This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 The following information was submitted December 2012 by Jose Angel Acosta Buxado:
Exhibition of 72 works of Wifredo Lam will be opened in Havana
Exposure Wifredo Lam: “Between painting and printmaking” will be inaugurated on December 12th at the Centre For Contemporary Art as part of the program of activities designed to mark the 110th Anniversary of Wifredo Lam, the most international Cuban artist Of the 72 pieces that will be on display, 68 are from the thesaurus of the National Museum of Fine Arts and four are lithographs series “Green Fire”, which are on loan from Alexys Leyva, Kcho. All were created by Lam between 1941 and 1976. Their artworks had not been returned to exhibit, in such a wide range as announcing, from the exhibition organized to commemorate the centenary of the artist. The exhibition will contemplate known artworks, some that have never been exhibited, shows like “The altars”, “Portraits HH”, “The Ocher and Sienna”, some works of the period in Haiti, and inks, pastels, tempera, collage prints and albums.
On December 11, 2012, there will be the screening of the documentaries: At the crossroads of the World 1902 – 1946, In Search of the Lost Unity 1946-1982, Wifredo and Ooets and Atom Dust, produced by Seven Doc (France), produced by the filmmakers Fabrice Maze and Barbro Schultz Lundestam and donated to Wifredo Lam Center by the collector Gilbert Brownstone.
The first two visuals are of 87 and 80 minutes, respectively. These are chronological materials that recreate the life and artwork of the Cuban painter, from his birth on December 8 1902, in Sagua la Grande in Villa Clara, until his death on September 11, 1982 in Paris. For Wifredo and poets (55 min), refers to the 60s, when he worked etching and lithography, closely related with writers and poets such as André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Aimé Césaire, Gherasim Luca, Alain Jouffroy and Jean-Dominique Rey, among other artists. Powder atoms (48 min), captures the time when he lived in Albisola Mare, Italy, where he made more than 300 ceramics at the workshop San Giorgio.
The exhibition will be open until February 23rd, 2013, and until then the aforementioned documentaries will be projected, in addition to Wifredo Lam from Humberto Solas, and It was already autumn in Paris from Jorge Aguirre.
| |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 Wifredo Lam was the youngest of nine children and the only son of a
Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother. He was born in 1902 in
Cuba. His father adhered to Confucius and Lao Tse, his mother
raised him as a Roman Catholic. Had his godmother had her way, he
would have become a Santeria priest-healer. He left Havana when
he was twenty-one to study art in Madrid. There he was exposed to
modernism: Surrealism, Picasso and Matisse.
In 1930, Lam
married a Spanish woman, but a year later both his bride and their
newborn son tragically succumbed to tuberculosis. He remained in
Spain, fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War.
Injured, he was taken to a Catalonian hospital where he met a German
chemist, Helena Holzer. Later they were married. In 1938,
after being wounded while fighting for the Republican army during the
siege of Madrid, he moved to Paris, where he established a lifelong
friendship with Picasso. In 1940, with World War II and the
internment by the Nazis of his wife, Lam fled with her to Marseilles
and in 1941, boarded a ship back to Cuba.
In the Paris years,
Lam has assimilated the Surrealist and Cubist vocabularies. Then,
during the decade in Cuba, he fused the modernist elements with his
Afro-Cuban heritage, forging his mature unique style.
In 1952, having divorced Helena, he moved permanently to Paris.
His international reputation began to soar. In 1960 he married a
Swedish artist with whom he had three sons. He supported Fidel
Castro, and he enjoyed two tributes at the Museo de Belles Artes, in
Havana. He died in 1982.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources include:
Susana Torruella Leval in ARTnews, Summer 1994
From the internet, Electric Library
|
Biography from Denis Bloch Fine Art:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Wifredo Oscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla was born December 8,
1902, in Sagua la Grande, Cuba. In 1916, his family moved to
Havana, where he attended the Escuela de Bellas Artes. During the
early 1920s, he exhibited at the Salón de la Asociación de Pintores y
Escultores in Havana. In 1923, Lam moved to Madrid, where he
studied at the studio of Fernando Alvarez de Sotomayor, the Director of
the Museo del Prado (and a teacher of Salvador Dalí). In 1929,
Lam married Eva Piriz, who died of tuberculosis two years later, as did
their young son. This tragic event may have contributed to the
dark and brooding appearance of much of Lam’s later work.
In the
early 1930s, the effects of Surrealism were evident in Lam’s work, as
was the influence of Henri Matisse and possibly Joaquín
Torres-García. In 1936, a traveling exhibition of the work of
Pablo Picasso shown in Barcelona, Bilbao, and Madrid proved
inspirational to Lam both artistically and politically. He moved to
Paris in 1938, where Picasso took him under his wing and encouraged his
interest in African art and primitive masks. During that year, Lam
traveled to Mexico, where he stayed with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Lam’s own multicultural heritage (son of a Chinese father and a mother
of mixed African, Indian, and European descent) and his involvement
with Santería, a religion rooted in African culture, would soon become
integral to his work. By the late 1930s, Lam was associated with the
Surrealists. He had his first solo show at the Galerie Pierre Loeb in
Paris in 1939, and his work was exhibited alongside Picasso’s at the
Perls Galleries, New York.
During World War II, Lam spent most of his time in the Caribbean, along with André Masson, and André Breton, whose poem Fata Morgana
Lam illustrated in 1940. Lam eventually made his way back to
Havana in 1941. His first year in Cuba marked a watershed in his
artistic development; he was introduced to the theories of Carl Jung,
and by the end of 1942 he had begun his powerful painting Jungle.
Lam’s exploration of mythic images paralleled that of his
contemporaries in New York, the Abstract Expressionists, though Lam
used specific subject matter. Lam created his own style by fusing
Surrealism and Cubism with the spirit and forms of the Caribbean.
Between
1942 and 1950, the artist exhibited regularly at the Pierre Matisse
Gallery in New York. His second marriage, to Helena Holzer in
1944, ended in divorce in 1950. In 1946, after a four-month stay
in Haiti, Lam returned to France via New York. He traveled
extensively until 1952, then settled for three years in Paris before
resuming his travels again in 1955. In 1960, Lam established a
studio in Albisola Mare, on the Italian coast. The winter of that year
he married Swedish painter Lou Laurin, with whom he would have three
sons. In 1964, he received the Guggenheim International Award, and in
1966–67 there were multiple retrospectives of Lam’s work at the
Kunsthalle Basel; the Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover; the Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and the Palais des
Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Lam died September 11, 1982, in Paris.
QUOTE:
“With
regard to life, modern painting is a revolutionary activity…We need it
in order to transform the world into a more humane place where mankind
can live in liberty…We must accept these things with passion. It means
that we must live imaginatively.”
Select Museum Collections:
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Guggenheim Museum, NYC
Tate Gallery, London
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
|
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|