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Wifredo Lam: Multicultural Modernist
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10776 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
2,253 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
The present mood in the United States and much of Europe calls for "multiculturalism," a term that connotes an attitude of mutual tolerance and understanding as a way to resolve differences between peoples of different backgrounds. The Cuban-born artist Wifredo Lam was a paragon of cultural blending: His heritage was mixed, he called many places home, he married women of diverse ethnicity, and he invented a distinctly multicultural visual language to conjure cross-cultural religious beliefs. Furthermore, Lam is one of Latin America's most famous artists, his name among a select group that includes Figari, Torres-Garcia, River, Kahlo, Siquieros, Orozco, Matta, and Soto. So it makes perfect sense that a decade after his death in 1982 he is receiving an international tribute in museums in the United States and Spain.
Three current exhibitions afford an opportunity to reconsider Lam's art as an individual and a uniquely Afro-Cuban achievements, and to view it in the context of the twentieth-century avant-grade. Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952 is at the Studio Museum in Harlem until April 11. The two other exhibitions are in Barcelona through March 28--Wifredo Lam: A Retrospective of Works on Paper at La Caixa Foundation, and Wifredo Lam at the Fundacio Miro.
Wifredo Oscar de la Concepcion Lam y Castilla (1902-1982) was the youngest of nine children and the only son of a Chinese father and a mulatto mother of Spanish and African descent. Though his father adhered to Confucius and Lao Tse, his mother raised him as a Roman Catholic. And had his godmother Mantonica Wilson had her way, young Lam would have become a Santeria priest-healer. She herself was a santera priestess and instructed her godson in the Afro-Christian religion Santeria, Literally "the way of the saints." Lam wanted instead to pursue drawing, but his Chinese, Spanish, and especially Afro-Cuban upbringing would ultimately provide the personal challenge that would define his art.
An extraordinarily gifted draftsman, Lam honed his skills for several years in Havana. When he was twenty-one he went to Madrid, where he continued his formal study with the academic realist Fernando Alavarez de Sotomayor, director of the Prado. In 1924 he left with a friend for the less expensive mountain village of Cuenca, where he stayed most of the next four years, doing portraits and picturesque scenes for the tourist trade. Most of the works from this period are in private hands, but several are included in the retrospective of Lam's works on paper. Among these are a riveting bust of a peasant woman, stern and unforgiving of life's hardships, and an
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