RICARDO ROMO’S TEJANO REPORT 03.20.26 MAJOR EXHIBITION OF CUBAN MODERNIST WILFREDO LAM

“Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” the first major U.S. retrospective of the famed Cuban artist, opened in November 2025 and runs through April 11, 2026 at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. Known for his large-scale paintings, which reference modernistaesthetics and Afro-Cuban imagery, Lam explored themes of social injustice and spirituality. The exhibition features over 130 works spanning six decades, and includes paintings, ceramics, and works on paper. In 1939, Lam was among the first Latin American artists collected by the MOMA. More than 100 solo exhibits worldwide established Lam as one of the important artists of the twentieth century.

Born in 1902, Lam resided in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, a municipality in central Cuba known for having the largest and most productive sugar plantations on the island. Lam’s father, a Chinese immigrant, came to Cuba in the 19th century to harvest sugar cane crops. His mother, of African and Spanish descent, traced part of her heritage to African slaves brought to the region to work in the plantations in the 1800s. Over his six-decade career, Lam’s mixed heritage would define much of his art.

In 1916, Lam and his family moved from the Cuban countryside to Havana. That year, at age fourteen, Lam enrolled in the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura, Academia de San Alejandro in Havana. His exhibitions at the Salon de Bellas Artes convinced him to become a painter. His birth community of Sagua la Grande noticed his artistic talents and awarded him a grant to study in Spain. In 1923 Lam left Cuba to study in Madrid where he spent hours at the Prado Museum studying the great masters of Spanish painting, particularly Velázquez and Goya. While at the academy, Lam explored his personal and artistic identity. He also became part of a community of modernist intellectuals and artists, and MOMA curators noted that he “experimented with modern idioms like flattened space, bold outlines, and patterning.”

In Spain, he married, and his wife Eva gave birth to their son Wifredo Victor. Tragedy struck the Lam family when his wife and young son died of tuberculosis. His grief led to numerous paintings of mother and child. Lam also grew closer to his friendship network and joined a political organization connected to the Republican forces in the fight against Spanish General Francisco Franco. MOMA curators noted that after joining the Republican army to defend Madrid against the fascist forces of Franco, Lam engaged in creating propaganda posters against Franco’s fascist army.

War has never been good for artists. The Spanish Republican army forces placed Lam in a munitions factory where toxic fumes resulted in chemical poisoning. Sent to Barcelona to recover, Lam composed one of his largest paintings, “Las Guerra Civil” [1937], which MOMA noted, “heralded his arrival as a modern and politically committed artist.” Forced to paint on Kraft paper due to wartime scarcity, Lam responded creatively to the medium, using it to explore the boundary between painting and drawing. The interplay of material, scale, line, and blank space would become a hallmark of his practice.

Lam wrote of this painting, originally commissioned for the 1937 Spanish Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris, “I am drawing a painting of big proportions… an anti-fascist subject, not very beautiful but very true and real.” The flat, churning scene depicts a violent confrontation during the Spanish Civil War in which figures with grimacing, masklike faces struggle against one another. Lam’s painting of the horrors of war reminded me of Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica,” completed in 1937 that was shown at the Spanish Pavilion of the Paris International Exposition and drew worldwide attention.

While in Barcelona, Lam also secured a letter from a friend of Picasso to introduce him to the famous artist in Paris. Lam fled Spain and arrived in Paris in 1938. He met with Picasso, who introduced him to his artist friends, including Joan Miro, Fernand Léger, and Georges Braque. Among Picasso’s vanguard art collective was Andre Breton, a key figure in the surrealist movement. Picasso also introduced Lam to his gallery associates. One of Lam’s earlier paintings of a mother and child, completed in Madrid, was instrumental in his breakthrough to international status when the MOMA purchased the “Mother and Child” painting from a Paris dealer in 1939.

War continued to torment Lam and caused his exodus from Paris in 1940 when the Nazis invaded France. He fled to Marseille, France with Breton and friends and eventually found passage to the Caribbean island of Martinique. A short video shown at the Lam exhibit, narrated by MOMA Director Christophe Cheriz and MOMA Latin American Curator Beverly Adams, noted that both the United States and Mexico rejected Lam’s entry. After a short stay in Martinique, Lam returned to Cuba.

Back in Cuba, Lam reconnected intellectually with his new artistic crusade, a coupling of the influence of Oceanic art with that of African art. His works also touched on his opposition to colonialism. In March 1943, the MOMA exhibition, The Latin American Collection, featured Lam’s gouaches Mother and Child and Satan.

For his most famous painting, La Jungla, Lam glued together two large pieces of Kraft paper. He first sketched the composition in charcoal and then used layers of thinned oil paint over the initial drawing. Lam’s figures feature faces reminiscent of African masks, hand-like feet, elongated legs, and male and female attributes. Adams, who curated the MOMA exhibit, noted that Lam’s figures “are placed within a Caribbean landscape, intertwined with broad leaves, tropical fruit, and sugarcane. This setting recalls Cuba’s history of slavery and indenture, while also signaling the resilience of Afro-Caribbean cultures.”

La Jungla was acquired by MOMA in 1945. Referring to La Jungla painting, poet Aimé Césaire, whom Lam met in Martinique, wrote that “La junglaimagines a constant re-creation of figures and their context, a revolving, as if they were both entering and leaving the world made for them. Rather than being static plant/humans, they become, unbecome, and ultimately transcend the impenetrable space of the sugarcane field.”

During the late 1940s, Lam’s new success as an international artist allowed him to divide his time between Europe, Havana, and New York. Lam received major recognition in the 1950s and 1960s, including winning the Grand Prix of the Havana Salon and the Guggenheim International Award in 1964. These awards solidified his status as a leading figure of global modernism. Prestigious museums in Cuba, Haiti, the United States, France, Sweden, England, Mexico, Moscow, and Prague featured Lam’s solo exhibitions.

In 1954, Lam moved to Albissola, Italy. He established a studio there in 1960 with his wife, Swedish painter Lou Laurin, and began exploring ceramics and later metal sculpture, often reworking the same hybrid personages that populated his paintings. His son, Eskil Lam, wrote, “Albissola, a traditional centre of Italian ceramics, was a hub of excitement, activity, and artistic exchange at the time my father was there. My mother called it ‘Albissolamania.’ It was this spirit of collaboration and friendship that first brought my father to the Italian coastal town of Albissola, just west of Genoa.”

During the 1970s, the last decade of his life, Lam collaborated with a Milan printmaker, Giorgio Upiglio, at the Grafica Uno workshop. His involvement with printmaking intensified through frequent working stays in Milan from the late 1970s onward. In these trips, he typically spent about a week at a time in Milan, experimenting with etching, aquatint, and lithography, which allowed him to sharpen the motifs of his mature style in graphic form. His love of poetry allowed him to maintain a sustained dialogue with poets through illustrated books and portfolios. He illustrated many journals and poetry books for friends and acquaintances.

Wifredo Lam passed away in 1982 and is remembered as a major 20th-century modernist painter whose career bridged Europe and the Caribbean. An art critic with the journal Artsy noted that Lam “fused Surrealism, Cubism, and Afro-Cuban spiritual imagery into a distinctive visual language.” It is exciting that Lam’s work is receiving the recognition it deserves.

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Copyright 2026 by Ricardo Romo. All photo credits as indicated.