Lam at MAM

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 — 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 — deities — are supposed to “ride” 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,” 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. “In Cuba Lam was a second-class citizen,” 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 Miami’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.

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