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\n Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/p>\n
\t Wifredo Lam \t
\n Aruna D\u2019Souza<\/p>\n
In his first comprehensive US retrospective, a demonstration of the Cuban artist\u2019s practice as an act of decolonization.<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, installation view. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, far right: Grande Composition, 1949.<\/p>\n
Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, curated by Beverly Adams and Christophe Cherix with Damasia Lacroze and Eva Caston, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West Fifty-Third Street, New York City,
through April 11, 2026<\/p>\n
\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u00a0\u2022<\/p>\n
Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream is the first comprehensive retrospective of the artist in the United States, consisting of more than 130 paintings, works on paper, illustrated books, and ceramics realized over a span of five decades. It is less what museums like to call an \u201cart historical corrective\u201d\u2014a show that addresses a scholarly lacuna\u2014and more an \u201cinstitutional corrective\u201d that seeks to redress the Museum of Modern Art\u2019s very specific past curatorial lapses. Lam (1902\u201382) became the first Cuban artist represented in the collection when Alfred Barr purchased one of his paintings in 1939; the museum acquired two more in the years following, including Lam\u2019s best-known work, La jungla (The Jungle, 1942\u201343). And then . . . nada. Not for years. It would be as if MoMA bought Picasso\u2019s Demoiselles d\u2019Avignon and then said, nah, we\u2019re good. Worse yet, La jungla was almost never shown with the rest of MoMA\u2019s collection; it was famously isolated in the lobby near the coat check. When the poet and critic John Yau called the museum out for its belittling treatment of the artist and his masterpiece in a 1988 Arts Magazine essay, MoMA responded not by changing its placement or rewriting its label, but by putting it in storage.<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, installation view. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.<\/p>\n
These facts are laid out in the first few pages of the show\u2019s catalog, a sign that MoMA has moved on from its chronic defensive posture in the face of critique and is ready to change course. Building on long-standing scholarly research and past exhibitions, the organizers\u2014Beverly Adams, curator of Latin American art, and Christophe Cherix, the institution\u2019s new director\u2014offer up the story of an artist whose engagement with modern art was framed and determined not only by the cr\u00e9olit\u00e9 of Cuban society and his own complex background, but by the larger context of an emerging idea of N\u00e9gritude\u2014a diasporic Black consciousness\u2014being developed by people like Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, Lam\u2019s longtime friend and collaborator. Lam considered his practice an \u201cact of decolonization\u201d\u2014the exhibition shows us why.<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, installation view. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, far left: La jungla (The Jungle), 1942\u201343.<\/p>\n
Though the curators do an admirable job of demonstrating that Lam\u2019s significance went far beyond La jungla\u2014it appears in the second gallery, well into the show\u2014the painting loses none of its power in the process. It has long been one of my favorite artworks, and I\u2019ve spent years puzzling out its densely packed, shadow-box composition, clearly influenced by the artist\u2019s study of Cubism, Surrealism, and other European avant-garde styles. Figures\u2014all legs and hands and feet and an occasional buttock and coconut-like breast, with faces like African masks\u2014merge with sugarcane stalks and foliage, everything suffused with tropical blues, greens, oranges, pinks, and purples. I always fixate on one detail: in the upper right corner, a paw-like hand clutching a pair of oversize shears. To my eye, that feature was what separated Lam\u2019s picture from the modern art that filled the galleries upstairs, work which likewise drew upon African culture but placed that culture definitively out of time, and therefore untethered to histories of colonialism, violence, capitalism, exploitation. But Lam\u2019s shears: they were a sign of labor. A reminder that, whatever the otherworldliness of this jungle, it was very much also a plantation.<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam, Sol (Sun), 1925. Oil on burlap, 44 1\/2 \u00d7 36 inches. \u00a9 Succession Wifredo Lam, ADAGP\/ARS.<\/p>\n
Lam was born to a father of Chinese origin and a mother of mixed African and European descent\u2014his ancestors had arrived in Cuba because of slavery and, later, the market in indentured laborers brought there to cultivate sugar, first for European colonizers and then American companies. They brought with them spiritual and cultural practices from their respective homes, which survived through a process of both hiding from and melding with the Christianity imposed by their overseers. There are hints in the show that, after moving to Spain in 1923 to continue his studies, the artist began to plumb his personal identity\u2014as with the intriguing oil-on-burlap Sol (Sun) from 1925, likely a self-portrait. It depicts a man in a gloriously embroidered robe posing languidly, fan in hand and beads around neck, against a setting sun. (This work is so clearly homoerotic, and yet no mention of that fact is made in the wall label or catalog. What gives?) But such pictures are rare in Lam\u2019s oeuvre, suggesting that exploring his own background was less important to him than taking part in a greater project of defining Afro-Caribbean creativity to plant seeds of political liberation; C\u00e9saire wrote in 1946 that his friend was a central figure in leveraging painting \u201cagainst the sordidness of history.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, installation view. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, center right, on back wall: La guerra civil (The Spanish Civil War), 1937.<\/p>\n
While pieces like La jungla intimate Lam\u2019s deep connection to Cuba, he spent a mere decade of his adult life there. After completing his studies in Spain, he stayed on to take part in the resistance against Franco\u2019s fascist onslaught, producing a major painting on the subject in 1937 (La guerra civil, The Spanish Civil War). In 1938, he fled to the French capital, where he was introduced to Picasso and the Surrealist ringleader Andr\u00e9 Breton, as well as other artists of the School of Paris. When the Nazis showed up in 1940, he took refuge in Marseille, immersing himself in Surrealist drawing techniques alongside Breton, Jacqueline Lamba, Victor Brauner, \u00d3scar Dom\u00ednguez, and others. (A number of the group\u2019s collective drawings are in the show.) A year later, he secured passage back to the Caribbean, first to Martinique and then to Cuba. In 1952, in response to both political upheaval and the exhaustion of living in a country so steeped in anti-Blackness, he returned to Paris, where he lived until his death.<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, installation view. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, far right: Harpe astrale (Astral Harp), 1944.<\/p>\n
In other words, even as his work has much to say about Afro-Cuban culture, the political consciousness that drove it developed mostly outside Cuba. It was when he arrived in Paris, for example, that he noticed how African and Oceanic art had been embalmed in European museums and appropriated by European modernists, aligning both phenomena with the violence of slavery: \u201cYesterday they sold Black flesh, today they monopolize the Black spirit, Black dreams, as objects of curiosity.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Wifredo Lam: When I Don\u2019t Sleep, I Dream, installation view. Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Pictured, far left: Le sombre Malembo, dieu du carrefour (The Somber Malembo, God of the Crossroads), 1943.<\/p>\n
His decade in Cuba was spent making works like Le sombre Malembo, dieu du carrefour (The Somber Malembo, God of the Crossroads, 1943), Harpe astral (Astral Harp, 1944), and the monumental Grande composition (1949). They all drew on various elements of Afro-Cuban spirituality, which he learned about largely thanks to his friend, the ethnographer and writer Lydia Cabrera, and his godmother, a priestess of Lucum\u00ed (also known as Santer\u00eda). The Somber Malembo depicts a number of orishas, or deities, including one\u2014Elegu\u00e1\u2014who represents the idea of crossroads. Curiously, Lam calls another of his figures Malembo\u2014the name derived from that of a major slave port in Kongo. Here, again, is a detail that signals that no matter what his personal connection to his chosen motifs\u2014Lam himself was not a practitioner of Lucum\u00ed, in fact\u2014he refused to simply adopt them in the manner of European modernists. When orishas appear in his work, they are firmly located in the historical conditions that brought them from West Africa to the Caribbean, and that continued, and continue, to shape life there. It was a process, he said, of taking Cubism, Surrealism, and other European movements back to their origins in African culture, reintegrating them with \u201call the transculturation that had taken place in Cuba among the Indigenous, Spaniards, Africans, Chinese, French immigrants, pirates, and all the elements that formed the Caribbean.\u201d Seen in this light, Lam\u2019s achievement wasn\u2019t simply a variation of modernist art, but its apotheosis.<\/p>\n