Wifredo Lam

WIFREDO LAM (Sagua La Grande, Cuba, 1902 - Paris, 1982).
Untitled...
Etching, copy 60/99.
Signed and justified by hand.
Measurements: 40 x 50 cm (print); 50 x 70 cm (paper); 67 x 87 cm (frame).
Presents stains on the paper.
Wifredo Lam was formed in Havana, where he studied at the School of Fine Arts. He made his individual debut in the early 1920s, with an exhibition at the Salon of the Association of Painters and Sculptors of the Cuban capital. In 1923 he moved to Madrid, with a scholarship from the City Council of Sagua La Grande, where he continued his training in the workshop of Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, director of the Prado Museum and recognized for having been Salvador Dali's teacher. At the same time, he attended the Academia Libre del Pasaje de la Alhambra, and visited the Prado, where his preferences leaned towards the work of Bosch, Brueghel and Goya. Little by little, his painting assumed a modern language that combined a geometrical structure with a certain surrealist vein. In 1938 he traveled to Paris, with a letter of recommendation for Picasso written by Manolo Hugué. Lam, who had had the opportunity to attend the Picasso exhibition held in Madrid in 1936, defined this experience as "a shock". In 1939 he had his first personal exhibition in Paris, with Pierre Loeb. During World War II Lam remained in the Caribbean, in contact with representatives of the avant-garde such as Masson and Breton, who, fascinated by the Cuban's pictorial work, asked him to illustrate his poem "Fata Morgana" (1940). Back in Cuba, Lam began an artistic activity based on the roots of a people who, in the painter's opinion, should recover their dignity. In this way, the autochthonous references were fused with the formal language learned in Europe to produce works where the characters of the Yoruba pantheon that would populate a large part of his later production already appeared. In the second half of the forties, Lam alternated his residence between Cuba, New York and Paris, where he settled in 1952. His international prestige grew progressively, and he held periodic exhibitions in galleries such as the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. He traveled intensely during the following years and, in 1960, he settled in Albisola Mare, on the Italian coast. In 1961 he received the Guggenheim International Prize, and between 1966 and 1967 multiple retrospectives of his work were held at the Kunsthalle in Basel.