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. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others.
—Wifredo Lam
In the middle of the twentieth century the Cuban-born painter Wifredo Lam made the African presence in his homeland the driving force of his oeuvre, in drawings and paintings filled with totemic figures that often float in dark, monochromatic spaces. It has taken a long time for the originality of that aesthetic and political orientation to be fully appreciated in the United States. His most famous painting, La jungla (The Jungle, 1942–1943), was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1945, but for many years it hung by the coatroom in the museum’s entrance. In an infamous essay published in 1988, the critic John Yau called attention to the negative implications of that marginal location.* Some four decades later MoMA has finally taken a major step by reconsidering the artist’s relevance to the canon. “When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” is the most comprehensive survey that Lam has ever had in the US. Thanks to the thoughtful curatorial efforts of Beverly Adams and Christophe Cherix, Lam’s imaginative attempts to capture the beliefs and the spirit of resistance of Black Cubans can finally be seen for what they were: an effort to decolonize European modernism.
The exhibition features more than 150 drawings, paintings, prints, and ceramics, made over the course of five decades. The works are arranged chronologically and are accompanied by explanatory texts, audio commentary, and documentary photographs that emphasize the impact of historical events on Lam’s evolving aesthetics. Much attention is paid to his Afro-Cuban and Chinese roots (his father was a Chinese immigrant), but it is equally important to recognize that Lam left his homeland in 1923, at the age of twenty, to study art in Spain, and lived most of his life as a cosmopolitan expatriate in Europe. His relationship with his country and his Cuban artist peers was ambivalent. He refused to participate in MoMA’s 1944 exhibition “Modern Cuban Painters,” wary of classifying himself as a Cuban artist, but he accepted the Cuban revolutionary government’s invitations and honors in his later years. He survived three major wars, married three Europeans, and exhibited in New York, Paris, Caracas, Mexico City, Port-au-Prince, and Havana during his lifetime. He not only enjoyed the good fortune of talent; he had an extraordinary circle of friends that included Pablo Picasso, André Breton, the Cuban writers Lydia Cabrera and Alejo Carpentier, and the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, who enriched his work and shaped his engagement with African art, Surrealist dreamscapes, Négritude, and Afro-Cuban religions.
Lam’s early paintings from his years in Spain reveal a young artist searching for his own style. His first portraits display the influence of Fauvism’s bright color schemes and Henri Matisse’s flattened forms. His fine drawing skills were notable from the start, as was his unusual use of industrial kraft paper instead of canvas. While Lam first turned to kraft paper because of his financial constraints and the limited availability of canvas during wartime, he continued to use it throughout his career; the paper enabled him to blend drawing and painting together by combining charcoal with thinned oil paint and gouache. He also left parts of his paintings on paper untreated, allowing the paper’s brown color to become integral to his compositions.
His most memorable work from the 1930s is La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War, 1937), a large gouache on paper that depicts fallen Republicans and their mourning comrades, their figures heavily outlined in black and colored in various shades of blue and green. Three adults and a child lie dead at the bottom of the painting; above them are four anguished women with bowed heads, painted mostly in tones of blue and gray, and around them a swirling mass of smaller outstretched arms and pained faces, all crowded together, leaving no space for background. As a supporter of the Spanish Republic, Lam had worked in a munitions factory during the war, but he fell ill from exposure to toxic fumes (and to chemicals used for making explosives) and was sent to a sanatorium in Caldes de Montbui. While there he began to work on La Guerra Civil, which became his antifascist statement. He planned to submit it for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in Paris but failed to complete it in time. The painting was not exhibited until 1992.
When General Francisco Franco established his first government in 1938, Lam left Spain, arriving in Paris with a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso, who quickly became an important friend and mentor. The elongated, masklike faces in Le Repos de modèle (The Model’s Rest, 1938), Madame Lumumba (1938), Tête (1940), and Composition (1940) suggest Picasso’s influence as well as Lam’s new interest in African art forms. His association with the master Cubist, and with Breton and the ethnologist Michel Leiris, led to his transformative encounters with African art, which was then on view in exhibitions and private collections throughout Paris. Although most Europeans found African art “primitive,” Lam’s friends were impressed with the formal qualities of the textiles, sculptures, and masks that had been extracted from France’s sub-Saharan colonies and celebrated them as expressions of the unconscious. As his appreciation of the aesthetic power of non-Western art deepened, Lam began to amass his own collection of African and Oceanic sculptures, and they likely informed the long limbs and angular faces of his paintings.
The Nazi occupation of France in 1940 forced Lam and his bohemian friends to flee, first to Marseille and then beyond Europe. During his nine months in the city he collaborated with other artists on a series of exquisite corpses; several of these playful works are on display in the MoMA exhibition. Lam’s drawing style changed radically while he waited in Marseille for a visa. He began to create fantastic figures that combined human and animal features, oversize extremities, horns, and flowers. Invited by Breton to illustrate an edition of his poem Fata Morgana (1941), Lam made seven delicately rendered, intricate drawings with colored pencils, including one of a beast with four breasts and teeth for a body, another with a wing, hooves, and a tail, and an elaborate two-headed female figure with a rodent crawling in her hair and a small beast protruding from her torso.
Propelled by the Surrealist interest in automatic drawing as a means of creating dreamlike imagery, Lam invented a visual language for the imaginary spirit world, one that he continued to expand in painting after painting. When he returned to Cuba in 1941 after eighteen years abroad, he began to use Afro-Cuban religious symbolism with a heightened appreciation of its symbolic power and cultural significance, but he had already chosen to distance his imagery from realistic figuration before he reached the island. Lam noted, “My painting was intended to communicate a psychic state.”
Lam left France along with his Surrealist colleagues in order to escape the Nazi occupation. However, unlike his European friends, he could not obtain a US visa and therefore ended up in Cuba. Upon his arrival in Havana he met Lydia Cabrera, an anthropologist who was gathering the songs, stories, and rituals of the island’s Black population. She was one of the leaders of the Afrocubanismo movement, a mid-twentieth-century effort by Cuban intellectuals to legitimate Black contributions to Cuban society and culture. Cabrera and Lam’s sister Eloísa, who was also familiar with the Afro-Cuban syncretic religion of Santeria, brought him to ceremonies, like toques de santos, that use music and dance to incite spirit possession and provided explanations of the myths and practices associated with the orishas, Santeria’s deities.
Lam had met Aimé Césaire, the founder of Négritude, during a brief stay in Martinique before landing in Cuba. Their close friendship, together with Cabrera’s guidance and Alejo Carpentier’s insistence that Afro-Cuban religions were fundamental to magic realism, shaped Lam’s efforts to, as he put it, “represent the spirit of the negroes in the situation in which they were.” Lam lamented that his island peers exoticized Black Cubans and that the country’s flourishing entertainment industry commercialized Black Cuban culture, famously saying that “I decided that my painting would never be the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs. I refused to paint cha-cha-cha.” Though he himself was not a believer, he saw the syncretic faiths developed by Black Cubans during the nineteenth century as expressions of an ethos of resistance against slavery and colonial oppression. The task he set for himself was to visualize that philosophical stance.
His oil painting Anamu (1942) features a figure with a crescent-shaped, masklike face and protruding breasts framed by large leaves. In this painting Lam begins to introduce the island’s vegetation and belief systems into his work; the title refers to a regional plant that is used in Santeria for ritual cleansing and is associated with Osaín, the deity who governs the secrets of nature. Soon after, in his most celebrated painting, La jungla, Cuba’s tropical colors and exuberant plant life burst into view. The work’s four main figures, painted in shades of blue, green, orange, and red, are enmeshed with stalks of sugarcane, evoking the island’s plantations. The figures’ masklike faces (again crescent-shaped and seeming to be “worn”) stare at the viewer, and three pairs of exposed buttocks give the painting an erotic charge. Necks and hands merge with plants, and fruits that resemble breasts (or vice versa) protrude from both the figures and the cane. A small horned head appears among the large feet at bottom left, and a seemingly disembodied light-skinned hand appears at top right holding a pair of scissors.
Unlike the figures that float against monochromatic backgrounds in Lam’s earlier works, La jungla’s bodies merge with a landscape that fills the canvas but lacks depth. Much has been written about how the painting evokes the history of slavery in Cuba and the exploitation of Afro-Cuban women by the entertainment industries of the Republican era. Critics have also suggested that the scissors symbolically sever the painting from European influence. I would say that these interpretations diminish the symbolic dimension of the painting’s title. Cuba has mountains, beaches, and forests, but it does not have jungles. La jungla in Spanish refers to the thick vegetation found in other regions of the world. It also signifies primal instincts, fertility, and areas outside of social control. Rather than treat the work like a history painting about Cuba, I would suggest that Lam sought to represent the vitalism at the heart of Afro-Cuban religious belief. In the mythology of Santeria, the dead walk among us, the past, present, and future are intertwined, and the wilderness is where the orishas reside. La jungla evokes the spirit world brought from Africa by a people who worked Cuba’s cane fields, a formidable collective consciousness in which nature is a divine force.
Through 1943 Lam continued to incorporate the island’s foliage and bright colors in paintings such as Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du carrefour (The Somber Malembo, God of the Crossroads), Omi Obini, and Mofumbe, but starting in 1944 the tropical backgrounds recede and his palette grows somber. He shifted away from botanical detail to avoid the seductive exoticism he saw in Cuban popular culture and the work of other island-based artists such as Mario Carreño and Uver Solís. The hybrid figures he began to paint that year float in dark backgrounds: human torsos with breasts and exaggerated extremities have animal heads; horses abound; horned and winged creatures peer out at us with beady eyes. In some of the pen-and-ink drawings he made during a trip to Haiti in 1946 his figures are fish, while in another the figure appears to be a two-headed winged beast holding a spear and standing on a pair of enlarged hands.
The paintings of the late 1940s combine references to Christian, Santeria, and Chinese symbology. Femme-cheval (Horse-Woman, 1948), one of his many oil paintings of this hybrid figure, displays a two-headed, heavily outlined female against a brown background. One hand holds the end of a beard hanging from the bottom of the horse’s blackened face on the left, while another holds one of the three small egg-shaped figures representing Eleguá, the trickster god of the crossroads. Two breasts emerge from the mane of the second, smaller beige-and-black horse head on the right. The horse-woman evokes spirit possession—in Santeria the possessed is often described as having been “mounted”—and recalls Surrealism’s fascination with human-bestial crossbreeds as representations of primal energies. Lam’s attraction to horses might also have been influenced by Chinese culture’s reverence for the animal, which he first learned of from his Chinese father and later through his study of Chinese philosophy books that he found in Cuba in the 1940s.
The last major work that Lam created in Cuba was Grande composition (1949), an expansive oil-and-charcoal painting on paper that MoMA recently acquired. It is filled with his favorite symbols—horses and bare-breasted women with African masks for faces—and his characteristically long, sharp lines imbue those forms with dynamism. Three main figures in shades of light brown spread across the surface, with two additional partial torsos and several smaller figures being held by or extending from the larger ones. The background is entirely black and gray. A horse with two elongated, masklike heads stands on the left; a woman’s breasts, arms, and head hang upside down from its tail. Another figure in the middle of the painting has a horse’s lower body and an upper body made of two diamonds, one bearing the face of a Cyclops, with two arms holding birds and an Eleguá. On the right the third figure, a woman holding a large talisman in one hand, has a mask face and a third breast. Césaire described Lam’s mode of painting as a “cargo of revolt,” a metaphor that recasts slave ship cargo as a potentially rebellious force. In 1963 Césaire arranged for the painting to serve as the backdrop for the inaugural reading of his play The Tragedy of King Christophe, about Henri Christophe, the formerly enslaved man who after Haiti’s independence pronounced himself king and then descended into despotism.
Lam and Césaire’s friendship was long-lasting, and their collaborations were many. Césaire’s focus on the brutal impact of colonialism and his insistence on reclaiming Black consciousness informed Lam’s sense of artistic purpose. Their relationship had a profound influence on both of their creative lives. Since meeting Lam, Césaire recalled in discussions with Daniel Maximin,
I have been writing without rules, as one relates a dream without having understood it, I make paintings on the sheet as Wifredo makes poetry on canvas, without subservience, without a spectator. I erupt without having made any appointment.
On view at MoMA are the illustrations that Lam drew for the Spanish translation of Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1943). At the end of the exhibition several of Césaire’s poems from moi, laminaire… (i, laminaria…, 1982) appear together with etchings from Lam’s series Annonciation (1969–1982). In those prints, Lam revises the Christian story of the archangel Gabriel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she will bear the Son of God; his versions include scenes in which Mary asks the orishas for protection. These deities appear as hybrid figures, drawn with exquisitely fine detail and set against blended backgrounds of black, red, and ocher.
Lam’s eleven years in Cuba were transformative, but owing to political instability on the island and his divorce from his second wife he relocated to Europe permanently in 1952, first to Paris and then to Albissola Marina on the Italian Riviera. He continued to paint, albeit at a slower rate as the years passed, and he experimented with ceramics, creating vessels and plates emblazoned with his surreal creatures. In 1956 he traveled to Cuba to create a black-and-white mosaic mural for the new headquarters of the national medical insurance company. He returned again in 1963, invited by the Cuban writer and revolutionary Carlos Franqui, and discovered that his house, along with the art and personal library he’d left behind, had been confiscated by the newly formed Ministry of Recovery of Misappropriated Assets.
Although he was never able to get his property back, he agreed to use his connections to other artists abroad, including Picasso, Joan Miró, and Alexander Calder, to garner international support for the Cuban government; in 1967 he persuaded those artists and others to join him in painting a mural for the Salón de Mayo, an originally Parisian exhibition that was held that July in Havana. The mural was supposed to celebrate the revolutionary character of collective engagement. Lam visited Cuba again in the 1970s and in 1980, before his death in 1982. He never publicly criticized the Cuban Revolution; like many other left-leaning European intellectuals of his generation, he looked on the government’s socialist goals favorably and did not address the repressive practices of the regime. One of the island’s most important cultural centers is named after him.
The scale of the show at MoMA allows viewers to appreciate the depth and intensity of Lam’s experimentation with visual language. The curators have also achieved an extraordinary feat in gathering the many fragile and rarely seen works that were kept in numerous private collections scattered across three continents. Sadly, what is missing from this majestic survey are the paintings and drawings that the Cuban government owns and refused to loan, apparently out of concern that they would be seized by US courts owing to claims by Lam’s estate, which has been trying to recover property confiscated by the Cuban revolutionary government.
Although the curatorial framing of the exhibition is quite thorough in its acknowledgment of the influences that shaped Lam, the emphasis on his family background and early influences at times feels overbearing, as if his mixed ethnicity and childhood experiences determined his artistic vision. Like most Cuban artists of his generation, Lam had a decidedly Eurocentric early education—he “discovered” African art and Black consciousness when he was far from home, as an adult. Near the end of his life, he gave an interview to the Cuban art critic Gerardo Mosquera in which he offered his own appraisal of the benefits of his academic training and his accomplishments:
I did succeed in becoming a polemical representative of the Third World within European culture, even though Europe had earlier dominated that culture. I was able to speak in a language that turned out to be a lucid one. If a young untrained Black person had come along painting these things, the Europeans would almost certainly have paid no attention to him, because he did not have the skills or instruments to transpose those contents. Yet, I could do it, because I had studied European art very deeply.
Lam’s cosmopolitanism, his commitment to experimentation, his intellectual curiosity, and his extraordinary ability to synthesize ideas and forms from different cultures enabled him to make a unique contribution to modernism.
English (US) · 