. The outstanding characteristics of his mature art are a sharp and refined draftsmanship, a violent sensuality, and a highly personal version of modern primitivism. Lam's art began to draw national recognition and international renown in the 1940s. In Havana he held his first one-person show at the Lyceum in 1946 and won the first prize at the 1951 National Salon. The Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York gave him five one-person shows between 1942 and 1950. In the 1944 exhibition, La jungla was universally well received by the critics in the local press; that same year James Johnson--director of the Museum of Modern Art--bought the painting for the museum's collection. His work also was featured in full-length articles in Magazine of Art (1949) and Art News (1950). At about the same time Lam's work gained recognition in Europe. He held one-persons shows in London in 1946 and 1952 and in Paris in 1945 and 1953. Full-length articles on his work appeared in Horizons (1945) and Cahiers d'art (1946). Over the past thirty years Lam has been the subject of several monographs and numerous retrospective exhibitions. His paintings are in museums and private collections all over the world