Wifredo Lam: Painter, Printmaker, Sculptor, and Ceramist
International Conference on Wifredo Lam, Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, Havana, Cuba, Dec. 2002
Lecture by Julia P. Herzberg. All images are reproduced for non-commercial scholarly and educational purposes only, in accordance with fair use. Copyright remains with the respective artists, estates, and rights holders.
Wifredo Lam had a long and prolific career as a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and ceramist. He contributed to modernism in very special ways. As an insider, he embraced Afro-Cuban subjects at a time when few artists in the western world were exploring similar paths. Lam, master of line, form, and color, learned the lessons of cubism and expanded the parameters of surrealism. He evolved a modernist language which included elements of both [negotiated between] figuration and abstraction. His works acknowledge such human emotions as pain, suffering, and loss; he referenced war, independence movements, and spirituality. Lam’s art communicates transcultural traditions rooted in the African diaspora not only in Cuba and the Caribbean, but in many countries in the world.
My talk today is directed to the nonspecialist who has come to this symposium. However, I hope to communicate to both the specialist and non-specialist some of the issues and areas of study that have engaged my attention for some fifteen years during which time I focused on the years in Marseilles and Havana. Those include an iconographical analysis of his work, a study of the histories of Surrealism in Europe and the New World, the interconnections between Surrealism and the early New York School, social and cultural histories of slavery in the Americas, social and cultural histories of WW II and its aftermath, articles and reviews in Havana (Diario de la Marina Alcance a la Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí, Estudios Afrocubanos, Gaceta del Caribe, Origenes: Revista de Arte y Literatura) and New York newspapers and journals (VVV, View, Hémispheres,) in the 1940s, the Matisse archives on Lam and other artists, study of Afro-Cuban religions, especially Santeria, folkways and traditions, interviews with people close to Lam in the 1940s, and the general literature of the artist, including the latest monographic study by Lowery S. Sims. All of this to attempt to situate the life and work of a complex artist within the larger social and cultural history of his time.
We begin with the artist’s formal and thematic development in Spain and France between 1924 and 1941, and then the artist’s work from the Havana years from mid-1941 to 1952, considering the dynamics of artistic and cultural arena here in Havana as well as in New York and Paris. During those years, the artist stood at the crossroads of some of the most inventive directions that redefined art in the 1940s in the Western Hemisphere. Lam’s expression of an Afro-Cuban worldview was a model for future generations of artists who wished to express their transcultural histories in a visual language.
As many of you here know Wifredo Lam moved from Sagua la Grande to Havana in 1916. He studied at the [Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura] San Alejandro Academy from 1918 to 1923, under two well-known academic Cuban artists [Armando Menocal and Leopoldo Romañach]. Lam received a scholarship from “the municipality of Sagua la Grande to study in Europe. That scholarship was endowed by a local merchant who specified that the money go to a young person of color in need.” The young art student arrived in Spain in 1923 and stayed there until 1938. Lam’s Self-Portrait illustrates the academic style he was developing at the time. During his fourteen years of residence in Spain, Lam lived, studied, and visited many cities, including Madrid (24-25) Cuenca (25-29) Madrid again from 29-31; Leon (‘31-’32) Madrid from 33-36), Caldes de Montbui, (sanatorium ‘36-37), Valencia (visited ‘36), and Barcelona (July ‘37-May ’38). During his Spanish period, the young artist searched for his voice. He worked with many styles influenced by the academic work of Europeans masters as well as the avant-garde directions of Dali, Picasso, Gris, André Masson, and Henri Matisse. Lam met many European and Latin American intellectuals [Federico Garcia Lorca, Alejo Carpentier, Carl Einstein, the anthropologist, Nicolás Guillén, the Afro-Cuban poet who had just published his first Afro-Cuban poems, Motivos, Valle Inclán, Miguel Angel Asturias] who were sympathizers of the Republican government. He was also connected to several political organizations, including the Organización Anti-Fascistas.
Illustration #2: Photo of Balbina Barrera and Lam, Madrid, 1936
When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Lam went to work at a weapons factory to support the Republican cause. After six months of overwork, Lam became sick and was sent to a sanatorium in Caldes de Montbui, near Barcelona. (He probably had amoebic dysentery.) During his recuperation, Lam made a short trip to Valencia, the temporary capital of the Spanish Republic. He was invited by the Director of Fine Arts (Josep Renau) to do a painting on the theme of the war. The painting was to have been included in the Spanish Pavilion, which was being completed for the Paris World’s Fair [1937].
Illustration #3: La Guerra Civil, 1937
La Guerra Civil was Lam’s first painting, among many that addressed the subject war. As can be noted, Lam adopted a strong palette and a tentative cubist structure in which the figures are compressed into a single plane. In terms of the subject, we are reminded of Picasso’s Guernica, a work that protested the bombing of that Basque town by the Italian allies of the Spanish Nationalist forces.
Illustration #4 Self-Portrait, 1938, gouache and watercolor
Lam left the sanatorium in Caldes de Montbui in July 1937 to live in Barcelona, where he became part of the artistic community. He joined artists’ tertulias and participated in a painting and sculpture section of the Ateneo Socialista, which provided him with access to the library, a cafeteria, and work sessions with a live model. Much of Lam’s Barcelona work shows that he was looking closely at the decorative patterns of Matisse. Self-Portrait is one such example. According to Maria-Lluisa Borràs, who has exhaustively studied the Spanish years, Lam purchased a book on Matisse that year. Lam depicted the corner of his Madrid attic studio from memory while depicting the tiles and wall made of colored glass from his Barcelona apartment.
Because of the deteriorating situation Lam had to leave Barcelona on May 1, 1938 for Paris, where he remained until when the Germans invaded in June 1941.
Illustration #5: Douleur de l’Espagne, 1938, gouache on paper.
In Douleur de l’Espagne, 1938, the figures of the two women interlock; one grasps her neck, the other covers her face. Their body language expresses the anxiety the general population must have felt in the winter of 1938 when Barcelona was heavily bombed. The gouache, probably painted in Paris after the artist’s arrival, seems hauntingly expressive today, some sixty years later. Most unfortunately, recurring images of war victims still resonate in our political arena.
Illustration #6: Photo of Pierre Loeb
Through a letter of introduction from an artist friend in Barcelona, Lam met Picasso. The Spanish artist introduced him to a group of avant-garde artists in this city and also to the modernist gallery dealer, Pierre Loeb. Loeb gave Lam his first solo show in 1939, and his first show back in Paris in 1946 after World War II. I might add that Douleur de l’Espagne was among the works exhibited.
Illustration #7: Madame Lumumba, attributed to 1938, gouache on paper
During Lam’s two years in Paris he painted many single figure subjects while continuing to incorporate some of Matisse’s lessons as well as those of Picasso. He also responded to African art, as noted in Madame Lumumba, (not s/d), a work on the cover of the recent exhibition catalogue Lam Metis. (I might note that the title was added after the Patrice Lumumba’s disappearance in 1961), which indicates Lam’s support of the Congo’s independence movement. This iconography of this figure is clearly based on African sculpture. Although Lam had seen African art in Madrid in the museum, he began to respond to its forms in a more specific way, in part due to the tremendous interest in African art on the part of European modernist artists. [I might also add that there was much African art in shops and galleries in Paris in those years, as has been recalled by Helena Benitez.] The European avant-garde artists appropriated elements of African art in redefining their own styles, and in so doing they legitimized African art, making it easier for young African and African diaspora artists and intellectuals to pursue their own explorations of their mother-father cultures. (Along these lines we recall Leopold Sengor, writer & president of Senegal who also studied in France.)
Illustration 8: Photo of Wifredo Lam and André Breton, years later
In June 1940 when he Germans invaded Paris, Lam managed to reach Marseilles. There in the Vichy occupied city, he was reunited with Helena Holzer, the German-born biologist with whom he had been living in Paris. The two received money from the Centre Américain de Secours, directed by the American Varian Fry. The Centre Américain de Secours was the precursor of the International Rescue Committee. While awaiting passage out of war-torn Europe, Lam and Holzer and a group of artists and writers, including André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Oscar Dominguez, Max Ernst, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner, among others, met regularly at Air-Bel, Varian Fry’s home outside of Marseilles. In order to distract themselves from the deteriorating war conditions, André Breton, the father of literary surrealism, organized a variety of parlor games, which included collective drawings intended to emphasize the role of chance and improvisation.
Illustration 9: Collage Collective, 1941 by Breton , O. Dominguez, W. Lam
Lam, who became part of that group, was invited to illustrate Breton’s poem Fata Morgana.
Illustration #10: Wifredo Lam, Fata Morgana, 1941
Here is an example of one of Lam’s many drawings for Fata Morgana. The artist worked within a cubist spatial structure and adopted a Surrealist language of hybrid forms, unconventional configurations, which appeared to spring from the imagination rather than from empirical reality. The line drawing reveals a complex figure combining elements of a woman, a child, a horse’s head, plant and animal forms, and the moon, images that recur in Lam’s early Havana work.
Illustration #11: Lam, Cover Illustration for Aimé Césaire’s Retorno al país, 1943
On March 25, 1941 Lam and Holzer, together with about 350 artists and intellectuals, boarded a freighter bound for Martinique. During a 40-day stopover in Martinique, André Breton introduced Aimé Césaire and his wife Suzanne to Lam. Césaire, a teacher and writer, had also studied in France, had returned to his country due to the war. He and his wife had just published their first issue of Tropiques: Revue Trimestrielle, a magazine about art, politics, and the négritude movement. Lam’s work appeared in that magazine several times during the ‘40s. During their holdover in Martinique, the group also spent time with André Masson who was very impressed with the dense, topical vegetation in that country, so much so that he later did a large body of work based on drawings he made there.
Illustration #12: André Masson, TITLE, DATE
Here is Masson’s XX inspired by the vegetation in Martinique. The French artist used a Surrealist language to merge one form of life with another. It is interesting in this context to consider similar explorations of Lam and Masson’s tropical landscape of this approximate period.
From Martinique Lam and Holzer, together with the Bretons and Andre Masson and his family went to Santo Domingo. The Bretons and Massons got visas for New York. Lam and Holzer went to Cuba.
Illustration # 13: Photo of Lydia Cabrera w/ iyalochas (priestesses) at the sacred lagoon of San José, Matanzas, 1956
When Lam returned to Cuba, he had been away for more than eighteen years. He was faced with very different cultural, political, and social conditions than those he had become accustomed to in Europe. Cuba was conservative, provincial, and the modern art scene was very small. Nevertheless, Lam formed close friendships with a group of Cuban intellectuals, such as Lydia Cabrera and Alejo Carpentier, and maintained close ties with an extensive network of Surrealist artists and writers in exile throughout the New World during the war years. He participated in national and international exhibitions to the extent that by the time he left Havana in 1952 to live in Paris, he had an international reputation. Lam’s Havana years were among his most productive. In his Cuban capital, the artist hit a new stride.
Illustration # 14, 15: La Chanteuse des poissons (Singer of Fish) 1942 & Installation shot Pierre Matisse Gallery, Nov., 1942
In 1942 alone, Lam produced more than a hundred works. André Breton introduced Lam’s work to an extended circle of surrealist artists in exile in New York as well as in other countries in the Americas. As a result of Breton’s largesse, Lam’s work appeared in two exhibitions in New York in 1942. La Chanteuse des poissons was included in “First Papers of Surrealism,” the first Surrealist exhibition organized by the French Relief Societies in New York on behalf of the war effort. Lam also had his first solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, where the Cuban artist exhibited regularly through the early ‘50s.