/ARTS&ENTERTAINMENT/ART-CUBA: 2002 Is Painter Wifredo Lam’s Year

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jan 3 2002 (IPS) - Wifredo Lam, considered the most important and universal of Cuba’s painters, will receive tribute from his fellow Cubans and from art lovers around the world in 2002 as they mark the hundred-year anniversary of his birth.

In addition to the cultural events planned in Cuba, launched this month with the inauguration of an art exhibition, came the announcement of the celebration of Wifredo Lam Year, declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

“We are fulfilling many dreams with this well-rounded exposition of works here by the master,” said Hilda Maria Rodriguez, director of the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre, in the Cuban capital.

This institution was born in the early 1980s and is located along one side of Cathedral Plaza, in the heart of Old Havana, though has always suffered the absence of key artworks by the creator of such notable pieces as “Tercer Mundo” (Third World, 1996).

But since Dec 8 visitors have been able to take in an exhibition at the centre featuring engravings, including 22 pieces from the National Fine Arts Museum and from the private collection of Juan Castillo Vazquez, the painter’s grand-nephew.

“They are works that have a certain number of reproductions, in some cases quite limited, but which cover a broad range of Lam’s creations – their value is incalculable,” says Castillo Vazquez.

The works on exhibit were created in the 1940s through the 1970s and are valued at 90,000 to 200,000 dollars, “varying with the fluctuations of the international art market,” according to curator Jose Manuel Noceda.

The expert, who has been studying Lam’s art for more than 15 years, highlighted the inclusion in the collection of “Quetzal”, a piece from 1947 “that we believe to be the first independent engraving by the Cuban artist.”

Noceda added that the showing “in some ways has a lesser tone” because it involves Lam’s engravings, not paintings. But engravings are “an essential element in Lam’s career and represent the genre he pursued with greatest rigour, after painting and drawing.”

The engravings “accompanied the stylistic variations that characterised Lam’s most fertile efforts from 1950 on,” stated Noceda, who situates the artist among the key figures of 20th century Latin American art and “one of its great engravers.”

Lam was born Dec 8, 1902, in the town of Sagua la Grande, 300 km from Havana. His father was a Chinese immigrant and his mother a descendant of the slaves who were brought to the Caribbean island from Africa.

In 1923 he left the Cuban academy of San Alejandro and headed to Spain, where he lived until 1938. In those years his works reflected a range of styles, covering realism, cubism and surrealism. The artist also became involved in the political sphere, joining the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936- 1939).

He visited Paris for the first time in May 22, 1938, with a letter of presentation for his Spanish colleague Pablo Picasso, who put Lam in contact with art’s vanguard, including Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro and Benjamin Peret.

Shortly after his first art showing in the French capital, World War II prompted him to move to Marseilles, where he developed strong ties with the surrealist group, which included Andre Breton.

Lam returned to Cuba in 1941 and the re-encounter with his native country had an obvious impact on his art. Art historians agree it was then that he developed his own artistic “language” to capture the island’s landscape and its Afro-Cuban traditions.