30 Facts About Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Oscar de la Concepcion Lam y Castilla, better known as Wifredo Lam, was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture.

Wifredo Lam was born and raised in Sagua La Grande, a village in the sugar farming province of Villa Clara, Cuba.

Wifredo Lam was of mixed-race ancestry: his mother, the former Ana Serafina Castilla, was born to a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father and his father, Yam Lam, was a Chinese immigrant.

In Sagua La Grande, Wifredo Lam was surrounded by many people of African descent; his family, like many others, practiced Catholicism alongside their African traditions.

In 1916, Wifredo Lam moved to Havana to study law, a path that his family had thrust upon him.

From 1918 to 1923, Wifredo Lam studied painting at the Escuela de Bellas Artes.

Wifredo Lam left for Madrid, Spain, in the autumn of 1923 to further his art studies.

In 1923, Wifredo Lam began studying in Madrid under Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor y Zaragoza, the curator of the Museo del Prado and teacher of Salvador Dali.

Wifredo Lam had begun to incorporate Surrealist techniques before his time in Europe, learning of artists like Matisse through publications and news from a friend.

Wifredo Lam quickly gained the support of Picasso, who introduced him to many of the leading artists of the time, such as Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque and Joan Miro.

Picasso and Wifredo Lam exhibited their work together at the Perls Galleries in New York in the same year.

Wifredo Lam's work went from showing the influence of Matisse, seen in his still lifes, landscapes and simplified portraits, to being influenced by Cubism.

Mainly working with gouache, Wifredo Lam began producing stylized figures that appear to be influenced by Picasso.

Wifredo Lam noticed that the descendants of the slaves were still being oppressed and that the Afro-Cuban culture was degraded and made picturesque for the sake of tourism.

Wifredo Lam believed that Cuba was in danger of losing its African heritage and therefore sought to free them from cultural subjugation.

Wifredo Lam's style was distinctive because of its fusion of Surrealist and Cubist approaches with imagery and symbols from Santeria.

Cuban artists have accused Wifredo Lam of being an impostor when it comes to his artwork and his identity as a Cuban.

Wifredo Lam continued to simplify and synthesize abstraction yet continued painting figurally; he kept on developing the mythology and totemism that defined his style.

Wifredo Lam settled in Paris in 1952 after having divided his time between Cuba, New York, and France.

Wifredo Lam, who continued to sympathize with the common man, exhibited a series of paintings at Havana University in 1955 to demonstrate his support for the students' protests against Batista's dictatorship.

In 1960, Wifredo Lam established a studio in Albissola Marina on Italy's northwest coast and settled there with his wife Lou Laurin, a Swedish painter, and their three sons.

At the encouragement of Asger Jorn and after being intrigued by the local pottery-making, Wifredo Lam began to experiment with ceramics and had his first ceramic exhibition in 1975.

Wifredo Lam progressed to model sculptures and cast in metal in his twilight years, often depicting personages similar to those he had painted.

Wifredo Lam died on September 11,1982, in Paris, aged 79.

Wifredo Lam dramatically synthesized the Surrealist and Cubist strategies while incorporating the iconography and spirit of Afro-Cuban religion.

Wifredo Lam held the belief that society focused too much on the individual and sought to show humanity as a whole in his artwork.

The Jungle, which is considered Wifredo Lam's masterpiece, is exemplary of the artist's mature style.

The polymorphism, for which Wifredo Lam is well known, juxtaposes aspects of humans, animals, and plants, creating monstrous, hybrid creatures.

Scholars have hypothesized that these figures originated from Wifredo Lam's subconscious, connecting the artwork to Surrealist principles.

Wifredo Lam sought to describe the reality of the Afro-Cuban experience of his time and gained acclaim and fame for doing so.