Poster for a show at Galerie Lelong in Paris 1988
1975 printed signature
Paper size: 26.5" x 19.5" (67.0 x 49.5 cm)
very good condition,some minor handling
Please note that there sometimes can be a slight color variation from Photo to actual art work of Art
Wifredo Lam grew up in Cuba with a grandmother who practised Voodoo rituals and
came of age in Spain (which he left after the fall of the Republican government
to Franco's armies) and Paris, where he and Picasso became very close friends
and artistic associates. In 1939 he joined the Surrealists and he collaborated
on a book, Fata Morgana, with André Breton, who wrote the text that
accompanied Lam's drawings. Sebastia Gasch in Wifredo Lam à Paris
(Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, c. 1976) suggests that "Lam might be considered
as something like the indispensable link between the native forces of
America—where we find the frenzied rites that originally came from Africa
superimposed upon memories of the Amerindian civilizations—and the tradition of
western culture." He further argues that "Lam's paintings evoke jungle
landscapes and totems—those beings, animate or inanimate, but generally in
animal or plant form, from which the Indians of North America believe each tribe
to descend. Thus his works may be said to give off an atmosphere of the
legendary. . . . In a word, Wifredo Lam brings the terrible orchard to flower in
jungles in which the civilized man and the savage are reconciled in a common
seeking after truth" (p. 49).
After the Germans invaded France, Lam left
Europe on the same ship as Breton and Masson, helped in part by the
International Rescue Committee, in token of which, many years later, Lam
contributed a lithograph to the Flight Portfolio as a fundraiser.
Returning to Cuba, Lam's work continued to mix Afro-Cuban and European
influences. After the war, Lam travelled before finally settling in Paris, with
side trips to Italy. Where Picasso and the German Expressionists turned to
African art to revitalize European traditions, Lam combines these traditions not
as an outsider but as a rightful possessor of both. His art offers the fantastic
images of a living but alien tradition to a world needing to find a new
conception of the civilized. As Pierre Loeb, Lam's dealer from 1946 on, said,
"Inspired by Picasso, to whom he owes not so much his style as a spirit of
liberation and the boldness of expression deriving from superb craftsmanship,
Lam introduces into the framework of western classicism the attributes of
tropical magic and poetry. For three years I have watched him live and work,
witnessed the birth of a work that becomes more legible and more mysterious each
passing day. More legible pictorially and more mysterious intellectually,
because there are no familiar images for us to relate to. Even when we recognize
a form from the past, it is mingled with so many other forms that we are really
in the presence of a work that is difficult to relate to any previous one"
(quoted from Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam. Trans. Kenneth Lyons and
Richard-Lewis Rees. 2nd Ed. [Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 1989], p.
204).
Lam's works are to be found in many important collections of modern
art including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum (NYC) and the
Tate; his works have been shown at major museums and important galleries in New
York, Paris, Düsseldorf, Madrid (the Reina Sofia), Barcelona (the Fondation
Miró), The Art Institute (Chicago), the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris, the Carnegie Institute (Pittsburgh), the Kassel Documenta (1959, 1960,
1965), the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Venice Biennale (1972), the Museo
de Arte Moderno (Mexico), the National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo), and many
others. Since his death, there has been an emerging consensus that Lam is one of
the most important artists of the 20th
century.