The Brooklyn Rail

In his 1949 manifesto “On the Marvelous Real in America,” the Cuban author Alejo Carpentier described Wifredo Lam as a quintessentially American artist:

And it had to be a painter from the Americas, the Cuban Wifredo Lam, who showed us the magic of tropical vegetation, the uncontrolled Creation of Forms in our nature—with all its metamorphoses and symbioses—in monumental paintings whose expression is unique in contemporary art.

Carpentier was convinced that European culture was in decline. But Wifredo Lam’s art was itself the product of a sustained dialogue with that very same, supposedly moribund, tradition. Between 1923 and 1940, Lam received a potent infusion of European artistic technique that, as the retrospective currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art demonstrates, decisively shaped his practice even as he returned to Cuba and reengaged his Afro-Caribbean roots.

Lam lived in Spain for almost fifteen years, an academic painter gradually becoming aware of modernism. Only in 1938, when he left Spain for Paris—for Picasso, specifically—did Lam become a truly twentieth-century artist. Especially liberating for Lam was Picasso’s 1907 Demoiselles d’Avignon, but what Lam saw was not what Picasso saw. For Picasso, the African or Iberian masks in his painting were inspiring, decontextualized relics of “primitive” art. Lam’s family, by contrast, had a relationship with the images of the syncretic religion Santería through his godmother Matonica Wilson, herself a priestess. So, Lam’s voyage to Picasso was also a voyage to his own past. But it was a long, complex trip.

The Museum of Modern Art’s grand, comprehensive show of some 130 items—paintings, works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrations, and ceramics—traces fifty years of Lam’s artistic production, from the 1920s until the 1970s. His story opens with a 1925 portrait of a young man in the style of fin-de-siècle decadence. The effete gentleman, probably Lam himself, is decked out in a Japanese kimono and sits in a bower of roses with the setting sun behind him. The painting could be an icon for an entire era in Spanish-American culture, a revival of art accomplished through the assimilation of European models.

By 1938, Lam’s style had evolved: a new self-portrait shows a fair-skinned young man with a Picasso-like face standing in a setting that evokes Henri Matisse. The background might derive from Spanish tiles, and the pseudo-architectonic structure shows Lam experimenting with perspective. He is making giant steps toward himself. His Douleur de l’Espagne (1938), probably painted in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, reflects both his political concerns—the Spanish Republic he fought for was collapsing—and his artistic development. The two women Lam depicts have mask-like faces and bodies that are heavily outlined and geometric. Le Repos du Modéle (1938) not only shows Lam’s affinity for the female body but his assimilation of Cubist stylization. This would be his dominant approach until 1940.

The break comes in Lam’s Marseille period, between 1940 and 1941, when he illustrates André Breton’s long poem “Fata Morgana.” The illustrations, like the drawings shown here that he produced during the same period for Surrealist games of “Exquisite Corpse,” are spidery, the figures more fantastic than human, constantly fusing and transmuting. Lam is now exploring a reality of his own creation, one that will culminate in Cuba with the astounding La Jungla (1942–43). Lam’s return to Cuba after eighteen years put him back in touch with Santería and with the tropics. The result is a large-scale oil and charcoal painting on paper, with its stylized stand of sugar cane and its mysterious deities variously posing or confronting the viewer. The figures, some of which are at least partially female, all enmesh themselves with the plant world. On the left, we find Lam’s trademark, the femme-cheval: in Santería, when a deity (orisha) possesses an adept, this spiritual relationship is represented as a horse (and, by implication, a rider). But Lam’s figure is ambiguous, a combination of masculine and feminine power. This is not a jungle but a sinister sugar cane plantation, perhaps representing Lam’s return to social criticism in a denunciation of Cuba’s monoculture. Here the garden of Eden is transformed into a garden of horrors.

From this point on, Lam becomes the artist he was truly meant to be, combining elements from Santería with his own liberated imagination. His tremendous When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream (1955), takes us back to the image of the artist himself. But having evolved from imitation and assimilation to complete artistic freedom, this is a radically transfigured form of self-portraiture, the only kind the now-mature Lam could produce. A geometrized figure reclines on a bed, its face a crescent-moon mask and one foot a hoof. The sleeper could be Lam or a Santería deity, though the dreams of such beings are surely beyond human comprehension.