Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam charted a pathbreaking trajectory in modern art and served as a reference for subsequent generations of artists working across the Caribbean, Africa, and the West. The early decades of his career were defined by movement and exile: from Cuba to Spain, where he trained as an academic painter, and later to Paris, to escape the Spanish Civil War, in which he had fought alongside the Republicans against the Nationalist military dictatorship. Though Lam would break with his academic training, he stated that “in Spain I truly learned to admire painting. When I arrived, for the first time, I felt that everything belonged to me…. Spain gave me the strength and structure of painting.”¹ Once in Paris, Lam continued his experimentation with simplified geometric forms and anti-illusionistic space. Mother and Child (1939) is a striking example of Lam’s departure from his earlier academic style.

Lam was forced to flee again in the summer of 1940, after the Nazi invasion of Paris. His exile in Marseille, where he awaited safe passage back to the Americas, laid the foundation for his later work. There, he found himself part of a circle of artists, writers, and poets experimenting with Surrealist techniques meant to engage the unconscious, including automatic drawing and the collaborative cadavre exquis (Exquisite Corpse) game, and he began drawing hybrid figures in which human, plant, and animal merge. The Surrealist poet André Breton also asked the artist to contribute a series of illustrations to his book-length poem Fata Morgana (1941). Reflecting on the importance of automatic drawing, Lam stated, “This new world began to surface within me…I had carried all of this in my subconscious, and by allowing myself to produce automatic painting…this strange world started to flow out of me.”²

Lam would continue to elaborate on this new world when he returned to Cuba, entering a period of heightened experimentation. Arriving in the summer of 1941 after a long transatlantic voyage, he was disturbed by the conditions he encountered, confronting anew the racial and economic realities of a neocolonial Cuba. Of African and Chinese descent, Lam was acutely affected by these experiences. His return home forced him to relive “all the dramas of my family, all the dramas of my youth, all the images of the consciousness of colonial activity.”³

This experience sparked a highly productive period in which he further developed the world of hybrid figures begun in Marseille and explored representations of Afro-Cuban culture. He completed the monumental oil painting on kraft paper La Jungla (The Jungle) (1942–43), whose all-over composition features life-size plant-animal-human figures emerging from a dense field of sugarcane, a location that evokes Cuba’s history of slavery and indentured servitude. Thinly painted with drips and unexpected colors, La Jungla is widely celebrated in modern art history for its references to Afro-Cuban religious practices and anticolonial critique. In 1944 the Pierre Matisse Gallery included La Jungla in the second solo exhibition of Lam’s work in New York. It was acquired shortly thereafter by MoMA.

Lam spent a decade in the Caribbean, enabling him to connect with other artists, poets, and intellectuals in the region. In Martinique, he befriended Aimé Césaire, the poet and founder of the Négritude movement. Césaire’s anticolonial writings—particularly his book-length poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (1939)—resonated deeply with Lam’s worldview, bringing the artist “a great moral comfort.”⁴ Lam illustrated the Spanish-language edition of Césaire’s poem, published in Cuba in 1943; the two would remain close friends and collaborators until the end of Lam’s life. Lam also traveled to Haiti, where he reconnected with Breton, met with local artists and writers, and deepened his understanding of Afro-diasporic religious practices. Lam’s paintings and Breton’s lectures on Surrealism spoke to a generation of Haitian poets and artists who recognized aesthetic and political affinities. A series of pencil and ink drawings, including Moths and Candles (1946), reflect Lam’s time in Haiti.

In 1949 Lam completed his largest work, the painting on paper Grande Composition (Large Composition). Substituting the vibrant tropical setting of the early 1940s with a muted palette and simplified landscape, Grande Composition marks a turning point. Though hybridized figures remained central to his repertoire, Lam adopted this darkened palette to depict indeterminate spaces. His use of dynamic diagonal lines, negative space, and geometric shapes also foreshadows his experimentation with abstraction in the 1950s. Consisting of tiles painted with black triangles and rhomboids, Lam’s mural Abstracción (Abstraction) (1955), installed at the Edificio del Seguro Medico in Vedado, Cuba, is the peak of his exploration of a geometric and abstract idiom.

Lam permanently relocated to Europe in 1952, settling first in Paris and later in Albissola Marina, Italy. In the final, prolific decades of his life, he experimented with new mediums, including ceramics, printmaking, and sculpture. He also continued collaborating with artists and writers in the Caribbean, creating a series of lithographs for Édouard Glissant’s poetry collection La Terre inquiète (The Restless Earth) (1955) and, a decade later, helping organize the Salón de Mayo (May Salon) in Havana, a major exhibition featuring works by 100 international artists working in the 20th century. In the final years of his life, Lam invited Aimé Césaire to collaborate on a last project, Annonciation (Annunciation) (1982). Lam first approached Césaire in 1979, showing the poet a series of etchings he had completed a decade earlier and, in response, Césaire wrote a set of poems. The etchings and poems were eventually published together as a portfolio in 1982, a testament to the enduring intellectual affinities between their work.

Cathryn Jijon, Mellon-Marron Research Consortium Fellow, Department of Drawings and Prints, 2025

Note: Opening quote is from Wifredo Lam, "My Painting is an Act of Decolonization," Gerardo Mosquera, translated by Colleen Kattau and David Craven. Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 3, no.1-2 (2009): 3. (The interview was originally published in the Cuban journal Bohemia 72, No. 25 (June 20, 1980): 10-13.)