Wifredo Lam

Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla was born on 8 December 1902 in Sagua la Grande, Cuba. His father, Lam Yam, was a Chinese immigrant from Canton who arrived in Cuba in the late nineteenth century, and his mother, Ana Serafina Castilla, was of African and Spanish descent. He grew up between Chinese and Afro-Cuban worlds, and later described himself as a mulatto of many worlds: African, Spanish and Chinese.

In 1916 the family moved to Havana, where Lam studied painting until 1923. That year he won a grant to study in Madrid, where he trained with the teacher of Salvador Dalí and remained for fourteen years. In the 1930s he became involved in anti-fascist politics and in 1936 joined the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War.

He moved to Paris in 1938 and introduced himself to Pablo Picasso, who showed him his collection of African art and became a friend and supporter. In Paris Lam moved among the Surrealists and met André Breton, but as the Second World War approached he left Europe, returning to Cuba in 1941 after about eighteen years away.

Back in Havana he found a new awareness of Afro-Cuban traditions. His sister Eloisa explained the workings of Afro-Cuban rituals, and he began attending ceremonies. In 1943 he painted The Jungle, a large work in which hybrid figures, half human, half plant and animal, emerge from a field of sugar cane. It combines Cubism and Surrealism with the imagery of Afro-Cuban religion, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought it in 1945.

Lam travelled between Cuba, the United States, Haiti and Europe, and in 1946 attended ceremonies in Haiti with Breton. He spent his later years largely in Europe, and died in Paris on 11 September 1982. His work is held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Reina Sofía in Madrid and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and he is regarded as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.