Artists & Works

STYLE: 70s PRINTMAKING,
CUBISM, SURREALISM

Wifredo Lam attended art school in Cuba, then moved to Madrid in 1923, where he saw the work of Picasso. He moved to Paris in 1938, where Picasso took the young artist under his wing. Wifredo’s multicultural heritage--he had a Chinese father and a Indian/African/European mother--as well as his extensive travel and exposure to African art had a profound effect on his work. Lam was also associated with the Surrealists. Married three times, the artist traveled throughout his life, receiving major exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, Basel, and Brussels, among other art centers.

Masques reflects Lam’s Cubist vocabulary, as well as a confluence of many cultural influences, including those of African art, the natural world, and the theories the artist was exposed to in Europe.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Edward Sullivan, Art in America, 5/03
“These days we are used to seeing Lam's work as representative of some of the main currents of Cubo-Surrealist modernism. In the early 1940s, he returned to Cuba from many years of study abroad and produced his most famous painting, The Jungle (1943, now in the MOMA). Thereafter, he consolidated his unique blend of Afro-Cuban religious references with the visual consequences of his rapport with Picasso, the Surrealists and the sensual richness of his Cuban surroundings. By the late 1980s, Lam had become something of a poster child for multiculturalism, his art easily lending itself to (sometimes facile) deconstructions by postcolonialist critics or to readings by essentializing advocates of sacred symbols as an appropriate iconography for emerging nations.
... By the 1950s he had begun to respond to sources of non-Western stimulus beyond the Afro-Caribbean. He collected Oceanic art (especially from the Sepik River region of New Guinea) as early as the mid-'40s. His imagery became, as Sims puts it, "more syncretized and internationalized." Colors became gradually darker and, beginning in the late '40s and '50s, there was a greater emphasis on drawing. The flatness of Lam's surfaces in his work from the '60s onward has much to do, Sims argues, with the painter's increasing engagement with graphic art (he made his first lithograph in 1947).”