Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982) ranks alongside his friends Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Cuban-born with mixed African, Cuban, and Chinese heritage, he produced a multifaceted body of work that melded multiple influences, combining abstraction and figuration, as well as primitivism and modernity.

Lam left his homeland at an early age to study art in Spain, absorbing influences from the masters of European art he saw in the Prado. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he moved to France and joined a circle of avant-garde painters and poets, embracing the creative freedom they endorsed and absorbing the currents of Cubism and Surrealism.

Although a rationalist at heart, he used his work to explore a deep personal mythology, rooted in the vibrant syncretic traditions of his homeland. When he returned to Cuba from Europe, his art fused modernist ideas with Santería and other Afro-Cuban imagery. Throughout his long career, he retained a questing spirit. He was a politically engaged artist with antiestablishment beliefs and strove to create an artistic language that expressed his own cultural identities.

This magnificently illustrated book follows a chronological path through Lam's career, outlining the continuing threads that connect the disparate phases of his art. His paintings are showcased alongside a selection of his works on paper and his later ceramics and sculptures. Lam's fertile multiculturalism is more relevant than ever in the twenty-first century and grants this unclassifiable artist a lasting resonance in the modern world.