Wifredo LAM

Wifredo Lam (1902-1982): Life, Lithographs and Original Prints

Wifredo Lam was born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, on 8 December 1902 and died in Paris on 11 September 1982. The son of a Cantonese father and a Cuban mother of African and Spanish descent, he trained in Havana and Madrid, joined Picasso and the Surrealists in Paris, and in the 1940s forged a visual language in which modernism meets Afro-Cuban belief. His late career was devoted in large part to original prints: lithographs, etchings and illustrated books made with poets such as Aimé Césaire, Gherasim Luca and René Char. In Britain he is best remembered through Tate Modern’s 2016 retrospective and through Ibaye (1950), a painting in the Tate collection.

Le Coin des Arts currently offers Sœur de la gazelle, a colour lithograph of 1974 from the album Pleni Luna; an Untitled lithograph of 1967; and the poster for Lam’s 1976 exhibition at the Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona. The poster is listed for what it is, an exhibition document rather than an original print. Each sheet has been chosen for the quality of its impression, its edition, its provenance and its condition.

A Cuban Youth and Fifteen Years in Spain

Lam’s full name, Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla, reflects the island’s mixed heritage: his father, Lam Yam, had emigrated from China; his mother, Ana Serafina Castilla, had African and Spanish ancestors. He moved to Havana in 1916 and studied at the city’s School of Fine Arts until 1923, when a grant took him to Madrid. There he worked under Fernando Álvarez de Sotomayor, curator at the Prado and once a teacher of Salvador Dalí.

Spain became his home until 1938. His first wife, Eva Piriz, whom he married in 1929, died of tuberculosis in 1931, as did their young son. In the Spanish Civil War Lam sided with the Republic, producing posters and painting The Civil War (1937). Injured during the defence of Madrid, he was sent to Barcelona, where he met Helena Holzer, later his second wife.

Paris and Marseilles: Picasso, Breton and Fata Morgana

Arriving in Paris in 1938 with an introduction from the sculptor Manolo, Lam was taken up by Pablo Picasso, who opened the doors of the avant-garde to him. He met André Breton, Victor Brauner, Óscar Domínguez, Roberto Matta and the ethnographer Michel Leiris. Pierre Loeb gave him his first Paris solo show at the Galerie Pierre from 30 June to 14 July 1939.

With the fall of France he moved to Marseilles, staying at the Villa Air-Bel with Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Victor Serge, and drew the illustrations for Breton’s Fata Morgana (1941). In 1941 he sailed to Martinique with Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and there met the poet Aimé Césaire, whose Cahier d’un retour au pays natal he would later illustrate.

The Jungle and the Caribbean Years

Back in Cuba by the summer of 1941, Lam rediscovered the island’s vegetation, its syncretic religions and the memory of slavery. Breton secured him a contract with the New York dealer Pierre Matisse, who showed him in November 1942 and June 1944. The Jungle (1942-43), oil and charcoal on paper mounted on canvas, entered the Museum of Modern Art in 1945; the Centre Pompidou holds a monumental gouache related to it, Lumière de la forêt (1942). In 1946 he spent four months in Haiti with Breton, and in 1947 took part in Le Surréalisme en 1947 in Paris.

That same year Lam visited London, where he met Roland Penrose and the collector Peter Watson. The London Gallery had shown his work from 5 to 30 November 1946. Tate would later describe its 2016 retrospective as the first museum exhibition of his work in London since 1952.

Albissola, Milan and International Standing

Lam settled in Paris in 1952. In 1954 he first went to Albissola, the Ligurian ceramics town where Asger Jorn and Enrico Baj had organised an international ceramics meeting, and in 1961 he bought a house there with his wife, Lou Laurin-Lam. He exhibited at documenta in Kassel in 1959 and 1964, won the Guggenheim International Award in 1964, and was given retrospectives at the Kunsthalle Basel and the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover in 1966-67. From 1975 he worked in clay almost daily.

The great posthumous retrospective organised by the Centre Pompidou (2015-16) travelled to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and then to Tate Modern, where The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam ran from 14 September 2016 to 8 January 2017. Curated by Matthew Gale and Catherine David, it brought together more than 200 paintings, drawings, photographs and prints, including late prints made with René Char, Gherasim Luca and Jean-Dominique Rey.

Lam the Printmaker: Workshops, Books and Catalogues

Havana’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes describes printmaking as the last great creative cycle of Lam’s life. His first essay was a small engraving of 1945 for Pierre Loeb’s Voyages à travers la peinture; in 1947 came the lithograph Quetzal, for a portfolio published in New York by Brunidor alongside Joan Miró, Max Ernst and Matta. The decisive meeting came in 1958 with Giorgio Upiglio of the Grafica Uno workshop in Milan, with whom he worked until 1982: the ten-plate album Images (1962), the fourteen etchings and aquatints of Luca’s Apostroph’ Apocalypse (finished 1966, published 1967 in 135 copies), and the seven plates of Césaire’s Annonciation, made in 1969 and published in 1982. Learn more about intaglio.

Other publishers followed: L’Antichambre de la nature by Alain Jouffroy (1966), Artaud’s Le Théâtre et les Dieux (1966), the ten lithographs of Pleni Luna (A. H. Grafik, Stockholm, 1974), twelve red-and-black lithographs for García Márquez’s El último viaje del buque fantasma (Polígrafa, Barcelona, 1976) and L’Herbe sous les pavés (1982). His 1976 lithograph for the portfolio Pour Jorn was printed in Paris by Clot, Bramsen et Georges for the Asger Jorn Foundation, Silkeborg.

Two catalogues raisonnés are cited. Dominique Tonneau-Ryckelynck’s Wifredo Lam. Œuvre gravé et lithographié (Musée du dessin et de l’estampe originale, Gravelines, c. 1993) uses numbers combining year and sequence, such as 7602 for a 1976 sheet. The 2016 catalogue by Eskil Lam, Tonneau-Ryckelynck and Dorota Dolega-Ritter (HC éditions, Paris) renumbers the prints consecutively, so a good description gives both.

Collecting Wifredo Lam: A Buyer’s Guide

The catalogue number. Ask for the Tonneau-Ryckelynck reference, old or new: it fixes the subject, date, publisher and edition.

Edition size. Editions range from about a hundred (Pour Jorn) to several hundred for some lithograph albums, plus artist’s proofs. See the printing.

Signature. Prints issued in Lam’s lifetime are normally signed in pencil. A signature printed in the stone is not the same thing. See the signature.

Book plates. Many loose sheets come from illustrated books; they remain original prints but should be catalogued with the book’s title and date. Browse our illustrated books.

Posters. Exhibition posters, such as those for the Galeria Joan Prats or Paris galleries, are collectable but are not original prints; neither are unsigned offset reproductions. See our posters and what makes an original print.

Paper and condition. Large 1970s lithographs show handling creases and light-staining easily; check the margins. Use conservation framing, and read our authenticity page.

Le Coin des Arts selects documented Lam prints in fine condition. Explore also Roberto Matta, Pablo Picasso, André Masson, Enrico Baj and Joan Miró, the Surrealism movement and our engravings and lithographs.

Sources and further reading

Catherine David, Matthew Gale et al., Wifredo Lam: The EY Exhibition, Tate Publishing, 2016 · Dominique Tonneau-Ryckelynck with Pascaline Dron, Wifredo Lam. Œuvre gravé et lithographié. Catalogue raisonné, Gravelines, c. 1993 · Eskil Lam, Dominique Tonneau-Ryckelynck and Dorota Dolega-Ritter, Wifredo Lam. Catalogue raisonné: prints / estampes / gráfica, HC éditions, 2016 · Helena Benitez, Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam, Acatos, 1999 · Tate – The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam · Tate Etc. – Wifredo Lam: the Albissola years · Tate – Wifredo Lam · The Met – Modern Art Index Project · Centre Pompidou – Pour Jorn