Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla (; December 8, 1902 – September 11, 1982), better known as Wifredo Lam, was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. Inspired by and in contact with some of the most renowned artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera, Lam melded his influences and created a unique style, which was ultimately characterized by the prominence of hybrid figures. This distinctive visual style of his also influenced many artists. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramics, and printmaking in his later life.
Early life Wifredo Lam was born and raised in Sagua La Grande, a village in the sugar farming province of Villa Clara, Cuba. He was of mixed-race ancestry: his mother, the former Ana Serafina Castilla, was born to a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father and his father, Yam Lam, was a Chinese immigrant.Balderrama, Maria R., ed. Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938–1952. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992. In Sagua La Grande, Lam was surrounded by many people of African descent; his family, like many others, practiced Catholicism alongside their African traditions. Through his godmother, Matonica Wilson, a Santería priestess locally celebrated as a healer and sorceress, he was exposed to rites of the African orishas. While Lam was never initiated into Santería, Palo Monte, or Abakuá Secret Society, he was familiar with the practices, as cultural participation was widespread in Cuba. His contact with African celebrations and spiritual practices proved to be his largest artistic influence.
Lam"s father, Enrique Lam-Yam, was a Chinese immigrant from Canton (Guangdong province) who came to Cuba as part of the late-19th-century wave of Chinese laborers and merchants. Enrique was in his fifties when Wifredo was born and remained an important presence in the family home in Sagua la Grande, a town with an active Chinese community.
Lam grew up surrounded by Chinese objects—porcelain, calligraphy, ornamental screens—that were common in Cuban-Chinese households. Scholars note that some of his later abstract, calligraphic lines and mask-like faces echo Chinese brushwork and scroll composition.
Though Lam never practiced Chinese religion, he absorbed a respect for ancestor veneration and an interest in hybrid spiritual systems. His later embrace of Afro-Cuban Santería and Taoist-like ideas of balance shows a comfort with syncretism that mirrors his mixed heritage.
Lam often spoke of being "a mulatto" of many worlds—African, Spanish, Chinese. His father"s Asian heritage helped form his lifelong fascination with mestizaje (cultural mixing), which became a key theme of his art.
In 1916, Lam moved to Havana to study law, a path that his family had thrust upon him. Simultaneously he also began studying tropical plants at the Botanical Gardens.Alley, Rin. "Lam, Wifredo". Grove Art Online. 1999-09-27. Oxford University Press. From 1918 to 1923, Lam studied painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. However, he disliked both academic teaching and painting. He left for Madrid, Spain, in the autumn of 1923 to further his art studies.
Career in Europe In 1923, Lam began studying in Madrid under Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, the curator of the Museo del Prado and teacher of Salvador Dalí. In the mornings he would attend his conservative teacher's studio, while he spent his evenings working alongside young, nonconformist painters. At the Prado, he discovered and was awed by the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel I. While Lam's early paintings were in the modernist Spanish tradition, his work soon became more simplified and decorative. Though his dislike for academic conservatism persisted, his time in Spain marked his technical development, in which he began to merge a primitive aesthetic and the traditions of Western composition. It was in Paris that Lam was exposed to conventions of African sculpture. In 1929, he married Eva Piriz, but both she and their young son died in 1931 of tuberculosis; it is likely that this personal tragedy contributed to the dark nature of his work."Wifredo Lam." Guggenheim Collection. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. .
During the 1930s, Lam was exposed to a variety of influences. The influence of Surrealism was discernible in his work, as well as that of Henri Matisse. Lam had begun to incorporate Surrealist techniques before his time in Europe, learning of artists like Matisse through publications and news from a friend. Throughout Lam's travels through the Spanish countryside, he developed empathy for the Spanish peasants, whose troubles in some ways mirrored those of the former slaves he grew up around in Cuba.Richards, Paulette. "Wifredo Lam: a Sketch." Callaloo 34 (1988): 90–92. JSTOR. At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he sided with the Republicans in 1936–1937 and used his talent to fashion Republican posters and propaganda. Drafted to defend Madrid, Lam was incapacitated during the fighting in late 1937 and was sent to Barcelona. There he met Helena Holzer, a German researcher, and the Catalan artist known as Manolo Hugué. Manolo gave Lam the letter of introduction that sparked his friendship with Picasso, whose artwork had impressed and inspired Lam a year before when he saw an exhibition in Madrid.
In 1938, Lam moved to Paris. He quickly gained the support of Picasso, who introduced him to many of the leading artists of the time, such as Fernand Léger, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Miró. He also befriended the poet Mary Stanley Low. In his trip to Mexico in the same year, Lam stayed with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Picasso also introduced him to Pierre Loeb, a Parisian art dealer; Loeb gave Lam his first exhibition at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in 1939, which received an enthusiastic response from critics.Sims, Lowery S. Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2002. Picasso and Lam also exhibited their work together at the Perls Galleries in New York in the same year. Lam's work went from showing the influence of Matisse, seen in his still lifes, landscapes and simplified portraits, to being influenced by Cubism. Mainly working with gouache, Lam began producing stylized figures that appear to be influenced by Picasso. Much of his work in 1938 possessed emotional intensity; the subject matter ranged from interacting couples to women in despair and showed a considerably stronger African influence, seen in the figures' angular outlines and the synthesis of their bodies.
While Lam began simplifying his forms before he came into contact with Picasso's work, it is apparent that Picasso had a significant impact on him. With regard to Picasso's exhibition, Lam said that it was "not only a revelation, but… a shock." Lam gained the approval of Picasso, whose encouragement has been said to have led Lam to search for his own interpretation of modernism.
With the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Paris by the Germans, Lam left for Marseille, France, in 1940. There he rejoined many intellectuals, including the Surrealists, with whom he had been associated since he met André Breton in 1939. While in Marseille, Lam and Breton collaborated on the publication of Breton's poem Fata Morgana, which was illustrated by Lam. Though the drawings he created in Marseille between 1940 and 1941 are known as the Fata Morgana suite, only about three inspired the illustrations for the poem. In 1941, Breton, Lam and Claude Lévi-Strauss, accompanied by many others, left for Martinique, only to be imprisoned. After forty days, Lam was released and allowed to leave for Cuba, which he reached in midsummer 1941.
Havana years
Upon his return to Havana, Lam developed a new awareness of Afro-Cuban traditions. He noticed that the descendants of the slaves were still being oppressed and that the Afro-Cuban culture was degraded and made picturesque for the sake of tourism. He believed that Cuba was in danger of losing its African heritage and therefore sought to free them from cultural subjugation. In an interview with Max-Pol Fouchet, he said:
"I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters." Additionally, his time in Cuba marked a rapid evolution of his style. Drawing from his study of tropical plants and familiarity with Afro-Cuban culture, his paintings became characterized by the presence of a hybrid figure—part human, part animal, and part vegetal. His style was also distinctive because of its fusion of Surrealist and Cubist approaches with imagery and symbols from Santería.Nessen, Susan. "Review: Multiculturalism in the Americas." Art Journal 52 (1993): 86–91. JSTOR. In 1943, he began his best-known work, The Jungle. It reflected his mature style, depicting four figures with mask-like heads, half-emerging from dense tropical vegetation. Later that year it was shown in an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where it created controversy. The painting depicted the tension between Modernism and the vibrancy and energy of African culture. The Jungle was ultimately purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is often compared to Picasso's Guernica, which is hung in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Another work of Picasso's that has been compared to The Jungle is Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Although these two paintings were created thirty-six years apart and have different cultural contexts, they both depict women in a sexualized context and both contain primitivist and Cubist elements in their designs.
The combination of African ideas with a European style in Lam's work, The Jungle led to Lam and his second wife experiencing discrimination from the largely nonwhite Cuban population. Upon his return to Cuba, Lam moved away from the cosmopolitan art community and experimented more with Cuban avant-garde styles. Cuban artists have accused Lam of being an impostor when it comes to his artwork and his identity as a Cuban.
Lam continued to simplify and synthesize abstraction yet continued painting figurally; he also kept on developing the mythology and totemism that defined his style. In 1944, he married Helana Holzer, whom he divorced in 1950. In 1946, he and Breton spent four months in Haiti. There Lam enriched his already extensive understanding and knowledge of African divinity and magic rituals through observing Voodoun ceremonies, although he later said that his contact with the African spirituality that he found throughout the Americas did not directly impact his formal style. African poetry, on the other hand, was said to have had a broadening effect on his paintings. In 1950, he worked with René Portocarrero and others; in the village of Santiago de Las Vegas, the group of painters worked on ceramic.Victor Moreno – ein kubanischer Maler, Felix Busse, Vielflieger Verlag Lam settled in Paris in 1952 after having divided his time between Cuba, New York, and France.