Cuba, 1902–23

Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla grew up in Sagua La Grande in the province of sugar canes, Villa Clara. He was of mixed ethnic origin—his father, Yam Lam was a Chinese immigrant and his mother, Ana Serafina Castilla, was the daughter of a former Congolese slave and a Cuban father. His godmother was a Yoruba princess.

In Sagua La Grande, Wifredo was surrounded by many people of African descent that, in the same manner as his own family, combined Catholicism with revered African traditions. His godmother, who worked as a Santería minister, healer and shaman, introduced Wifredo to rites from the African Òrìṣà-religion that had been brought to Cuba from Yorubaland by Nigerian slaves. Later, Wifredo’s contact with African celebrations and spiritual practices turned out to have a profound influence on his artistic imagery.

In 1918, Wifredo was accepted into the Escuela Profesional de Pintura o Escultura Academia de San Alejandro. This residence, during which he participated in several exhibitions at the Salón de Bellas Artes, was crucial for his decision to become an artist.

Spain, 1923–38

In 1923, Wifredo was awarded a scholarship to study art in Europe. At age 21, he left Cuba, travelled to Madrid, and continued his artistic education with Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, the manager of Museo del Prado and teacher to Salvador Dali.

His stay in Europe was originally planned to be of short, but he remained there for almost eighteen years.

In Madrid, he became involved in the ideas and movements of modern art. He spent many hours at the Museo del Prado where he studied the great masters of Spanish art—Velásquez and Goya. He was, however, more attracted to Bosch and Bruegel the Elder. Just like several of his European colleagues, Wifredo Lam was also attracted to the innovative elements of the then called ‘primitive’ art, what we now know today as classic and historical African art.

France, 1938–41

“When I arrived in Paris, after the fall of the Spanish Republic to the fascists, I began to paint what I felt most deeply […] this strange world started to flow out of me.”

In 1938, Wifredo Lam left Spain with his wife-to-be, Helena Holzer, a German scientist of neurobiology, to settle in Paris. With a letter of recommendation from the sculptor Manolo Huguét, Wifredo Lam visited Picasso in his studio in Rue des Grands-Augustins—a visit that turned out to have a significant influence on Wifredo Lam’s further destiny. Picasso introduced him as his new ‘colleague’ to his friends, Braque, Matisse, Miró, Léger, Eluard, Leiris, Tzara, Khanweiler and Zervos. Wifredo Lam also met the famous art dealer Pierre Loeb, owner of Galerie Pierre in Paris, where Wifredo Lam had his first solo exhibition in 1939.

Shortly before the Germans occupied Paris, Wifredo Lam and Helena Holzer again left the city and travelled through Bordeaux to Marseille, where many of his surrealist friends—Pierre Mabille, René Char, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Oscar Domínguez, André Masson and Benjamin Péret—had already gathered around André Breton in Villa Air-Bel.

Villa Air-Bel was a large country estate, a château, that had been rented by an American relief committee to be used as a temporary residence for intellectuals and political refugees that had to wait for exit visas since they feared the Vichy-government would extradite them to Nazi-Germany. While waiting for his visa, Wifredo Lam illustrated the André Breton poem, “Fata Morgana”, which was censored by the French Vichy-government and labelled revolutionary. Wifredo Lam was also focused on a series of Indian ink drawings that became a starting point for the imagery he would work on in the following years on Cuba.

On the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, a converted freighter that sailed European war refugees to Martinique, André Breton, Wifredo Lam and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as 300 other refugees, left Marseille in 1941 to be transported to the French island in the Caribbean. On their arrival, they were arrested and imprisoned in Trois Îles. After a detention of forty days, Wifredo Lam was released and allowed to travel on to Cuba.

Cuba, 1941–51

After twenty years in Europe, Wifredo Lam again settled in Cuba. Here he found nourishment in the surroundings of his childhood and youth, and he immersed himself deeply into the artistic undergrowth. He rekindled a close connection to his sister Eloisa who, in great detail, explained to him about Afro-Cuban ritual ceremonies. This contact with Afro-Cuban culture developed his art further. He painted more than a hundred paintings, which made 1942 his most productive year during this Cuban period.

At the end of the 1940s, Wifredo Lam divided his time between Europe, Havana and New York. He enjoyed the company of such artists as Noguchi, Hare, Motherwell, Pollock and the Dane, Asger Jorn.

“In the autumn of 1946, Paris was still marked by the drama of the world war. In Palais de Luxembourg, peace is under debate. The Lettriste-movement makes a scandal, the Existentialists put on a show, we, the Surrealists, organise the international surrealist exhibition, and Oscar Domínguez is sentenced and excluded from the movement. It was in this hysterical climate that my friend André Breton introduced me to Asger Jorn at Café de Flore on Boulevard St. Germain des Prés. Breton had brought me there to argue with a Belgian group of revolutionary surrealists.”

After the introduction, Jorn frequently visited Wifredo Lam at his hotel in Rue Jacob, where they discussed subjects relating to art and politics, among other things. During those hard times, when nothing could be found, Jorn brought materials such as pencils, Indian ink and paper to Wifredo, so that his work could continue.

From 1947, Wifredo Lam went down new roads in the development of his imagery—a pronounced presence of esoteric elements and a link to the influence from his anthropological collection of Oceanic and African objects. His reputation as an artist had spread internationally. It was now possible to read articles and reviews of his exhibitions around the world in prestigious publications.

Cuba, Italy, Sweden and France, 1952–82

After divorcing Helena Holzer in 1951, Wifredo Lam again settled in Paris, where he met the Swedish artist Lou Laurin—they were married in 1960. At the same time as he kept a close connection to the Cuban art scene, during the 1950s Wifredo Lam became ever more involved in European art movements—he was especially close to CoBrA—and Italian avant-garde artists.

In 1954, Wifredo Lam, as well as other artists such as Karel Appel, Corneille, Sergio Dangelo, Lucio Fontana and Roberto Matta, was invited by Asger Jorn to participate in an international meeting on ceramics in Albissola that he had arranged with Enrico Baj at the local potter Tullio Mazzotti’s workshop. Wifredo was in Cuba and could not participate but he visited Albissola about ten days after the meeting.

Wifredo Lam became so enamoured by the atmosphere of this area that he later would buy a house and build a studio with a view of the Mediterranean. During the last decades of his life, he would spend most of his time here, working. At the pottery workshops of Mazzotti, Bianco and Salino, Wifredo Lam would exchange ideas, views and experiments in the art of ceramics with his friends Asger Jorn, Enrico Baj and Lucio Fontana.

Several private photos from the first half of the 1970s bear witness to Wifredo’s studio housing many historical sculptures, mainly from West Africa and Papua New Guinea. In his private residence, he was surrounded by a large collection of Baule and Dan masks—most had been acquired in the early 1970s at Milanese L’Uomo e l’Arte in Milan while visiting Giorgio Upiglio, a master printer at the Grafica Uno workshop.

Wifredo Lam was born in 1902 in Sagua La Grande, Cuba and died in Paris in 1982. Wifredo Lam is represented at a large number of museums and art collections. He was awarded the Guggenheim International Award in 1964.