Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982)

Lam was born in Cuba to parents of Chinese and African/Spanish ancestry; he was raised practicing both Roman Catholicism and Santería. After attending art school in Havana, he moved to Spain and then Paris, where he socialized with modernist artists, including Picasso. Returning to Cuba in 1941, committed to expressing “the drama of the Negro spirit,” he synthesized Afro-Cuban religious motifs with Cubism and Surrealism, often inventing hybrid human/animal/plant figures. After 1952, Lam lived in Europe and traveled worldwide.

Important Source Material:

Balderrama, Maria R. ed. Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992.

“Chronology.” Wifredo LAM. SDO Wifredo LAM, 2011-2012. Web. 24 July 2013. .

Day, Holliday T. & Sturges, Hollister. Art of the Fantastic: Latin America, 1920-1987. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1989. Entry on Wifredo Lam.

Sims, Lowery Stokes. “The Post-Modern Modernism of Wifredo Lam.” Annotating Art’s Histories: Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Ed. Kobena Mercer. London, England: Institute of International Visual Arts; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. 86-101.

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