Wifredo Lam was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramics and printmaking in his later life.
Background
Ethnicity:
His father was a Chinese immigrant and his mother was born to a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father.
Wifredo Lam was born on December 8, 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba. He was of mixed-race ancestry: his father, Yam Lam, was a Chinese immigrant and his mother, the former Ana Serafina Castilla, was born to a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father. His godmother was Matonica Wilson, a Santería priestess locally celebrated as a healer and sorceress.
Education
In 1916 Lam moved to Havana to study law, a path that his family had thrust upon him. From 1918 to 1923 Lam studied painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. However, Lam disliked both academic teaching and painting. He left for Madrid in the autumn of 1923 to further his art studies.
In 1923 Lam began studying in Madrid under Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza.
Career
During the 1930s Lam traveled through the Spanish countryside and was exposed to a variety of influences. The influence of Surrealism was discernible in his early work.
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. 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.
Picasso and Lam also exhibited their work together at the Perls Galleries in New York in the same year. 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.
With the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Paris by the Germans, Lam left for Marseille 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.
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, animal and vegetal elements. In 1943 he began his best-known work "The Jungle". Later that year it was shown in an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, where it created controversy.
In 1946 Lam and Breton spent four months in Haiti. In 1950 he worked together with René Portocarrero and others; in the village of Santiago de Las Vegas, the group of painters worked on ceramic. Lam settled in Paris in 1952 after having divided his time between Cuba, New York and France.
Lam exhibited a series of paintings at Havana University in 1955 to demonstrate his support for the students’ protests against Batista's dictatorship. Similarly, in 1965, six years after the revolution, he showed his loyalty to Castro and his goals of social and economic equality by painting "El Tercer Mundo" ("The Third World") for the presidential palace. In 1960 Lam established a studio in Albissola Marina on Italy's northwest coast and settled there.
After being intrigued by the local pottery-making, Lam began to experiment with ceramics and had his first ceramic exhibition in 1975. He progressed to model sculptures and cast in metal in his twilight years, often depicting personages similar to those he had painted.
Wifredo Lam died on September 11, 1982 in Paris, France.
His family practiced Catholicism alongside their African traditions.
Views
Quotations:
"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."
Connections
Lam married Eva Piriz in 1929, but both she and their young son died in 1931 of tuberculosis. In 1944 he married Helana Holzer, whom he divorced in 1950.
His third wife was Lou Laurin, they married in 1960 and were together until his death. Lam and Lou Laurin had 3 sons.