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www.ambiente.us MARCH / MARZO 2008
Works of ‘Cuba’s greatest artist’ come to Miami for the first time
By Cynthia Archbold
“Femme Assise,� one of Wifredo Lam's Femme Cheval portraits, with overt reference to Santeria.
When you see the early paintings of Cuban surrealist
Wifredo Lam, you think of surrealist artists Pablo Picasso
and André Breton. When you learn about Lam’s
adventurous life in Cuba, Spain, Paris, New York and
Italy from the 1930s to the 1960s, you think of Ernest
Hemingway living in Paris and Spain among modernist
artists and writers, around the time of A Moveable Feast.
“Lam is Cuba’s greatest artist,� says Rene Morales, the
curator who put together the Miami Art Museum’s Wifredo
Lam in North America exhibit, which opened Friday.
The MAM show, which runs through May 18, marks a
historic occasion. Lam is one of the world’s most
celebrated 20th-century Cuban artists — a friend,
colleague and artistic collaborator of modernist icons
Picasso and Breton, with paintings hanging in the most
important galleries and museums in North America and
Europe. Yet Lam’s work has never been displayed in a
large Miami exhibition until now, because Lam supported
Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution.
Now Wifredo Lam in North America reveals how much
we have been missing. The exhibition contains 60
paintings, revealing the entire scope of Lam’s development
as an artist. The works reflect a young painter molded in the European tradition, painting in the cubist and
surrealist styles of his colleagues in Paris, then breaking from them, creating a unique symbolic vocabulary â
€” fierce and bold compositions depicting the deities of Afro-Cuban mythology.
“In surrealism and also in cubism and in European modernism, there’s an interest in ‘primitivism,
’ this notion of returning to a primal state before the influence of Western civilization,� Morales says.
But Lam’s Afro-Cuban primitivism exudes wild energy and transcends those artistic movements, setting
him apart from the Parisian school artists of the 1930s and ’40s. Lam embraced the imagery and
mythology of Santeria, a faith prevalent among blacks in the Caribbean that grew out of slavery and
colonialism, combining the worship of African deities with Catholic saints.
During a private tour, Morales points out one in Lam’s series of “Femme Cheval� portraits,
depicting a woman with a horse’s head, symbolizing an important concept in Santeria: the way orishas â
€” deities — are supposed to “rideâ€� the worshipper, who falls into a trance in a state of possession
by the spirit. “The woman is being possessed, or ‘being ridden by the spirit,’ which is a holy state,â
€� Morales explains. “It’s Africa invading European tradition, the colonized Afro-Caribbean coming
back to haunt the colonizers.�
Lam was born in Cuba in 1902 to a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother, and his childhood was
grounded in Santeria. In fact, Lam’s godmother, Mantonica Wilson, was a santera priestess who took
him to secret ceremonies when he was a boy.
In 1923, Lam left Cuba to study art in Spain and to escape entrenched racism. “Although he was one of
the youngest and most talented graduates of Havana’s Academy of Fine Art, he did not belong to his
country’s cultural and economic elite,� art critic Valerie Fletcher wrote in an exhibition guide about his
work.
Photographs of Lam — provided by his son Eskil Lam, who is in Miami to launch the exhibition — reveal a
tall, exotic-looking man with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, a broad nose, curly hair and dark skin. â
€œIn Cuba Lam was a second-class citizen,â€� Fletcher wrote.
In Spain, Lam studied painting in the Western European tradition, winning a scholarship at the Museo del
Prado in Madrid. That’s when his life began to evoke Hemingway’s hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Lam fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side before escaping to France in 1937. Then he went
to Paris and met Picasso, who welcomed him to the City of Light and introduced him to Breton and other
surrealist painters and writers.
In 1940, Lam went to Marseilles, where he rejoined other surrealist painters. When he returned to Cuba in
1941, he was appalled to rediscover the racism and colonialism that plagued his youth, and embraced the
Caribbean myths that influenced his soul.
In his surrealist-style paintings, thoroughly grounded in the European tradition, Lam appropriated these
mythologies and painted their deities overtly to rebel against Catholicism, colonialism and art of the Western
tradition, subverting its imagery.
One of his most famous works from 1943, “Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du Carrefour,� (Dark Malembo,
God of the Crossroads), is a painting of Malembo, a Santeria god, depicted with horns, one of the first
surrealist works to celebrate the artist’s unconscious and coinciding with the black pride movement
taking place in the 1940s throughout the Caribbean, Morales says.
What bullfighting represented to Hemingway — an almost religious and primal tradition ritualizing a
masculine code of honor — Santeria and other African religions were to Lam, instilling his later
compositions with power. His increasingly aggressive, raw and brutal images convey anger and ethnic and
racial pride.
One of Lam’s most famous works, painted while he lived in Cuba and included in the MAM exhibition, is
the 1950 “La Rumeur de la Terre� (Rumblings of the Earth) from the Guggenheim Museum — a dark,
apocalyptic work depicting jagged, bony, bird-like creatures (which could be creatures of death or life) floating
up or being hurled down amid daggers, arrows and spikes. The ominous, judgment-day composition
presages the overthrowing of Batista in a Cuban revolution that was to take place in 1959.
Later, Lam divided most of his time between Paris and Italy. In all, he produced 2,400 paintings in his
lifetime, according to his son. He died at the age of 80 in Paris in 1982, but his ashes are buried in Cuba.
More than 20 of his works are on loan from such private art collectors as Rosa de la Cruz, Trudy and Paul
Ceijas, Jorge Perez, and Susana and Alberto Ibarguen. Other pieces are on loan from University of Miamiâ
€™s Lowe Art Museum, the Guggenheim in New York and the Hirshhorn and Smithsonian in Washington.
For more information about the exhibit, visit www.miamiartmuseum.org
Copyright © AMBIENTE MAGAZINE. Do not reproduce without citing this source.
Works of ‘Cuba’s greatest artist’ come to Miami for the first time
By Cynthia Archbold
“Femme Assise,� one of Wifredo Lam's Femme Cheval portraits, with overt reference to Santeria.
When you see the early paintings of Cuban surrealist
Wifredo Lam, you think of surrealist artists Pablo Picasso
and André Breton. When you learn about Lam’s
adventurous life in Cuba, Spain, Paris, New York and
Italy from the 1930s to the 1960s, you think of Ernest
Hemingway living in Paris and Spain among modernist
artists and writers, around the time of A Moveable Feast.
“Lam is Cuba’s greatest artist,� says Rene Morales, the
curator who put together the Miami Art Museum’s Wifredo
Lam in North America exhibit, which opened Friday.
The MAM show, which runs through May 18, marks a
historic occasion. Lam is one of the world’s most
celebrated 20th-century Cuban artists — a friend,
colleague and artistic collaborator of modernist icons
Picasso and Breton, with paintings hanging in the most
important galleries and museums in North America and
Europe. Yet Lam’s work has never been displayed in a
large Miami exhibition until now, because Lam supported
Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution.
Now Wifredo Lam in North America reveals how much
we have been missing. The exhibition contains 60
paintings, revealing the entire scope of Lam’s development
as an artist. The works reflect a young painter molded in the European tradition, painting in the cubist and
surrealist styles of his colleagues in Paris, then breaking from them, creating a unique symbolic vocabulary â
€” fierce and bold compositions depicting the deities of Afro-Cuban mythology.
“In surrealism and also in cubism and in European modernism, there’s an interest in ‘primitivism,
’ this notion of returning to a primal state before the influence of Western civilization,� Morales says.
But Lam’s Afro-Cuban primitivism exudes wild energy and transcends those artistic movements, setting
him apart from the Parisian school artists of the 1930s and ’40s. Lam embraced the imagery and
mythology of Santeria, a faith prevalent among blacks in the Caribbean that grew out of slavery and
colonialism, combining the worship of African deities with Catholic saints.
During a private tour, Morales points out one in Lam’s series of “Femme Cheval� portraits,
depicting a woman with a horse’s head, symbolizing an important concept in Santeria: the way orishas â
€” deities — are supposed to “rideâ€� the worshipper, who falls into a trance in a state of possession
by the spirit. “The woman is being possessed, or ‘being ridden by the spirit,’ which is a holy state,â
€� Morales explains. “It’s Africa invading European tradition, the colonized Afro-Caribbean coming
back to haunt the colonizers.�
Lam was born in Cuba in 1902 to a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother, and his childhood was
grounded in Santeria. In fact, Lam’s godmother, Mantonica Wilson, was a santera priestess who took
him to secret ceremonies when he was a boy.
In 1923, Lam left Cuba to study art in Spain and to escape entrenched racism. “Although he was one of
the youngest and most talented graduates of Havana’s Academy of Fine Art, he did not belong to his
country’s cultural and economic elite,� art critic Valerie Fletcher wrote in an exhibition guide about his
work.
Photographs of Lam — provided by his son Eskil Lam, who is in Miami to launch the exhibition — reveal a
tall, exotic-looking man with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, a broad nose, curly hair and dark skin. â
€œIn Cuba Lam was a second-class citizen,â€� Fletcher wrote.
In Spain, Lam studied painting in the Western European tradition, winning a scholarship at the Museo del
Prado in Madrid. That’s when his life began to evoke Hemingway’s hero in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Lam fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side before escaping to France in 1937. Then he went
to Paris and met Picasso, who welcomed him to the City of Light and introduced him to Breton and other
surrealist painters and writers.
In 1940, Lam went to Marseilles, where he rejoined other surrealist painters. When he returned to Cuba in
1941, he was appalled to rediscover the racism and colonialism that plagued his youth, and embraced the
Caribbean myths that influenced his soul.
In his surrealist-style paintings, thoroughly grounded in the European tradition, Lam appropriated these
mythologies and painted their deities overtly to rebel against Catholicism, colonialism and art of the Western
tradition, subverting its imagery.
One of his most famous works from 1943, “Le Sombre Malembo, Dieu du Carrefour,� (Dark Malembo,
God of the Crossroads), is a painting of Malembo, a Santeria god, depicted with horns, one of the first
surrealist works to celebrate the artist’s unconscious and coinciding with the black pride movement
taking place in the 1940s throughout the Caribbean, Morales says.
What bullfighting represented to Hemingway — an almost religious and primal tradition ritualizing a
masculine code of honor — Santeria and other African religions were to Lam, instilling his later
compositions with power. His increasingly aggressive, raw and brutal images convey anger and ethnic and
racial pride.
One of Lam’s most famous works, painted while he lived in Cuba and included in the MAM exhibition, is
the 1950 “La Rumeur de la Terre� (Rumblings of the Earth) from the Guggenheim Museum — a dark,
apocalyptic work depicting jagged, bony, bird-like creatures (which could be creatures of death or life) floating
up or being hurled down amid daggers, arrows and spikes. The ominous, judgment-day composition
presages the overthrowing of Batista in a Cuban revolution that was to take place in 1959.
Later, Lam divided most of his time between Paris and Italy. In all, he produced 2,400 paintings in his
lifetime, according to his son. He died at the age of 80 in Paris in 1982, but his ashes are buried in Cuba.
More than 20 of his works are on loan from such private art collectors as Rosa de la Cruz, Trudy and Paul
Ceijas, Jorge Perez, and Susana and Alberto Ibarguen. Other pieces are on loan from University of Miamiâ
€™s Lowe Art Museum, the Guggenheim in New York and the Hirshhorn and Smithsonian in Washington.
For more information about the exhibit, visit www.miamiartmuseum.org
Copyright © AMBIENTE MAGAZINE. Do not reproduce without citing this source.
