Wifredo Lam’s Boundless Visions

In 20^th century art history, there is no artist like Wifredo Lam. Just look at La Jungla (The Jungle), among Lam’s most iconic paintings, which pops with gradated viridians, aquamarines, violets, crimsons and yellows.

Completed in 1943, otherworldly figures emerge from a quivering sugarcane field, synthesising influences of the European avant-garde, in particular Cubism and Surrealism, with Lam’s African, Cuban and Chinese heritage—notably, Santería, an Afro-Caribbean religion developed in Cuba by African slaves. In this matrix, distinctions between nature and body, human and non-human, abstraction and figuration—even Africa, Europe, and Asia—dissolve into a vibrating continuum: the kind that only an artist like Lam could have visualised. Born to a Cantonese father and Afro-Iberian mother in a sugar farming province in Cuba in 1902, the year the country became a republic after centuries of Spanish colonial rule, he was a singular product of unique fusions and fissions.

That La Jungla was rendered in oil and charcoal on paper mounted on canvas is another reflection of the syncretism that defined Lam’s practice, where printmaking, illustration, painting and sculpture ended up co-existing on an equal plane. Lam worked on the painting after returning to Cuba from Europe, where he arrived in 1923 after graduating from the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Havana. He trained in Madrid under Museo del Prado director Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, a professor at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes, faithfully copying the old masters under Sotomayor’s conservative tutelage, while attending classes at the non-conformist Escuela Libre de Paisaje, frequented by the likes of Dali.¹

During this period, Lam encountered Goya’s Los desastres de la guerra (The Disasters of War), an aquatint series produced between 1810 and 1820, portraying the horrors of Napoleon’s Spanish invasion.² Goya’s outrage at imperialist violence finds echoes in Lam’s own—expressed through his support of Republicans fighting monarchist Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, when he designed posters, defended Madrid, and assembled anti-tank bombs until chemical exposure forced his retreat to Barcelona in 1937.³ One year later, Lam fled to Paris, amid Spain’s Nationalist takeover, where he promptly befriended Picasso. The artists famously influenced each other, even exhibiting together in New York in 1939, the same year Lam held his first solo show in Paris with dealer Pierre Loeb, later creating his first etching for Loeb’s memoirs, Voyages à travers la peinture, in 1945.⁴

But war forced Lam to flee again, this time to Marseilles, where he joined artists and intellectuals escaping the Nazis with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee. Eventually, he boarded a ship in 1941 alongside the likes of Surrealist André Breton, for whom he illustrated a book-length poem, Fata Morgana, the same year, with drawings heralding the multispecies figures that would define his oeuvre. Fateful encounters continued when Lam’s ship stopped in Martinique, where he met poet Aimé Césaire, a founding figure in the anticolonial Négritude movement, who engaged Surrealism as a means to transcend colonialism’s cultural straitjacket by recasting the Afro-Caribbean’s creole cultures through frames of living metamorphosis. Embracing one another as brothers, Césaire declared Lam “a poet” and “the great artist of Neo-African painting,” while a 1941 text in Tropiques, a journal Césaire co-founded with Suzanne Césaire and René Menil, acknowledged the “intermingling of Asian and African traditions” in Lam’s art⁵—a notable observation, given the continuing speculation surrounding the Chinese influence on Lam, despite his enduring relationship with the line as a form of poetic writing.

As Lam once said: “I have never created my pictures in terms of a symbolic tradition, but always on the basis of a poetic excitation.”⁶⁷ That deep and enduring relationship with poetry is significant. According to Eskil, the artist’s son, Lam would often describe his own father as a calligrapher—knowing multiple Chinese dialects, he served as a scribe for the Chinese Cuban community.⁷ This biographical detail resonates with Lam’s gestural strokes, bearing in mind the balance of ink, water, brush, paper, body, and poetics that defines Chinese calligraphy. Take La Jungla, which could be read as a form of “mad grass” expressionism, recalling the kuangcao style and Tang dynasty calligrapher Sun Guoting’s description of seeing “frantic beasts,” “a phoenix dancing,” and “a startled snake” in calligraphic lines.⁸

Landing in Cuba in August 1941 after nearly two decades, Lam found an island shaped by US imperialism and racialised class divides, and his charged brushwork pulsates with that confrontation. “I decided that my painting would never be the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs,” Lam proclaimed; “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country."⁹ The idea, he said, was “to act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”¹⁰All of which recalls Césaire’s poem about Lam’s work, where he saw “the shivering spawn of forms liberating themselves...”¹¹—much like La Jungla’s post-human sentinels: a confident refusal of the colonial gaze drawn from the land and those that have lived, toiled, and died on it.

Fittingly, La Jungla was completed the year Césaire’s 1939 poem, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), was published in Spanish, with Lam’s illustrations of creatures, including a dove and bird of prey, that matched Césaire’s defiant observations of an island devastated by colonial occupation. Whether in Le regard vertical (1973), six lithographs depicting Lam’s recurring horse-headed woman in thick black lines, or La Mandibula (The Jaw) (1964), an etching of a screaming horse skull, Lam’s creatures were unyieldingly complex: a resolute disfigurement that railed against Europeans decontextualising African artefacts as decorative objects. “In the same way that black bodies had a history of being exploited, he saw this as an exploitation of the black soul,” Eskil has explained. “He wanted to give his objects some dignity, so he put them all together, in conversation…"¹²

That impulse to gather in dignified conversation seemed to fuel Lam’s distinct shift to printmaking in his last decades, which extended his lifelong pursuit of collaboration. Friendship, and by extension, the solidarity he experienced with peers through war and displacement, felt at the heart of Lam’s politics: a balm to the violence that propelled him and his contemporaries from one place to another throughout the twentieth century, which included a return to Europe following a military coup in Cuba in 1952.

Master printer Giorgio Upiglio, whom he met in 1958 in Milan, was among his most important friends and collaborators. Notable projects include Apostroph’ Apocalypse (1966), a publication pairing Romanian poet Ghérasim Luca’s apocalyptic verse with Lam’s explosive figures: a furious entanglement of elegant lines accented with earth-toned washes. Produced in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis and threats of Cold War annihilation, Apostroph’ Apocalypse encapsulates Lam’s commitment to forging a poetics of protest in the crucible of conflict and exile; as does Contre une maison sèche (1976), a publication of poetry by René Char, for which Lam imagined tormented horse-headed bodies cowering under falling bombs.

Lam sustained his political concerns to the end. In 1982, suffering from the aftereffects of a brain stroke in 1978, he published Annonciation, seven aquatint etchings he originally began creating in 1969, which Césaire’s poems responded to, with figures rendered in the negative, their un-inked forms glowing against dark grounds. Lam worked with Upiglio to complete the series just before his death that year, when they also completed L’herbe sous les pavés, a collection of short stories by Jean-Dominique Rey, whose title, “The grass beneath the cobblestones,” references a May ’68 slogan illuminating a politics of life amid oppression.

There is a mirror to Lam’s legacy in that revolutionary call, not only through his expressions of a post-human, anti-colonial resistance, but in the way he described his own father’s life. “Wherever he went, my father carried the memory of all sorts of landscapes: Siberia, Mongolia, Tartary, the drama of Asia and the China Sea," Lam once recalled. “In his eyes, you could see the sunrise of an island in turmoil fighting for its freedom.”¹³ Describing a chain reaction that moves through generations, what emerges in Lam’s view is a boundless horizon: a defiant vision of hope, in spite of the present.

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