Wifredo Lam, ‘La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War),’ 1937. Gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 6\u201911 \u00bc\u201d x 7\u20199 \u00bc\u201d (211.5 x 236.9 cm). Capriles Cannizzaro Family Collection \u00a9 Succession Wifredo Lam, ADAGP, Paris \/ ARS, New York 2025<\/p>\n
\u00a92025 Silvia Ros Images<\/p>\n
Wifredo Lam went to Spain from Cuba in 1923 at the tender age of 21 as a classically trained portrait painter. <\/p>\n
These aren\u2019t portraits. Or classical.<\/p>\n
Not after 1937. <\/p>\n
By then, Lam (1902\u20131982) had been radicalized. <\/p>\n
Radicalized by fascists and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Along with his brushes, he picked up a rifle and fought in Madrid beside the Republicans\u2013the good guys in that case. Suffering from chemical poisoning as the result of working in a munitions factory, Lam went to recuperate in Barcelona. <\/p>\n
There, in 1937, he produced his first overtly political and monumental work on paper, La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War). The painting can be seen in the U.S. for the first time during the Museum of Modern Art in New York\u2019s stupendous \u201cWifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream\u201d exhibition<\/a>, the most extensive retrospective devoted to the artist in this country.<\/p>\n Dead bodies litter the street. One is stuck through with swords. Civilians grieve over them. A sea of faces\u2013the righteous and the evil. A flag. A naked baby. <\/p>\n Bullfight imagery references the Badajoz Massacre<\/a>, where Franco-aligned soldiers penned up roughly 4,000 opposition fighters as prisoners in the local bullring before murdering them all. <\/p>\n Notice the sickle mid-painting\u2013the Communists were the good guys in the Spanish Civil War (don\u2019t tell American history); they fought the fascists, a conflict that would shortly spread across Europe. The Communists and socialists and trade unionists and \u201cradicals\u201d in Germany and France and Italy and Russia fighting fascism across the continent same as their brothers in Spain.<\/p>\n Fascists outfitted by American corporations and industrialists<\/a>. Ford. Texaco. J.P. Morgan. American business interests then and now<\/a> hold warm feelings toward authoritarian regimes<\/a>, so much easier to do business with<\/a> than messy democracies and all their transparency and constantly rotating civil servants. <\/p>\n La Guerra Civil brings to mind Francisco Goya\u2019s The Third of May 1808 (1814) that Lam saw in Madrid\u2019s Prado Museum<\/a> as well as Pablo Picasso\u2019s famous Guernica, also produced in 1937, also in response to the Spanish Civil War, also highlighting fascist barbarism. Nazi planes bombed the city of Guernica in support of Spanish fascist Francisco Franco. Picasso depicts what he imagined the scene to look like after having read newspaper accounts.<\/p>\n In an ironic art historical sidenote, Picasso asked the Museum of Modern Art to hold Guernica for safe keeping<\/a>, not to return the painting to Spain until Franco died. Finally, in 1981, after 42 years<\/a>, the masterpiece was sent to Madrid.<\/p>\n MoMA won\u2019t hold La Guerra Civil for that long, only through the end of the Lam exhibition, April 11, and it will ironically have to leave America for Spain to escape fascism<\/a>, not the other way around.<\/p>\n La Guerra Civil hangs in the presentation\u2019s opening gallery, a presentation bookended by Grande Composition (Large Composition) (1949), an image of liberation and empowerment. The massive painting, Lam\u2019s largest, nearly 14 feet across, has not been shown in more than 60 years, never in the US. <\/p>\n Wifredo Lam (Cuban, 1902\u20131982), ‘Mother and Child,’ 1939. Gouache on paper 41 x 29 (104.1 x 73.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase<\/p>\n Chadd Scott<\/p>\n War wasn\u2019t the only hardship the artist experienced in Spain. In 1931, Lam\u2019s first wife and son died from tuberculosis. TB at that time was no longer a death sentence for those with access to competent medical care. The Lam\u2019s lacked that access. Heath care as a human right and demands for universal access to basic medical treatments are not a 21st century invention. <\/p>\n Lam\u2019s Madre y ni\u00f1o (Mother and Child) (1939) suggests the tragedy. MoMA\u2019s famed founding director Alfred H. Barr Jr. acquired the painting directly from the artist\u2019s Paris gallery that year, the first of his paintings to join a museum collection.<\/p>\n MoMA and Wifredo Lam go way back.<\/p>\n Lam later married the director of a tuberculosis laboratory.<\/p>\n Citizen Of The World<\/p>\n Spanning the six decades of Lam\u2019s prolific career, the exhibition includes more than 130 artworks from the 1920s to the 1970s including paintings, large-scale works on paper, collaborative drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics, and archival material, with key loans from the Estate of Wifredo Lam, Paris. La jungla (The Jungle) (1942\u201343), arguably his best-known work, is a highlight. The vibrant and evocative painting foregrounding the Caribbean landscape, its inhabitants, and its histories of slavery and indenture, has been in MoMA\u2019s collection since 1945.<\/p>\n The artwork holds a special place in MoMA history.<\/p>\n \u201cSome days, when I lived in Harlem, I would visit MoMA just for a moment to see Wifredo Lam\u2019s 1943 painting The Jungle, which hung off the lobby near the coat check,\u201d eminent contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall is quoted as saying in the exhibition catalogue.<\/p>\n The Jungle\u2019s placement in the entry lobby meant it could be admired without paying museum admission. The location, both prominent yet excluded, reveals how MoMA staff recognized the painting as a masterpiece beloved by the public, but uncategorizable among its strictly siloed galleries.<\/p>\n Modern art didn\u2019t have a tidy category in which to place Lam in the 20th century.<\/p>\n Wifredo Lam, ‘La jungla (The Jungle),’ 1942-43. Oil and charcoal on paper mounted on canvas, 7\u201910 \u00bc\u201d \u00d7 7\u20196 \u00bd\u201d (239.4 \u00d7 229.9 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York \u00a9 Succession Wifredo Lam, ADAGP, Paris \/ ARS, New York 2025<\/p>\n The Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I Sleep I Dream\u201d reveals how Lam\u2014an artist born in Cuba to a Chinese father and mother with mixed Congolese and Spanish ancestry who spent most of his life in Spain, France, and Italy\u2014came to embody the figure of the transnational artist commonplace today. Transnational by choice and desperation. Same as today. <\/p>\n He chose to study in Spain. War forced him to Paris in 1938. <\/p>\n \u201cTo leave Spain defeated was and is for me such a deep pain that I have never stopped carrying it inside me,\u201d Lam said later in life. \u201cIn the beloved Spanish land I left Eva and my son dead. I also left many brothers in struggle.\u201d<\/p>\n In Paris, he met Picasso. While Picasso\u2019s interest in African masks, apparent in another of MoMA\u2019s gems, another of art history\u2019s greatest paintings, Les Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon (1907),<\/a> passed, the imagery stuck with Lam throughout his career. <\/p>\n \u201c(Lam\u2019s) commitment to making his painting an \u2018act of decolonization,\u2019 as he put it, forever changed modern art,\u201d Christophe Cherix, The David Rockefeller Director at the Museum of Modern Art and exhibition co-organizer, said in a press release announcing the show.<\/p>\n \u201cAfrica has not only been dispossessed of many of its people, but also of its historical consciousness\u2026 I have tried to relocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world,\u201d Lam is quoted in exhibition wall text.<\/p>\n Lam also met Surrealist Andr\u00e9 Breton in Paris before the war again forced him to flee\u2013Picasso safeguarding his paintings\u2013this time to Marseille. There, he collaborated with Surrealists who were also awaiting safe passage out of Europe. They fled to America and Mexico, and in Lam\u2019s case, back to Cuba via Martinique in 1941; neither the U.S. nor Mexico would accept him.<\/p>\n Lam\u2019s return to Cuba led to a complete reinvention of his work and the creation of some of his most important paintings, including The Jungle.<\/p>\n \u201cThe trees, the fruit, the light\u2026 dazzled me; it was there that encountered\u2026 the sources of ancestral cultures that lived in my unconscious mind,\u201d Lam is further quoted in the exhibition. <\/p>\n The quality of light he had forgotten about in Cuba from his time there as a boy shocked him, as did the poverty.<\/p>\n Lam traveled widely\u2013Haiti, back to Europe after the war, the United States\u2013absorbing what he saw, his art constantly evolving and expanding.<\/p>\n \u201cHe insisted on placing diasporic culture at the heart of modernism\u2014not as a peripheral influence, but as central, a generative force,\u201d Cherix added.<\/p>\n Political unrest would again force Lam to move. <\/p>\n Fulgencio Batitsta\u2019s military coup in 1952 pushed the artist out of his birth country for good. Back to Paris, by choice, then finally to Albissola Marina, Italy in 1962 where he\u2019d live out the remainder of his life making art, deeply engaged with the other artmaking taking place around the world.<\/p>\n The Caribbean, Africa, Asia, Europe\u2013Lam prefigured contemporary artists inspired by, descended from, traveling, and living globally. Global influence from study and personal experience. An archetype for what is now expected. <\/p>\n Moxy Lower East Side<\/p>\n NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 25: People attend the annual Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown on February 25, 2024 in New York City. People gathered to enjoy and celebrate the 26th annual Lunar New Year parade, commemorating the end of the 15 days honoring the first new moon on the lunar calendar. 2024 is the \u201cYear of the Dragon.\u201d (Photo by Michael M. Santiago\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n Getty Images<\/p>\n If visiting New York, consider staying at the Moxy Lower East<\/a> side less than .5 miles from the New Museum (reopening March 22<\/a>) and the Tenement Museum<\/a>. Marvel at remaining tenement buildings from the hotel\u2019s fabulous rooftop bar with unobstructed views west to the Hudson River, north to the Empire State Building, and south to One World Trade Center. <\/p>\n The property borders Chinatown and Little Italy along historic Bowery street. Destination pizza places Lombardi\u2019s and Williamsburg Pizza are three blocks away.<\/p>\n The hotel was built new in 2023, but hints to the Bowery\u2019s history of performance\u2013live music and circus\u2013through d\u00e9cor and artwork. Pay close attention to wallpaper details. Cheeky, stylish, hip. <\/p>\n Moxy hotels are known for their reasonable rates, lively public spaces, and compact rooms, perfect for solo travelers and couples looking to get out and explore, not hole up with room service. The brand\u2019s Lower East Side location leans into that ethic. <\/p>\n Enjoy an old-school, sit down, tabletop Ms. Pac-Man arcade game in the lobby. Thursdays through Saturdays, local DJs welcome guests by spinning near the entrance. The beats continue long past midnight at Loosie\u2019s subterranean nightclub. Wednesdays through Saturdays, live music in the restaurant adjacent to check-in has \u201cMTV Unplugged\u201d vibes with previous acts including Sublime and Train. The on-site modern Japanese restaurant Sake No Hana employs sake sommeliers. <\/p>\n More From ForbesForbesWifredo Lam\u2019s \u2018Mental Decolonization\u2019 On View At Gary Nader Art Centre In MiamiBy Chadd Scott<\/a>ForbesContemporary Native American Artwork On View Across New York This WinterBy Chadd Scott<\/a>ForbesNoah Davis Paintings At Philadelphia Art MuseumBy Chadd Scott<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wifredo Lam, ‘La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War),’ 1937. 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