Wifredo Lam - Hardcover

by Jacques Leenhardt (Author)

This beautifully illustrated book, the first monograph on Wifredo Lam since 1989, provides a comprehensive retrospective of the iconic Cuban artist's life and work. With the quasquicentennial of his birth approaching, recent research and cataloging have deepened our understanding of Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) and his multifaceted contributions to 20th century art and politics.

Following a long journey that began in Spain, where Lam studied the great European painters--Bosch, Dürer, Velázquez and Goya--this book traces defining moments in his artistic evolution. Encounters with Picasso and Breton in Paris shaped his distinctive style, which existed at the heart of modernity, distinguished also by the influences of surrealism, Matisse, and African art.

Born in 1902 to a Chinese father and an African mother, Lam's work draws from both European and Afro-Caribbean visual culture in a unique synthesis of his multicultural heritage and formulative studies. Forced to flee Paris in 1940 by the Nazi occupation, Lam took refuge in Marseilles before returning to Cuba, where his visual language evolved into a powerful tool for confronting the social and political injustices of the newly globalized world.

Through thoughtful interpretation of Lam's body of work, author Jacques Leenhardt sheds light on the originality of his language, both symbolic and pictorial, and the evolution of visual art in the 20th century.

Back Jacket

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) ranks alongside his friends Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Cuban-born with mixed African, Cuban, and Chinese heritage, he produced a multifaceted body of work that melded multiple influences, combining abstraction and figuration, as well as primitivism and modernity.

Lam left his homeland at an early age to study art in Spain, absorbing influences from the masters of European art he saw in the Prado. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he moved to France and joined a circle of avant-garde painters and poets, embracing the creative freedom they endorsed and absorbing the currents of Cubism and Surrealism.

Although a rationalist at heart, he used his work to explore a deep personal mythology, rooted in the vibrant syncretic traditions of his homeland. When he returned to Cuba from Europe, his art fused modernist ideas with Santer?a and other Afro-Cuban imagery. Throughout his long career, he retained a questing spirit. He was a politically engaged artist with antiestablishment beliefs and strove to create an artistic language that expressed his own cultural identities.

This magnificently illustrated book follows a chronological path through Lam's career, outlining the continuing threads that connect the disparate phases of his art. His paintings are showcased alongside a selection of his works on paper and his later ceramics and sculptures. Lam's fertile multiculturalism is more relevant than ever in the twenty-first century and grants this unclassifiable artist a lasting resonance in the modern world.