The Unique Art of Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam Self-Portrait

Last fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced a retrospective exhibition of the work of Afro-Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. (His mother was Congolese and Spanish, his father Chinese.) But what caught my attention was an article in the newsletter of the Archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (ALBA), which detailed Lam's participation in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-38, when idealistic )social democrats and Communists banded together in a doomed attempt to stop a takeover by General Franco and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini.

The Civil War

From this perspective, "it was Republican Spain, where Lam frequented left-wing circles and read Marxist literature, which first politicized the painter. Lam rejected the Eurocentric primitivism of much modernist art, which he denounced for commodifying non-European cultures as objects of curiosity. In Lam’s paintings, Afro-Cuban culture speaks back. Toward the end of his life, he described his work as 'an act of decolonization.'” In Paris, Lam had close ties with Picasso and other European artists and writers. His painting, The Civil War, conveys the same anguish and chaos as Picasso's Guernica. Lam's, like many of his later works, was painted on brown wrapping paper, because canvas was expensive.

Lam and Picasso

On his return to Cuba in 1941, Lam became involved in Afro-Cuban culture and spirituality, both the Négritude movement of poet and theoretician Aimé Césaire and the spiritual practice of Lucumi. He said, “I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but fully expressing the black spirit, the beauty of black [visual] art.” (wifredolam.org/biography) His magnificent painting, The Jungle, the centerpiece of the 2025-26 MoMA show, created a scandal at one of its first showings at a gallery in New York. When the Museum first acquired it in 1945, they hung it inconspicuously next to the coat check. Lam said, “I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.”

Enough words. The paintings speak for themselves. I'm sorry if you missed the MoMA exhibition, which ended on April 11. I don't always have a visceral experience at the art museum, but I found Lam's work thrilling and unique.

The Jungle

Oggue Orissa

Body and Soul

Song of Osmoses (Bombing of Hiroshima)

Malembo, God of Crossroads

Grief of Spain references both the Civil War and images of African masks that influenced the Cubists in Paris. Lam would later criticize them for appropriating African motifs.

Revisiting the Art of My Youth

The group of young Asian Americans beside me gaze at The Starry Night with its sharp spears of cypress piercing the swirling patterns of the sky.

"Is it real?" one of them asks.

"It is," I say. "Those are the real colors Van Gogh painted and the real brushstrokes. You won't see those in the immersive digitized version. This exhibition from the 1880s to the 1940s is only a fraction of what we got to look at every week when I was a kid. But the art from the 1960s to the 2020s hadn't been painted yet."

On the day of this conversation, I'd just scored a free year's MoMA membership, usually three figures, as a perk of the NYC ID that New York residents are entitled to as photo ID with numerous benefits. When I was in high school, I spent every Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art. We took the subway from Queens and feasted on art for free. Now, they've curated the hell out of the bits of the collection on display. My very favorite, Pavel Tchelitchew's Hide and Seek, doesn't fit any category so may never make the cut.

The Cubists have plenty of wall space. I've been reading a mystery series based on art crimes, the Genevieve Lenard novels by Estelle Ryan. The Braque Connection gave me a new appreciation of Cubism and Georges Braque in particular, as seen through the eyes of its autistic protagonist. I'd never liked Braque because his art at MoMA in the 1950s was limited to a few brown and gray paintings, which hung next to similar brown and gray canvases by his buddy Picasso. A visit to Google Images taught me that Braque had an enormous stylistic range and a broad and vivid palette. Back at MoMA in 2025, I looked at his work and that of Picasso, Juan Gris, and the other Cubists with fresh eyes. Braque's Road near l'Estaque, which I don't remember, is a Cubist abstraction with the colors of a Cézanne.

Some of the paintings I visited many times in my teens made me feel as if I'd come home. Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy, Chagall's I and the Village, and Cézanne's Château Noir all put a huge smile on my face.