Wifredo Lam

Multicultural artist, Wifredo Lam drew from his Cuban roots and his experiences across Europe and the Caribbean to become a pioneering figure in mid-century Modernism

Initially trained in academic art, Wifredo Lam later immersed himself in the experimental world of the (white) European avant-garde, ultimately forging a distinctive painting style that he regarded as an artistic and mental act of decolonization. His work explored and celebrated his cultural heritage, establishing him as a significant voice in Afro-Cubanism and the broader history of Black art.

Biography of Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla, the eighth child of Enrique Yam Lam and Ana Serafina Castilla, was born in a small village in Villa Clara in Cuba, a province known for its sugar farming. His father, a Chinese immigrant from Canton who arrived in Cuba around 1860, worked as a carpenter. His mother was the daughter of a Congolese former slave and a Cuban mulatto father. Lam was introduced to the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería by his godmother, Matonica Wilson, a local healer and sorceress.

From a young age, Wifredo Lam displayed a strong artistic inclination. He cherished the stories his parents told him, later recalling that his father "carried the memory of all sorts of landscapes: Siberia, Mongolia, Tartary, the drama of Asia and the China Sea. In his eyes, you could see the sunrise of an island in turmoil fighting for its freedom." His mother, too, shared Cuban folk legends that fueled his imagination.

Wifredo Lam devoured any art books he could find, drawn especially to the works of Da Vinci, Velázquez, Goya, Gauguin, and Delacroix. He dreamed of one day traveling to Europe to see these masterpieces in person.

In 1916, Wifredo Lam's family sent him to Havana with the expectation that he would study law, but his determination to become an artist remained unshaken. He spent much of his time at the Botanical Gardens, where he studied and sketched tropical plants.

From 1918 to 1923, the artist attended the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura, Academia de San Alejandro. Initially focusing on sculpture, he found the physical demands of working with stone too taxing and shifted his focus to painting, with a particular emphasis on mastering portraiture. However, during his time at art school, Lam developed a strong aversion to the academic approach to artmaking.

In 1923, Wifredo Lam received a grant from the municipality of Sagua la Grande to pursue further artistic studies. Armed with a letter of recommendation from the director of the Museo Nacional de la Habana, he departed for Madrid. In Madrid, he spent his mornings studying under the portraitist Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, who also taught Salvador Dalí, at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes. In the afternoons, Lam attended the Escuela Libre de Paisaje, founded by Julio Moisés, where he took more experimental classes and immersed himself in the creative atmosphere of the Alhambra.

In 1925, after losing his grant, the artist relied on his skill as a portraitist to support himself, offering his services to the aristocracy of Madrid. That same year, he spent several months in Cuenca, where he painted the rugged mountainous landscapes and the impoverished locals, who reminded him of the people he had left behind in Sagua la Grande. Upon returning to Madrid, Wifredo Lam was deeply influenced by the vibrant energy of Picasso's works, inspiring him to infuse his own art with what he described as "a general democratic proposition [...] for all people." He also drew inspiration from exhibitions of Surrealist and African art.

In 1929, the artist married Eva Piriz, and shortly after, they welcomed a son, Wifredo Victor. However, tragedy struck in 1931 when both Eva and their baby died of tuberculosis. This devastating loss plunged Lam into profound despair, leading to a darker tone in his artwork. He took on just enough portrait commissions to get by and spent much of his time engrossed in historical and ethnographic studies of Africa and slavery.

A summer sojourn to León rejuvenated Wifredo Lam's spirits and reignited his passion for art. Upon returning to Madrid, he became acquainted with a circle of artists and intellectuals who would become lifelong friends, including the Cuban musicologist and writer Alejo Carpentier. Meanwhile, the worsening political situation in Cuba under Gerardo Machado's dictatorship led the artist to delve deeper into Marxist ideas and become active in anti-fascist political groups.

When the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936, Wifredo Lam was drafted into the war effort. After six months of working with explosives at an arms factory, he developed chemical contact poisoning and was sent to recover at the sanatorium in Caldes de Montbui. During his time there, he met sculptor Manuel Martínez Hugué, known as Manolo, one of the earliest collectors of "Negro Art." Manolo captivated the artist by discussing African statuary, emphasizing its simplified forms and the rhythmic expression of the essential and the irrational.

While in Paris, Wifredo Lam also formed friendships with artists such as Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, Nusch and Paul Éluard, Joan Miró, and Victor Brauner, as well as art dealer Pierre Loeb. Loeb hosted Lam’s first exhibition at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in 1939, which received positive acclaim from critics.

When the Germans invaded Paris in June 1940, Wifredo Lam and his circle of artists and intellectual friends fled to Marseille and boarded a steamship bound for Martinique. Upon arrival, they were interned at the Lazaret camp for a month before being allowed to settle in Fort-de-France. During this time, poet Aimé Césaire organized island excursions, which led Lam to fall in love with the tropical vegetation and the "savage beauty" of the island landscape.

In May 1941, the exiled artists boarded a ship bound for the Dominican Republic. After being denied a visa to Mexico, Lam was forced to return to Cuba after seventeen years away. He later remarked, "What I saw upon my return looked like Hell." While Havana was thriving with "its white capitol, the mark of America, its banks, its palaces, its luxurious European shops," the countryside starkly reminded him of "all the drama of the colonialism of my youth."

Wifredo Lam's return to Cuba marked a turning point in his artistic direction. He reflected, "I was taken aback by its nature, by the traditions of the Blacks, and by the transculturation of its African and Catholic religions. And so I began to orient my paintings toward the African." The artist deliberately distanced himself from the folkloric pictorial traditions promoted by Cuba's political parties, choosing instead to develop a unique visual language.

In 1944, the artist married Helena Holzer, a German doctor he had met in Barcelona in 1938. Around this time, he also rekindled his connection to the spiritual traditions of his youth, with his sister Eloísa arranging Santería initiation ceremonies for the couple. They grew close to Lydia Cabrera, an anthropologist focused on preserving Afro-Cuban culture, and the Cuban novelist and musicologist Alejo Carpentier.

On July 9, 1946, Wifredo Lam eagerly set off for Paris, anticipating a return to a newly liberated Europe. However, he was disheartened to find that Social Realism had dominated the art world and that Surrealism was now deemed "counter-revolutionary idealism." After traveling through Italy and Germany, he returned to Paris and formed a friendship with Danish artist Asger Jorn, who credited Lam’s paintings, with their strong musical connections, as a significant influence on his work.

In 1947, the artist held an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Jackson Pollock acknowledged that the show was the catalyst for his interest in studying Native American art. Later that year, Wifredo Lam returned to Cuba and joined other artists in establishing the Agrupación de Pintores y Escultores Cubanos (APEC). He was partly inspired by Jorn's involvement in the formation of the CoBrA group in Scandinavia, with which Lam had a loose affiliation. In May 1951, the artist and Helena Holzer divorced.

In 1952, Wifredo Lam relocated to Paris, where he immersed himself in the Italian avant-garde movements and joined other post-war groups such as "Phases" and the Situationist International, while still participating in Surrealist events and exhibitions. In 1955, he met Swedish artist Lou Larin, and they married in Manhattan on November 21, 1960. The couple had three sons: Eskil, Timour, and Jonas.

During the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the artist continued to travel extensively to the United States, Italy, Venezuela, India, Kenya, Spain, Norway, Greece, and Sweden. In 1956, he took part in an expedition to Mato Grosso, Brazil, but fell ill and had to return to Cuba for medical treatment. He recovered in time to showcase a series of paintings at Havana University, showing his support for the students' protests against Batista's dictatorship. On May 1, 1963, Wifredo Lam was honored as a "national painter" by Cuba.

From 1964 onwards, the artist split his time between Paris, Zurich, and Albissola Mare, Italy, where he established a studio in a house in the Bruciati neighborhood near Asger Jorn’s home. In his later years, he experimented with printmaking and ceramics.

In 1978, the artist suffered a stroke that left him paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair. Wifredo Lam passed away in Paris on September 11, 1982. He was cremated, and in line with his wishes, his family scattered his ashes on Cuban soil.

The Art of Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam brought Afro-Caribbean motifs into the international art scene dominated by Western cities, creating cultural encounters on his canvases that treated his imagery as equal to European modernist motifs and styles.

Immersed in the lessons of Cubism and Surrealism, the artist adapted their visual language and formal innovations in a way that was uniquely his own, all while consciously managing how his work was received and interpreted by Western audiences. He likened his art to a Trojan horse, intending to unsettle "the dreams of exploiters" through his work.

Wifredo Lam recognized that "the great mistake of Western civilization [...] was to have separated, by exaggerated and arbitrary notions of quality, the so-called primitive arts from those of supposedly mature civilizations." His artworks reclaimed Primitivism from its traditional use in twentieth-century European art, where it often signified "simplicity" and "a more instinctive nature," without acknowledging the historical constructions of such stereotypes.

Lam and the Negritude Movement: Reclaiming African Identity

Wifredo Lam's art provided a potent visual language that resonated with the Negritude movement — a primarily literary initiative aimed at reclaiming and elevating African identity in response to historical oppression, colonialism, and the assimilationist policies of the West.

Francophone literary scholar Paula Sato explains through Lam's friend and Afro-Caribbean author Aimé Césaire that "Negritude was the revolt of black men against the assassination of their culture, an amputation that had begun during slavery and continued in its aftermath, and whose effect essentially was to 'cut man off from himself'. Negritude was also the quest of those men to recover their lost selves that remained buried in 'the collective unconscious.'"

Wifredo Lam was the painter most closely associated with the Negritude movement in the visual arts. This recognition of the collective unconscious aligns with Surrealism's principles, and the artist embraced the movement, believing it could provide "deliverance from cultural alienation."