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Cuba celebrates birth of Wilfredo Lam By Karen Juanita Carrillo The Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro (San Alejandro Fine Arts National Academy) – which Lam attended as a youth – plans to have screenings of documentaries on the artist, including “Wilfredo
Lam” Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla was born on December 8, 1902 in the small Cuban town of Sagua La Grande to a Canton, China born father, Lam Yam, and a Afro-Cuban mother, Ana Serafina Castilla. When his family moved to Havana in 1916, Lam began to study art at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro and within a few years he was exhibiting at the school’s Salón de la Asociación de Pintores y Escultores. But the focus of Cuba’s art schools on the works of ancient Europe was too stifling, and Lam did not stay at the Academia for long. He moved
to Madrid, Spain in 1923 and continued his studies under the guidance of Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, the director of the Museo del Prado. Lam traveled to Cuenca, Barcelona and León working on stills and landscapes until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War. Then, with a letter of introduction from the sculptor Manolo Hugué, Lam moved to Paris and became good friends with Pablo Picasso, who encouraged him to look into Cubism’s inspirations
from African art. Lam also traveled to Mexico in 1938, to spend time
with the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. He had his first solo show at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in Paris in 1939,
and his work was exhibited with Picasso’s at the Perls Galleries in New York City. When Germany’s Third
Reich army invaded Paris, Lam moved his home base to Marseille, France (along with his confidantes André Masson, Claude
Lévi-Strauus, André Bretón and other artists in the Surrealist movement) and later to Martinique where
Lam met Aimé Césaire, the Caribbean’s strongest proponent of the African diasporic ideology of Negritude. Lam spent years living in various locales – with times spent in Spain, Italy, Haiti, France and Switzerland – and only returned to his native Cuba in 1941 to stay there a total of five years. Yet during that time he created his most famous painting, “La Jungla/The Jungle” (1943). Wilfredo Lam's “La Jungla” Often referred
to as Cuba’s most famous contemporary artist, Lam is recognized as a true creator of his own style. In “La
Jungla” – which was purchased for $3000 in June of 1944 by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) – Lam shows a mix of a Cubist-based African structure, Surrealism’s more lush-like instincts and his own interpretations
of the depths of an Afro-Cuban oriented world view. You can view “La Jungla” and other works by Lam online,
here. Although Wilfredo Lam died in Paris on September 11, 1982, his ashes
were returned to Cuba, as he had requested in his final will. |
the film made in 1978 by Humberto Solás, and the 82-minute film “Ya era otoño en Paris” by Jorge Aguirre Ramírez which recalls Lam’s final
days as his life drew to a close in Paris. (DVD copies of “Ya era otoño en Paris” are available in English,
Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese 
Lam would not only work as a painter, but
with ceramics and sculpture, and he later illustrated the book El último Viaje del Buque Fantasma (The Last Voyage
of the Ghost Ship) for Gabriel García Márquez. |
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