Wifredo Lam
A pivotal figure of Latin American modern art, Wifredo Lam was born in 1902 in Cuba, the son of a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother of Spanish descent. After graduating from Havana’s Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro, he won a scholarship in 1923 to study at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where he stayed until 1938, when he moved to Paris. There he was enthusiastically embraced by the city’s avant-garde, whose members at the time were fascinated with the unconscious, the fantastic, and the non-European cultures of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. As a Caribbean of African descent, Lam held a particular appeal for these artists and poets (especially Pablo Picasso and André Breton), who perceived his race as playing a distinctive role in his work. In 1940, after the Nazis had occupied Paris, Lam escaped via cargo ship for an arduous journey back to Cuba. The voyage included a layover in the French Caribbean island of Martinique, where he met the poet Aimé Césaire, a founder of the Négritude movement, whose ideas would have an enduring influence on the artist.
Back in Cuba after this long absence, Lam was confronted with the harsh reality of a country struggling to emerge from over 400 years of colonial subjugation. Disturbed by the island’s condition, Lam found motivation in his empathy with the dispossessed: “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly exploring the negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks.” La jungla (The Jungle), made two years after his return to Cuba, is a monumental drawing of life-size figures in a sugarcane field, a location invested with the island’s history of slavery. Embracing the influence of Cubism, Lam depicts these characters multiperspectivally and gives them stylized masks, referring not only to the masks in, say, Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) but also to the idols of Afro-Cuban mysticism. Lam used water-based gouache to compose the scene in translucent layers. The figures stand camouflaged amid the dense bamboo and sugarcane; their totemic forms, simultaneously voluptuous and angular, gesture provocatively in a mysterious scene evoking “*lo real maravilloso*” (the marvelous real), a term coined by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier to describe the genuinely surreal nature of everyday life in the Caribbean. In Lam’s jungle, the exuberance of nature, and the imperturbable expressions of the masks, are interrupted by the alarming presence of sharp blades and beaks in the sugarcane. These menacing presences insinuate that other dangers may lie hidden beneath the jungle’s skin.
A landmark in Lam’s oeuvre, La jungla was included in a solo exhibition at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1944. There it caught the eye of James Johnson Sweeney, MoMA’s director of painting and sculpture, who successfully proposed the work for purchase to the Inter-American Fund, recently endowed by Nelson Rockefeller to strengthen the Museum’s Latin American holdings. Although Lam was absent from MoMA’s 1944 survey Modern Cuban Painters (following a dispute with the Cuban critic José Gómez Sicre, one of the show’s organizers), La jungla went on view in the Museum’s collection galleries immediately after its acquisition, in June 1945, and has been often on display since.
Lam left Europe having experienced firsthand the vitality of Cubism, the emergence of Surrealism, and modern art’s fascination with African art. At home in Cuba, he developed a style that allowed him to express the hybrid quality of Cuban identity, fully asserting the African elements of its history in the language of modernist painting. In works such as La jungla, Lam reintegrated African art forms into an autochthonous context, challenging the Western construction of “the primitive” while still acknowledging the reality of Cuba’s colonial legacy.
Originally published in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, ed. Darby English and Charlotte Barat (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Karen Grimson, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints
- Introduction
- Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla (Chinese: 林飛龍; Jyutping: lam4 fei1lung4; 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 influences many artists. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramics and printmaking in his later life.
- Wikidata
- Q465342
- Nationality
- Cuban
- Gender
- Male
- Roles
- Artist, Painter, Sculptor
- Names
- Wifredo Lam, Wilfredo Lam, WiFredo Lam, L Lam
- Ulan
- 500006317
Exhibitions
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401: Out of War
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times
Mar 10–Aug 30, 2010
MoMA
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Painting &
Sculpture II Nov 20, 2004–Aug 5, 2015
MoMA
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MoMA at El Museo: Latin American and Caribbean Art from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art
Mar 4–Jul 25, 2004
MoMA
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Postwar to Pop: Masterworks from MoMA's Collection
Apr 22–Oct 5, 1999
MoMA
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Wifredo Lam has
27 exhibitionsonline.
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Wifredo Lam Mother and Child 1939
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Wifredo Lam Satan 1942
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Wifredo Lam The Jungle (La Jungla) 1943
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Wifredo Lam Moths and Candles 1946
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Wifredo Lam Untitled 1946
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Wifredo Lam Untitled 1946
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Max Ernst, Stanley William Hayter, Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Kurt Seligmann, Yves Tanguy, Various Artists Brunidor Portfolio, No. 1 1947
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Wifredo Lam Quetzal from Brunidor Portfolio, No. 1 1947
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Jean (Hans) Arp, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Serge Brignoni, Alexander Calder, Bruno Capacci, Julio de Diego, Enrico Donati, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, David Hare, Jacques Hérold, Marcel Jean, Wifredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Maria Martins, Roberto Matta, Joan Miró, Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky), Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, Dorothea Tanning, Toyen (Marie Čermínová), Suzanne van Damme, Various Artists Le Surréalisme en 1947 1947
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Wifredo Lam Plate from Le Surréalisme en 1947 1947
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Wifredo Lam Emblem (Emblèm) 1952
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Wifredo Lam Le Rempart de brindilles (The Rampart of Twigs) 1953
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Wifredo Lam Plate (page 17) from Le Rempart de brindilles (The Rampart of Twigs) 1953
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Wifredo Lam Plate (page 25) from Le Rempart de brindilles (The Rampart of Twigs) 1953
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Wifredo Lam Plate (page 33) from Le Rempart de Brindilles (The Rampart of Twigs) 1953
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Wifredo Lam Plate (page 41) from Le Rempart de brindilles (The Rampart of Twigs) 1953
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Wifredo Lam Wrapper from Le Rempart de brindilles (The Rampart of Twigs) 1953
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Wifredo Lam Untitled 1953
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Jean (Hans) Arp, Hans Bellmer, Camille Bryen, Oscar Domínguez, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, Stanley William Hayter, Valentine Hugo, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, Joan Miró, Various Artists Feuilles éparses 1957–65, published 1965
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Wifredo Lam Night (Nuit) (plate, page 19) from Feuilles éparses 1965
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Various Artists, Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Adolph Gottlieb, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, André Masson, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, Édouard Pignon, Fritz Wotruba Flight 1971
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Wifredo Lam Untitled from Flight 1969, published 1971
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Wifredo Lam Untitled from Flight 1967, published 1971
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Various Artists, Wifredo Lam Pour Jorn (1973)
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Wifredo Lam Acide doux from Homage to Picasso (Hommage à Picasso) 1973
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