Wifredo Lam

The Cuban-born painter Wifredo Lam combined elements of his Afro-Caribbean heritage, academic training in Spain, exposure to avant-garde art in Europe, and abiding interest in African cultures throughout his oeuvre. Moving between the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States, he came into contact with nearly every historical figure associated with Cubism and Surrealism and the postwar avant-garde. He assembled an impressive collection of modern art through his contacts with artists, and also purchased a significant grouping of African sculptures and masks.

The son of a Cantonese-born father who had immigrated to Cuba in the 1860s and a Cuban mother with African and Spanish heritage, Wifredo Oscar de la Concepcion Lam Yam y Castilla was raised in the coastal town of Sagua La Grande. From 1916 to 1923, Lam studied painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Havana. He was awarded a grant to pursue study in Madrid, where he began training in 1923 with Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, a former teacher of Salvador Dalí. He remained in Spain for fourteen years, and became involved in anti-Fascist political activities in the 1930s. In 1936, he joined the Republican forces in the fight against the Fascist regime led by Francisco Franco.

Living in Paris from 1938 to 1941, Lam came into contact with artists and writers in the orbit of Surrealism, including André Breton, Victor Brauner, Oscar Dominguez, and Roberto Matta. The sculptor Manolo introduced him to Pablo Picasso. The two men became lifelong collaborators and friends: Picasso proclaimed Lam a lost “cousin” with whom he shared formal concerns and a mutual interest in myth and history. Lam, in turn, was moved by the African artifacts he encountered in Picasso’s collection, and would begin to collect African art himself in the 1940s. While in Paris, Lam also met writer and ethnographer Michael Leiris. Picasso introduced Lam to the gallerist Pierre Loeb, who mounted the artist’s first solo exhibition in Paris at the Galerie Pierre in 1939. Lam and Picasso’s work was exhibited together at the Perls Galleries in New York later the same year.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Lam relocated to Marseilles in 1940, staying at the Villa Air-Bel with Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Serge, and several other artists and intellectuals declared subversives by the Vichy regime. During this time, he illustrated Breton’s lyric poem Fata Morgana (1940). Lam was able to return to Cuba in 1942 before traveling to Martinique, Haiti, and the United States. In 1941–42, Breton secured Lam a contract with the gallerist Pierre Matisse, who exhibited his work in New York in two solo exhibitions in November 1942 and June 1944. After the latter, curator James Johnson Sweeney purchased Lam’s The Jungle (1943) for The Museum of Modern Art. The artist himself arrived in New York in 1945, where he befriended artists Marcel Duchamp, Arshile Gorky, Roberto Matta, Robert Motherwell, Isamu Noguchi, and Yves Tanguy. In January 1946 Lam’s work was shown at the Art Center in Port au Prince, Haiti and accompanied by a series of lectures given by Breton. Lam returned to New York in 1947–48 and traveled throughout New England to see Tanguy and Kay Sage in Woodbury, Connecticut; Gorky in Sherman, Connecticut; Pierre and Teeny Matisse in Califon, New Jersey; Matta and Patricia (later Mrs. Pierre Matisse) in Palisades, New Jersey; Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner in Springs, East Hampton; Jeanne Raynal in Bangor, Maine; and Alexander Calder in Roxbury, Connecticut, who gave Lam a mobile (location unknown).

The artist returned to Paris later that year, and participated in Le surréalisme en 1947 exhibition organized by Breton and Marcel Duchamp. He traveled to London, where he met art historian Roland Penrose and collector Peter Watson, and visited his old friend Picasso in Paris. Through Breton, Lam also befriended the young Danish artist Asger Jorn. Lam regularly visited Jorn in Albissola, Italy, before purchasing his own home in the small Italian coastal town in 1961.

In the decades after the war, Lam continued to assemble an important collection of African art, beginning with the purchase of eight African sculptures and masks in Paris in 1946. In the 1950s, he also collected several masks from New Guinea. The artist displayed his ethnographic artifacts in dialogue with his own paintings throughout his home. In addition to collecting, Lam also acted as an intermediary on behalf of Breton, helping to facilitate the sale of works from his collection to private individuals and institutions in Latin America, such as the 1954 sale of Yves Tanguy’s Pollens (1929) to the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.