Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam was one of the great painters of the twentieth century, and among the first to carry the language of European modernism beyond its borders and return it transformed. Of Chinese, African and Spanish descent, a friend of Picasso and a companion of the Surrealists, he forged a visual world entirely his own, peopled with hybrid, mask-like figures drawn from the Afro-Cuban spirituality of his childhood. His masterpiece, The Jungle, hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his work, spanning three continents and six decades, remains a landmark of modern art.

Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla was born on 8 December 1902 in Sagua la Grande, in the sugar-growing heart of Cuba, the eighth child of Lam-Yam, a Cantonese immigrant, and Ana Serafina Castilla, of mixed African and Spanish ancestry. The lush nature of his birthplace marked him deeply from early childhood. In 1916 he moved with part of his family to Havana.

At the age of twenty-one he left for Madrid to train as a painter, and Spain would be his home for some fifteen years. They were years of profound personal loss, for he lost both his first wife, Eva Piriz, and their son, and of political commitment, for he fought for the Republic during the Civil War. It was there, too, that he encountered the work of Picasso, whose 1936 exhibition he would later describe as a shock.

In May 1938 Lam arrived in Paris bearing a letter of introduction from the sculptor Manolo Hugué to Picasso. The meeting proved decisive. Picasso took him up warmly and introduced him to his circle, among them Braque, Matisse, Miró, Léger, Éluard and Kahnweiler, as well as the dealer Pierre Loeb, whose Galerie Pierre gave Lam his first solo exhibition in 1939. In Paris he also came into contact with André Breton and the Surrealists, including Victor Brauner, Óscar Domínguez and Roberto Matta.

With the German advance of 1940, Lam fled south to Marseille, where Breton and his circle had gathered at the Villa Air-Bel while awaiting passage out of Europe. There he produced a series of ink drawings that set the tone for his hybrid figures, among them his illustrations for Breton's poem Fata Morgana. In March 1941 he sailed on the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle alongside Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss. A stop in Martinique brought him the friendship of Aimé Césaire, whose Cahier d'un retour au pays natal he would illustrate in its Spanish edition in 1943.

His return to Cuba, after almost two decades away, opened the most celebrated chapter of his career. In Havana, in the company of the ethnographers Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera, he rediscovered the Afro-Cuban heritage that Europe had taught him to see anew, and he began to experiment freely, from thinned oils to heavy impasto, leaving areas of canvas bare. Breton had secured him a contract with Pierre Matisse, who showed his work in New York in 1942 and 1944. The Jungle, painted in the winter of 1942-43, shows figures with crescent faces rising from the sugarcane, an image of Cuba's African heritage and plantation history. Its acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art sealed his international reputation.

In 1952 Lam returned to Europe, dividing his life between Paris and, from 1961, a house in Albissola Marina on the Ligurian coast, where he had first come to visit his friend Asger Jorn. The Italian years saw a bold turn towards abstraction, notably in the Brousse series of 1958, before a renewed figuration of tangled, elongated forms in the 1960s. He also explored ceramics, sculpture and printmaking, and assembled an important collection of African and Oceanic art, displayed in dialogue with his own paintings. He married the Swedish artist Lou Laurin in 1960. Lam died in Paris on 11 September 1982, having created, in his own words and those of his admirers, a painting that belonged at once to Africa, to Europe and to the Americas.