Wifredo Oscar de la Concepción Lam Castilla

He was born in Sagua La Grande and died in Paris. He was the son of Lam Yam, a Chinese scribe settled in the Caribbean island, and Ana Serafina Castilla, a mulatto woman in whose veins also ran Indian blood. Besides his elderly father—who was eighty-four years old when Lam was born—a curious character would exert a powerful influence on the painter's childhood. This was his godmother, Mantonica Wilson, a healer and priestess of Santería.

In 1916 his family moved to Havana, contradicting his godmother's wishes, who augured for him a brilliant future as a sorcerer. The young man studied Law and, at the same time, developed his artistic inclinations at the Academy of San Alejandro (1918 and 1922). Little interested in the law, Lam concentrated on painting and, although he tolerated with some resignation the stale academicism that dominated, he preferred to draw the lush vegetation of the botanical garden to the classical motifs his teachers imposed on him.

In the early twenties he held his first exhibition in Sagua la Grande at the Salon of the Association of Painters and Sculptors.

In 1923 he traveled to Madrid, entering the workshop of Álvarez de Sotomayor, an academic painter who also directed the Prado Museum. At the same time, he attended the Free Academy of the Alhambra passage, a gathering place for young and restless painters, and, above all, he visited the Prado, where his preferences leaned toward the work of painters like El Hosco, Brueghel, and Goya. Linguistic affinity and emotional ties meant that what was initially supposed to be merely a stage of his journey to Paris became a fourteen-year stay, until 1938. From this period comes a series of drawings of country people, of conventional workmanship, in which the painter already shows his interest in social issues. Little by little, his painting assumed a modern language that combined a geometrizing structure with a certain surrealist vein.

He was married, from 1929, to Eva Píriz, with whom he had his son Wilfredo the following year; both died in 1931 from tuberculosis.

In 1938 he went to live in Paris, where Pablo Picasso (whom he admired) took him under his tutelage. Picasso introduced him to a wide circle of artists and writers, such as Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró, Benjamín Péret, André Breton, among others. That same year he traveled to Mexico, where he was with the artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

In 1941 he left Europe for the Caribbean with Breton, André Masson, Claude Lévi-Strauss and other intellectuals. He returned to his homeland in 1942, and there he associated with intellectuals, such as the Afro-Cuban folklorist Lydia Cabrera and writer Alejo Carpentier. His reunion with his country was very bitter: to the sense of rootlessness caused by seventeen years of absence was added indignation at the lamentable conditions in which his people lived, especially those of his racial brothers. This feeling led him to overcome his initial prostration and to begin artistic activity based on the roots of a people that, in Lam's opinion, should recover its dignity. In this way, indigenous references merged with the formal language learned in Europe to produce works as important as The Jungle (1942-1943), where the characters of the Yoruba pantheon already appear, characters that would populate much of his later production.

In 1945-46 he was in Haiti with André Breton. Between 1942 and 1950 he held exhibitions at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. In the second half of the forties, Lam alternated his residence between Cuba, New York, and Paris, the latter city where he settled in 1952. Similarly, he continued traveling to Cuba and other countries. In 1960 he settled in Albisola Mare, on the Italian coast.

Throughout his career he received numerous awards and recognition. His works are found in the principal museums of the world.

On February 28, 1983, the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center was created, an institution whose objective "is to research and promote the contemporary visual arts of Africa, Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean"; as well as to study and disseminate the work of this great Cuban artist.

In his early paintings he used oneiric elements, but his painting evolved toward expressionism. Afro-Cuban themes predominate in his production. He also created ceramics, sculptures, etchings, lithographs, and murals.

Among his works stand out: "The Inn of Blood," "The Jungle" (1943, which is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and his portraits of "Gregorio Marañón" and "Lady of Estévanez."