Jacques Leenhardt – Wifredo Lam: A painter at the heart of 20th-century modern art

WIFREDO
NOUVEAU NOUVEAU MONDE
3

Wifredo Lam
A painter at the
22

heart of 20th-century modern art
Jacques Leenhardt
23

24

Jacques Leenhardt
Wifredo Lam.
A painter at the heart of 20 th -century modern art
Jacques Leenhardt
When Wifredo Lam met Picasso in 1938, marking the beginning of their
longlasting friendship, he left many years of apprenticeship in Spain behind
him, having acquainted himself with all the techniques of the Western pictorial
tradition. He was born in Sagua-la-Grande (Cuba) in 1902, the son of a
Chinese father from the Guangdong province and an Afro-Cuban mother.
Following these studious years in Madrid and just before reaching Paris to start
a new career within the capital of art and modernity, Wifredo Lam had fought
on the side of Spanish Republican Army against Franco. During his time in
Spain, he had come into contact, through the art journals available to him,
with the major currents of modernity, of African art and Surrealism. Strongly
influenced by Cubism, he had furthermore rejected all classical notions of
perspective, creating in his canvases complex spaces and composing images
from his imagination, freed of traditional codes. This was also the period when
Lam meditated on the work of Matisse, which left its mark on his own work
from the late 1930s, combined with the influence of Picasso, in his treatment
of color and the composition of his figures.
The paintings Lam created at the time and showed to people around him when
he arrived in Paris revealed a talent and originality that opened many doors for
him. He gained access to different groups of artists and poets. Picasso received
him at his studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins, taking him in as a friend
and introducing him to all his Parisian friends, among them Michel Leiris
with whom Lam formed a lifelong, unwavering friendship. André Breton
reports that Picasso systematically sent all his friends to see the Lam exhibition
at the Galerie Pierre and that he made sure the young artist had enough light
and space to go on working. But Picasso and Lam were linked by more than
friendship, as they showed their work side by side at the Klaus Perls Gallery of
New York.
Dora Maar introduced Lam to André Breton, who in turn brought him into
contact with many other surrealists. Within this active and varied milieu, Lam
thus made friends with the major figures of Paris culture at the time: its painters
such as Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, the poet René Char and the gallery
owners Christian Zervos, the author of the Catalogue Raisonné on the work
Pablo Picasso and Wifredo Lam, Vallauris 1954
25

of Picasso, and Pierre Loeb, who was to give him a show of his recent paintings
in his gallery in 1939.
The paintings he produced during this period took up the classic themes of
the portrait, the nude and the self-portrait. They contain large figures within
decors often of flower motifs in the style of Matisse, but very rapidly the
backgrounds grow more spare and the decors disappear altogether, leaving
often only sketched outlines of the room’s volume, like simple reminders of
depth, which over time are themselves effaced. The figures of personages, while
still recognizable, become steadily less realist and less figurative. The influence
of Cubism and Picasso has become more tangible, certainly in the rendering of
the faces — Lam’s own interpretation of the aesthetic of African traditional art.
The year 1940 marked a turning point in the career of Wifredo Lam. After no
more than two years in Paris, the outbreak of the war again forced him to leave.
After entrusting Dora Maar with his paintings, which she stored in Picasso’s
studio, he found temporary refuge in Marseille where he awaited passage on a
boat to a country of exile. In Marseille he encountered many of the same artists
and poets he had met in Paris, who like him were hoping to be able to leave
occupied France for America. This group, which also included a number of
German nationals in exile, would gather together every Sunday around André
Breton at the Villa Air Bel. These meetings were frequent and intense, moments
of exciting artistic exchanges within a group comprised mostly of poets and
artists: René Char, André Masson, Benjamin Péret, Marcel Duchamp, Max
Ernst and Peggy Guggenheim, Jacques Hérold, Victor Brauner, Henriette
Gomez, Sylvain Itkine and Óscar Domínguez, Helena Benítez, too, was among
them, Lam’s future wife, and of course André Breton and his wife Jacqueline
Lamba.
In Lam’s mind, painting had always been foremost a question of poetry and
hence through his interaction with these surrealist writers, the great whirlwind
of automatic writing (l’écriture automatique) naturally swept through his work.
This technique of poetic creation, which Breton had termed “automatism,”
consisted of letting oneself freely express, without any prior control, the
spontaneity of language. It was about letting the words flow freely without
censorship from the conscious mind, and even less from the social codes
of writing or etiquette, and about the freedom of invention in drawing by
26

Jacques Leenhardt
Ana Serafina Castilla, Wifredo Lam’s
mother, Cuba 1943
Lam-Yam, Wifredo Lam’s father,
Cuba ca. 1920
27

Invitation to the vernissage for
the exhibition ”Peintures par Wifredo Lam”
at Galerie Pierre, Paris 1939
“Lam,” Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York 1944
Presentation of “The Jungle” at the
Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, 1944
28

Jacques Leenhardt
ignoring the rules of verisimilitude and the demands of rational thought — or
so Breton defined it in the Surrealist Manifesto (1924). Lam began using this
instrument of poetic spontaneity with great relish. During his stay in Marseille,
he created figures and forms hitherto unknown to his pictorial vocabulary. The
poetic excitation of the moment was such that André Breton asked him to
illustrate the poem he was working on: Fata Morgana, published a few years
later in 1942 in Buenos Aires with drawings by Lam.
For the first time, Lam freed himself from all the constraints he had inherited
through his years of apprenticeship. He could now give free reign to his natural
tendency to approach the world obliquely, adopting an indirect approach
comparable, in many ways, to the allusive incitement (xing) of Chinese
poetics. He began to speak about his world through the detour of allegory and
metaphors and never in representations of a frontal, realist nature. 1 The images
Lam created for Breton’s book marked an essential turning point in his work
and opened up the prospect of that search for common ground in art pursued
by New York artists and the CoBrA group, with whom he would connect later.
In March 1941, Lam left Marseille with other Surrealists on the boat that
would take them to the Caribbean. This new exile brought him back to his
home, his native land of Cuba, with a short passage in Martinique where he
met another poet who would become one of his closest friends: Aimé Césaire.
Indeed, this meeting brought new impetus to the painter’s imagination, and
upon returning to Cuba he created an extraordinary series of paintings around
the theme of tropical vegetation from which emerge enigmatic figures. Within
a single year, 1942, Lam painted over 120 works, among them his famous
Jungle, which he finished in 1943. He gained almost instantaneous success
at this new stage in his artistic career. Pierre Matisse exhibited the immense
Jungle in his gallery in New York in 1944 and James Johnson Sweeney, the
curator of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA), purchased it in
1945 for the museum where it still hangs majestically to this day — one of its
masterpieces.
Lam was now a famous artist, as much in the United States as in Europe.
The synthesis he was capable of bringing about of several traditions, along
with the energy he gave to his “mythic imagery,” echoed with other artists
in New York circles and Lam was soon to count them as both friends and
29

Invitation for the exhibition “Drawings by Picasso, Gouaches by Wifredo Lam,” held at the Perls Galleries,
New York 1939
30

Jacques Leenhardt
“Exposition Internationale d’Art Moderne,” UNESCO, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris 1946
31

artistic colleagues, especially those artists greatly influenced by André Masson,
such as Roberto Matta, Arshile Gorky, William Baziotes and Jackson Pollock. 2
Once again, Lam tried to settle in New York but failed to obtain a visa to live
there. Many travels followed between Paris, Cuba and New York, and later
Zurich and Albissola Mare, making of Lam one of the most itinerant, mobile
artists of his times. Breton and Duchamp invited him to participate in the
exhibition “Le Surréalisme en 1947” at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, for which
he created a piece that he sent from Havana, which was installed in his absence
(La Chevelure de Falmer, 1947).
In 1951, Lam separated from his wife Helena and, as the situation had grown
untenable in Cuba after Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état in 1952, he decided
to return to Paris. He then formed new ties: with the Danish painter Asger
Jorn and the CoBrA group which was formulating, in its own unique way,
a new link between Surrealism and lyrical abstraction. This offered him the
opportunity to participate with Appel, Corneille and Jorn, but also with Matta
and Fontana, in the “Incontro Internazionale d’Albissola” in 1954.
Instead of affiliating himself to a group of artists, however, and the constraints
this engenders, Lam chose to stay in the margins of CoBrA, just as he had
done with Surrealism. He was now in full possession of his formal vocabulary
and a very productive period, again with much traveling, lay ahead of him.
A world of chimerical beings invaded his canvases and colors were gradually
abandoned, as though the artist wanted to turn away, once and for all, from
the colorful quotidian in order to focus his attention on that world of symbols
germinating in his work for over a decade. His painting thus took up a stance
that was neither abstract nor realist, nor at the worst naturalist. His “figures”
detached themselves, set against neutral grounds which intensify their angular
linearity. Drawing began to affirm its place in the work, gaining increasing
importance, just as engraving offered him a particularly fitting support for this
primacy of the line over painting.
Some critics have established a link between this progressive evanescence of
color and the liquid dissolution of the pictorial matter, so characteristic of his
canvases from the ‘60s and ‘70s.
They see in this a relationship to the ink washes of Chinese painting. Lam did
actually create many different shades of gray and used them much like diluted
32

Jacques Leenhardt
Wifredo Lam and Marcel Duchamp,
film stills, New York 1948
33

ink to capture the shapes of his improbable beings — headless horsemen and
other frog-like gods that you might well think had come straight out of Pu
Songling’s fantastic imaginings in Strange Tales of Liaozhai.
The influence of a Chinese tradition is nevertheless uncertain, but we can
always muse, like the critic Xing Xiao Sheng, 3 about the buried memories that
may have resurfaced from Lam’s childhood in which a sort of filial piety toward
the old Lam-Yam, his father, has an impelling role. We know, for instance, that
when still a child, Wifredo Lam drew an expressive portrait of this father with
the face of an old wise man, a man who served his immigrant community of
Sagua-la-Grande in the transmission of memory.
Now shown in London, Milan, Washington and Malmö and in most of the
capitals of the art world, including a centennial exhibition at the Yokohama
Museum of Art (Japan), Wifredo Lam’s art is difficult to classify. His pictorial
language is above all a form of poetry with multiple origins: African, Chinese,
French and Caribbean. His oeuvre, now resolutely universal, is marked by the
many cultures and heritages that traverse it, which is what makes him a truly
contemporary artist in this globalized world.
Lam is a storyteller of catastrophes and marvels, and hence we can see why
Picasso derived such pleasure from, as he put it to Leiris, “listening to Lam tell
his prodigious stories.” 4
Jacques Leenhardt is President of the Association of the Friends of Wifredo
Lam and Honorary President of the International Association of Art Critics
(AICA).
1
See François Jullien, Detour and access: Strategies of meaning in China and Greece (New York: Zone Books,
New York 2000).
2
See Lowery Sims, “Myth and Primitivism: The Work of Wifredo Lam in the Context of the New York
School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952,” in Wifredo Lam and his Contemporaries 1934-1952, The
Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992, pp. 77-88.
3
Xing Xiao Sheng, “Merveilles et démons de Wifredo Lam,” in Gravures de Wifredo Lam (exhibition
catalogue), Beijing-Shanghai-Hangzhou-Guangzhou, Beijing, 1991, p.11.
4
Michel Leiris, Wifredo Lam, Paris, Michel Devillez Editeur, 1997, p.43.
Wifredo and Lou Laurin-Lam
in Alibissola, 1970s
34

35
Jacques Leenhardt

Credits
© documentary photos SDO The Estate of Wifredo Lam
© Archives Loeb (p.28)
© Perls Galleries (p. 30)
© UNESCO (p. 31)
Chillida Archives (p. 41)
© Graham Foundation
© The Irving Penn Foundation (p. 49)
© Published with the graceful permission of Marie-Claude Char (p. 57)
© Éditions du Sagittaire (p. 57, 265)
© Nouvelles Éditions Place, Paris (p. 74)
© Austrian Frederick and Lilian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna (p. 75, 89)
© John and Trude Schiff papers, courtesy Leo Baeck Institute (p. 76)
© Fondation Marguerite et Aimé Maeght (p. 89)
© Revista Revolución y Cultura, Havana (p. 91–95)
ICA Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (p. 100, 101, 113)
© Lee Miller Archives, Chiddingly, East Sussex, 2012. All rights reserved (p. 110, 111)
Courtesy Fondazione Piero Manzoni, Milan (p. 126, 131, 132, 133, 134 )
Courtesy Casa Museo Asger Jorn, Albissola Marina (p. 127, 136)
Courtesy Comune di Albissola Marina / Comune di Albissola Marina (ph. Gianluca Anselmo) (p. 121, 132)
Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid / Foto: Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores
(p. 148-149, 154-155, 160-161, 178-179, 206-207, 220-221)
Courtesy Bibliothèque et Archives Canada / e000756917 (p. 200)
© Bill Cotter, WorldsFairPhotos.com (p. 201)
© association Atelier André Breton, www.andrebreton.fr
© ProLitteris for the artworks by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Wifredo Lam
Despite a thorough research, not all copyright holders could be identified. Should you be the owner of
the copyright or related rights to the illustrations published in this book, please contact the gallery.
338

Concept
Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer
Coordination
Alessandra Consonni
Texts by
Eskil Lam
Alain Jouffroy
Professor Luca Bochicchio, University of Genova
Professor Dawn Adès
Monsieur le Ministre Dominique de Villepin
Dorota Dolega-Ritter, Associate Director of the Wifredo Lam Archive
Adrian Clark
Antony Penrose, director of the Lee Miller Archive and Penrose Collection
Jacques Leenhardt, Directeur d’Études at School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris
Quote: ‘My Painting is an Act of Decolonization’
an Interview with Wifredo Lam by Gerardo Mosquera (1980)
Jean-Louis Paudrat
© galerie gmurzynska 2018
Printed by Grafiche Step, Parma, Italy
galerie gmurzynska
w w w · g m u r z y n s k a · c o m