Artist: Wifredo Lam
Date: 1943
Technique: Oil On Canvas
Wifredo Lam is a central figure in Latin American modernism. Born to a Chinese father and Afro-Cuban mother, he studied as a child with his godmother, a Lucumí priestess. He then took art classes at the Academia de San Alejandro in Havana. In the nineteen-twenties, he was awarded a fellowship to study in Europe, where he met major figures from the avant-garde groups active between World War I and World War II. His production from this period was particularly influenced by cub- ism and, later, by surrealism. Drawn to African masks and sculpture, Lam pursued a synthetic figuration; the line took precedence over color in frontal and hieratic figures. The death of his wife and son from tuberculosis changed the course of his life. An opponent of fascism, he returned to Cuba in 1941 escaping the Spanish Civil War and Nazi-occupied France. “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country and to express in detail the Black spirit and the beauty of the art of Black people. I would, thus, be able to act as a Trojan horse out of which would come hallucinatory figures capable of jarring and unsettling the dreams of the exploiters,” he said in a statement that evidences an anticolonial consciousness that challenged the Western construction of the primitive. His peers in Cuba included intellectuals investigating Afro-Cuban traditions, among them anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, writer Alejo Carpentier, and ethnographer Lydia Cabrera. Along with
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