{"id":279287,"date":"2025-11-13T00:36:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T00:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/279287\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T00:36:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T00:36:11","slug":"a-great-show-for-a-misunderstood-surrealist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/279287\/","title":{"rendered":"A Great Show for a Misunderstood Surrealist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tRare are the shows that reveal a bona fide masterpiece to the public; the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>\u2019s rich, fascinating Wifredo Lam<\/a> retrospective is one of them. I\u2019m not talking about his iconic 1942\u201343 painting La jungla (The Jungle), a landmark of the Surrealist movement that has been a prized possession of MoMA\u2019s since 1945. The real star here is Grande Composition (1949), a 14-foot-wide tangle of angular, elongated creatures that twist through each other.<\/p>\n

\n\tGrande Composition was Lam\u2019s largest work, and he made it by painting onto paper with oil so thinned down that it appears semitranslucent. Note the bottom portion of the painting, where charcoal outlines delineate the three-toed feet belonging to a tailed figure with bulging breasts. That area of the canvas appears unfinished, but the work\u2019s incompleteness only enhances its eeriness. The work looks like a world coming into being.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"panting<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore MoMA acquired Grande Composition earlier this year, the painting was held in a collector\u2019s Paris apartment. MoMA\u2019s new director\u2014Christophe Cherix, who curated the Lam retrospective with Beverly Adams, working with the assistance of Damasia Lacroze and Eva Caston\u2014spent a couple years cajoling this collector into giving up the painting. Thank goodness he did. Standing before this magnificent work, one must wonder: If this painting received little recognition, what else don\u2019t we know about Lam?<\/p>\n

\n\tQuite a lot, the MoMA show proves. In wall texts, Adams and Cherix repeatedly point to the artist\u2019s own words about his paintings, which Lam famously labeled \u201can act of decolonization\u201d in an interview that art historian Gerardo Mosquera conducted with Lam in 1980, two years before the artist died. \u201cAfrica has not only been dispossessed of many of its people, but also of its consciousness,\u201d Lam, who was Afro-Cuban and had Chinese heritage, told Mosquera. Lam described wanting to \u201crelocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tConsider the case of Grande Composition, one of many paintings by Lam that features a horse-human figure with a scrotum dangling from its chin. That figure is known as a femme-cheval, and its hybrid form refers to a Lucum\u00ed worshipper who\u2019s possessed by a deity known as an orisha.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWifredo Lam, Grande Composition (Large Composition), 1949.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Museum of Modern Art<\/p>\n

\n\tThe femme-cheval figure recurs throughout works by Lam produced in Cuba following his return to his home country during the \u201940s. Here she is, sitting elegantly in a chair, hands clasped near her lithe human legs, in one ca. 1949 painting in which she has a breast for a face. There she is again in Les Invit\u00e9s (The Guests), a 1966 painting in which her equine head has been abstracted beyond recognition, with long, pointy legs and gigantic hands.<\/p>\n

\n\tBecause Lam befriended Surrealist thinkers such as Andr\u00e9 Breton, Lam and his femmes-chevals were not exactly unknown in Europe. But whether intentionally or not, observers in Europe and the US generally did not see allusions to Afro-Cuban traditions in his art. A 1950 profile of Lam that ran in ARTnews centers around the creation of a painting featuring an equine figure that the piece\u2019s writer named The Horse. Across its 3,000 words, the profile never mentions Lucum\u00ed or the true meaning of the femme-cheval figure.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWifredo Lam, La jungla (The Jungle), 1942\u201343.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Museum of Modern Art<\/p>\n

\n\tThe MoMA retrospective does a good deal of necessary historical rewriting for Lam, whose Afro-Cuban heritage has been downplayed\u2014defanged, you might even say\u2014by many American and European museums, which instead place an emphasis on the dreaminess of his figures. The exhibition points out, for example, that La jungla does not depict just any jungle but one in the Antilles, to which Lam had recently relocated himself, having fled war-torn France for Cuba in 1941. The painting\u2019s figures with moon-shaped faces are not simply manifestations of a tormented subconscious, as they would be in the hands of another Surrealist. Lam situated his buxom beings within a thicket of sugarcane\u2014an explicit allusion to the commodity\u2019s central role in the enslavement of Black people in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

\n\t[See pictures of works in the show.]<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tElsewhere, the MoMA show turns its focus on Lam\u2019s friendship with Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, a Martinican poet who founded the N\u00e9gritude movement and ran the journal Tropiques with Suzanne Roussi-C\u00e9saire and Ren\u00e9 M\u00e9nil. Lam\u2019s ties to C\u00e9saire are well-documented\u2014still today, you can easily buy a copy of Cahier d\u2019un retour au pays natal, a 1936 long-form poem by C\u00e9saire, with illustrations by Lam.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Lam and C\u00e9saire\u2019s collaborations are rarely so foregrounded here in the US as they are right now at the MoMA show, which has prints by Lam that appeared alongside C\u00e9saire\u2019s poetry for a portfolio known as Annonciation (Annunciation, 1982). In Lam\u2019s engravings, elongated arms push away mask-like faces, and creatures with cinched waists sashay through darkness. While the portfolio\u2019s title refers to the archangel Gabriel\u2019s divine announcement to the Virgin Mary, the subject matter has less in common with Catholicism than it does with \u201cthe sacred territory reluctantly conceded by the leaves,\u201d as C\u00e9saire once put it\u2014a zone unbound from reason that he wrote was \u201creclaimed from wild beasts.\u201d (Those are quotations from C\u00e9saire piquantly titled poem \u201cfa\u00e7on langagi\u00e8re,\u201d or \u201ctongue fashion,\u201d which lent its name to one of Lam\u2019s prints on view.)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWifredo Lam, Les Invit\u00e9s, 1966.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York<\/p>\n

\n\tBased on the MoMA show, one would be right to ask whether C\u00e9saire didn\u2019t play too much of a role in determining what Lam\u2019s art was really about. Lam\u2019s painting Madame Lumumba (1938), featuring a woman with a tossed-back head and a flow of greenish hair, has generally been viewed as an homage to Pauline Opango, the widow of the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Bear in mind that Lam\u2019s grandmother was Congolese and had herself been enslaved, and you might interpret the work as a decolonial treatise of a sort. But the title is essentially a red herring: Opango was a baby when Lam painted this work, which received its name from C\u00e9saire well after it was made. Lam\u2019s original title isn\u2019t specified in the MoMA show, though whatever that prior name may have been, the painting\u2019s decolonial context\u2014if it even had one at all\u2014was certainly less explicit before C\u00e9saire\u2019s intervention.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, it\u2019s worth heeding the words of Lam, who once described himself as a \u201cTrojan horse\u201d with the ability to \u201cdisturb the dreams of the exploiters.\u201d What else is Trojan-horsed in Lam\u2019s paintings? The MoMA show only begins to raise that question.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tInstallation view of \u201cWifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream,\u201d 2025, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPhoto Jonathan Dorado<\/p>\n

\n\tAnswers arrive in the exhibition\u2019s first galleries, which survey Lam\u2019s early years in Madrid and Paris. Having been raised in Cuba, where his godmother was a Lucum\u00ed priestess, Lam departed for Spain in 1918 to finish out an art education that he began in Havana. The works he produced there during the \u201920s and \u201930s were essentially Picasso lite, liberally cribbing that Spaniard\u2019s women with almond-shaped eyes, thickly outlined nudes, and blocky Cubistic forms. But every so often, Lam produced something singular, as he did in La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War, 1937), in which crying women, helmeted soldiers, and nude babies tumble across one another. Produced the same year that Picasso painted Guernica, the piece evinces a palpable since of chaos and grief\u2014and feels like the obvious predecessor to Grande Composition in form, suggesting that these two works, made more than a decade apart, were not entirely separate in Lam\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWifredo Lam, La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War), 1937.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Capriles Cannizzaro Family Collection<\/p>\n

\n\tLam relocated to Paris in 1938 and linked up soon after with Breton, the self-appointed leader of Surrealism<\/a>. In the French capital and later in Marseille, Lam took part in Surrealist games known as \u201cexquisite corpses,\u201d wherein multiple people contribute to a collaborative drawing, with one artist picking up where the last left off. Yet even in the works attributed to a collective, it\u2019s possible to pinpoint Lam\u2019s contributions. In one 1941 drawing, there\u2019s a hand holding a flame beside bulging eyes and wavelets\u2014and a femme-cheval that unmistakably belongs to Lam\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat same year, Lam and many other refugees departed France and ended up in Martinique, where he fell in with the Tropiques crowd. Though Lam\u2019s Martinican period was short, with the artist putting down new roots in Cuba less than four months later, it appears to have induced a turning point in his art, which started to display a deeper engagement with Caribbean tradition.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe began painting unforgettable images like Ogue Orisa (1943), in which the Shango orisha Oggu\u00e9 hides among palm fronds. On view nearby is Omi Obini (1943), a painting that briefly held the distinction of being the most expensive Latin American artwork<\/a>. Both works make it difficult to tell where Afro-Caribbean deities end and the land around them begins.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tWifredo Lam, Fata Morgana, 1941.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Museum of Modern Art<\/p>\n

\n\tWhere these two paintings enchant the eye, with kaleidoscopic arrays of emerald green and cherry red, Lam\u2019s works from the late \u201940s and early \u201950s are darker and more menacing. Canaima III (1947), a large painting that rivals La jungla in visual intensity, features rows of giant thorns that enclose a tangle of shadowed appendages. The painting is ravishing, even as it is repellent. That might also be an apt way of describing a kanaima, or an evil spirit central to the lore of some Indigenous cultures of the Caribbean.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe latter stages of Lam\u2019s career saw him try his hand at abstraction and pottery, neither of which he entirely mastered, if the MoMA show is any proof. But until his death in 1982, Lam continued opening portals to other universes that he seemed to suggest were closely related to our own.<\/p>\n

\n\tTake the case of one 1955 painting featuring a being with a mask-like face, two sprawling arms, one leg, and one squat hoof. (Might this be yet another femme-cheval?) The painting\u2019s title, Quand je ne dors pas, je r\u00eave (When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream), suggests not the waking nightmares of European Surrealism but something else entirely: a true vision of Lam\u2019s world. In this case, it\u2019s the stuff of one man\u2019s dreams becoming another man\u2019s reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rare are the shows that reveal a bona fide masterpiece to the public; the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,78235,72271,127296],"class_list":["post-279287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-museum-of-modern-art","tag-surrealism","tag-wifredo-lam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}