As a fan of surrealism in different genres and contexts, I love the title of this outstanding review by Ben Davis (Artnet). In this article, Davis offers “A close look at ‘The Jungle’ and the Exquisite Corpse.”

An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it’s a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it. There it stands, about halfway through “Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” a mythic work in its time and ours, the artist’s immediately recognizable calling card, but also an enduring, still-to-be-processed enigma.

Plenty of good essays have been written about this show, so I’ll just put down a few things that it made me think, specifically about Wifredo Lam’s relationship to art history and his significance now.

Culture Clash

If there’s one issue that hovers in the background of the exhibition, it’s how to fit together two facts of Lam’s biography: his intense engagement with Europe’s interwar Modernist avant-gardes versus his view of his art as a self-conscious project of cultural decolonization, throwing off imposed European cultural values.

There is a long tradition of celebrating Lam as “Cuba’s Picasso.” He was personally close with Picasso, and many elements of The Jungle (1942–43) read as a head-on confrontation with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Picasso’s own first swaggering statement piece as a Modernist dynamo. But viewing Lam through this lens risks relegating his practice to an exercise in “applied Cubism,” as if he were merely taking developments from across the sea and finding Caribbean uses for them.

In a contemporary art world where “decolonial” is a buzzword, the tendency runs mainly in the other direction, emphasizing the absolute alterity of Lam’s themes, his art’s “Afro-Cuban-ness” as its main defining feature. His canvasses teem with creatures that you can link to various orisha spirits of Santería, the folk religion that descendants of enslaved Africans innovated in Cuba.

And yet, there’s a danger in this language of representation, too. Despite early exposure via a grandmother who was a priestess of Santería, Lam was never a practitioner himself; he was more of a sympathetic observer. Above all, Lam’s works are very proudly individual in their vision. He rarely paints anything that is a clear-cut reference. “I don’t use symbolism,” he once said. “I never invent my paintings in relation to symbolic tradition, but always from a poetic stimulus.” [. . .]

World War II loomed. Lam was among a group of refugees who escaped south to Marseilles as Paris was invaded, eventually leaving the collapsing Old World aboard a refugee boat, the Capitaine Paul Lemerle. That ship’s passengers included the “Pope of Surrealism,” André Breton; the future father of structural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss; and the exiled Russian revolutionary Victor Serge (a cast of personalities so symbolic of what shaped culture in the 20th century that it is the subject of a least one novel and one musical).

After arriving in Vichy-controlled Martinique, Lam and Breton crossed paths with Aimé Césaire, the radical poet who was in the midst of launching the Négritude movement of proto-Black nationalism. Lam and Césaire would become lasting comrades, the painter lending his art to the Spanish edition of Césaire’s 1939 poem-manifesto, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. (Lam’s second wife, Helena Holzer, did the translation.)

After weeks in a new limbo in Martinique, the refugees were eventually dispersed. Lam would have preferred to go on to New York, like Breton, or to Mexico, like Victor Serge, but the bureaucracy was impossible. So instead, he went to the Dominican Republic, and then back to Cuba. [. . .]

For full article, visit https://news.artnet.com/art-world/wifredo-lam-surrealism-moma-2744278

[Photo above by Ben Davis. Wifredo Lam, Sol / Son (1925), a possible self-portrait, on view at MoMA.]