Introducing Wilfredo Lam

‘I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country’
Wifredo Lam

A small whitewashed earthen room near the dwelling house holds the cult objects: it is known as the hounfor. On the altar, also made of earth, covered vases contain the souls of the initiated faithful, others contain divine forces, and bottles filled with liquors and perfumes are left for use by the gods. On the walls, flags, swords and chromolithographs depict Catholic saints, through whose effigies African gods are worshipped. The holy garments are closed up in a trunk… The ceremony was directed at the Congo loas–this is the name of the gods, sometimes also known as ‘spirits’ or ‘mysteries’. The loas are numerous: more than twenty and no hierarchy exists among them… the celebrationis a general invocation … Now it begins. Legba is invoked: he is the god of the gate or door, he who precedes the others and brings the spirits nearer to man. Everyone is dancing … The god appears to possess one of the women serving him: she loses consciousness and begins to shake convulsively. The last sentence of a work by André Breton crosses my mind: ‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all’.¹Introducing Wifredo Lam
1. Pierre Mabille, ‘La Jungle’, Tropiques, no. 12, January
1945; reprinted and translated in Catherine David
(ed.), Wifredo Lam: The EY Exhibition, Tate, London,
2016, pp. 178–79

Published in the journal Tropiques in 1945, this account by Pierre Mabille–French doctor, Surrealist author and former editor of the Surrealist journal Minotaure–detailed his initiation into Haitian voodoo ceremonies. Mabille went on to declare that the art of Wifredo Lam, then a rising star in the international art world, ‘evokes a world such as this, in which trees, flowers, fruit and spirits cohabit though dance’. ²ibid

If ever an artist exemplified the adage that you have to leave home in order to find yourself, it was Lam. Born in 1902 in the small sugar-producing municipality of Sagua la Grande in Cuba, he was the son of Enrique Lam Yam, a highly educated Chinese immigrant who spoke several dialects and was the public scribe for the large but mostly illiterate local Chinese community, handling all their correspondence with relatives back in China. Since the Spanish invasion of Cuba in the sixteenth century, the country’s economy had been fuelled by African slave labour. After the abolition of slavery in Cuba in 1878, large numbers of Chinese workers were attracted to the country by its sugar plantation owners. While Lam’s father– who was around eighty years old when Wifredo, his ninth child, was born – practised traditional ancestor worship, the maternal side of Lam’s family held to the Afro-Cuban religious beliefs of santeria, which fused West African spirit-worship with Catholicism.

Lam’s mother, Ana Serafina Castilla, was the daughter of a Hispanic father and a woman who had originally been brought from the African Congo to Cuba as a slave. For centuries santeria enabled enslaved African peoples in Cuba to secretly practise their traditional beliefs beneath the cloak of ostensibly conformist Western religion. Lam’s godmother, Ma’Antoñica Wilson, was a lucumí priestess of the West African Yoruba religion. Her personal deity was Changó, the Yoruban thunder god, and she gave the young Lam a Changó amulet, which the artist kept with him throughout his life. ³Julia P. Herzberg, ‘Wifredo Lam: The development of a
style and world view, the Havana years, 1941–1952’, in
Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries 1938–1952, Studio
Museum in Marlem, New York, 1992, p. 31

Lam’s father’s expertise with calligraphy saw him support his son’s artistic ambitions. These emerged early, and as a teenager Lam began attending classes at the Esquela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura San Alejandro in Havana. In 1923, when his father was 103, Lam travelled to Madrid to further his studies, financed by family money and a scholarship from the Sagua la Grande town authorities. He was to spend the next fourteen years in Spain. In Madrid, Lam became a master portraitist working in the Spanish academic tradition; he assiduously studied the works of the Spanish and Flemish old masters in the Prado Museum. In 1929 he married a Spanish woman, Eva, with whom he had a son. Both were to die of tuberculosis in 1931, leaving Lam devastated.

During these Spanish years Lam’s art and political beliefs were challenged and expanded. In Madrid he first encountered African art in a museum context, something he had not experienced in the Hispanophile Cuba of his adolescent years.

‘(Lam’s) academic leanings were destabilised by his first viewings of modernist paintings by Pablo Picasso, which he recalled as ‘not only a revelation but … a shock’⁴Wifredo Lam, quoted in Lowery Stokes Sims, ‘Wifredo Lam: From Spain back to Cuba’, in Herzberg, p. 18

while his political awakening occurred when he joined the Republican party in 1932. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Lam fought to defend Madrid from Franco’s fascist forces. Injured, he was transferred to a hospital in Barcelona, and from there, in 1938, he set off for Paris with a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso.

On his first meeting with Picasso, Lam later recalled,

He led me to a room where there were African sculptures …What made me feel such empathy with Picasso’s painting, more than anything else, was the presence of African art and the African spirit that I discovered in it. When I was a little boy, I had seen African figures in Ma’Antoñica Wilson’s house. And in Pablo’s work I seemed to find a sort of continuity. ⁵ibid., p. 19. Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam, Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, 1976, p. 137.

Lam, while still in Spain, had already started to shed his training as a Spanish Academic artist; now, under the guidance and influence of Picasso, he embraced his African heritage in a powerful new way. This was reinforced by visits to the African displays in the Musée de l’Homme with Picasso’s friend, the writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris.

A new network now opened up for Lam in Paris, as he met artists such as Óscar Domínguez and the writers Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret and Pierre Mabille, as well as the ‘Father of Surrealism’, André Breton. The outbreak of the Second World War and subsequent Nazi invasion of Paris saw all these men, save for Picasso, flee south to unoccupied France. There they gathered at Marseille for eight months awaiting safe passage away from the conflict. During this time Lam’s relationship with Breton and the other exiled Surrealists deepened considerably. In March 1941 Lam, Breton and three hundred other intellectual refugees were shipped to the French-controlled Caribbean island of Martinique. There Lam befriended the poet Aimé Césaire, who, in his literary review Tropiques, hailed the arrival in Martinique of ‘the painter in whose works we find, alongside the best teachings of Picasso, a curious and wide intermingling of Asan and African traditions’. ⁶Aimé Césaire, quoted in David, p. 208 Césaire had spearheaded the Négritude movement in the 1930s, which sought to disavow colonialism by re-embracing awareness of African heritage as a form of self-empowerment. Lam was to absorb this philosophy intimately.

In July 1941, Lam returned to Cuba. After eighteen years away, he was shocked by both the governmental corruption and cultural degradation that had enveloped his homeland. As he put it:

What I saw on my return was like some sort of hell. For me, trafficking in the dignity of a people is just that, hell … [I saw] an exploited people, with a society that crushed and humiliated its slaves. No, I decided that my painting would never be the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs. I refused to paint cha-cha-cha. I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country, but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the Blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating images with the power to surprise, to disturb the dream of the exploiters. ⁷Wifredo Lam, quoted in Fouchet, pp. 192–93

He further expressed his disenchantment with the ‘new’ Cuba by lamenting: ‘Yesterday it was black skin that was sold; today it is its spirit, its dreams, that are exploited, like objects of curiosity, because primitive people are reduced to the condition of slaves, of criminals, because today’s world is Western and white.’ ⁸Wifredo Lam, quoted in Kobena Mercer, ‘Wifredo Lam’s Afro-Atlantic routes’, in David, p. 26 From this point on, Lam’s painting channelled the force, beliefs and imagery of santeria. He found a connection with his experiences in France, noting, ‘Here in Cuba there were things that were pure surrealism (surrealismo puro). One example would be Afro-Cuban religious beliefs (Santería); one can immediately see the poetry that is preserved in this elemental magic state (estado mágico, primitivo).’⁹Wifredo Lam, ‘My painting is an act of decolonization’, interview by Gerardo Mosquera, trans. Colleen Kattau & David Craven, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 3, no. 1–2, 2009, p. 6

Meanwhile, Pierre Mabille had become cultural advisor at the French embassy in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 1945 he invited Lam and Breton to visit this country, where he organised their attendance at voodoo ceremonies. One of the first commentators to attempt to decode this unique diaspora religion for Western readers, William Seabrook in 1929 articulated

something which I think has never been fully understood, that Voodoo in Haiti is a profound and vitally alive religion–alive as Christianity was in its beginnings and in the early Middle Ages when miracles and mystical illuminations were common everyday occurrences–that Voodoo is primarily and basically a form of worship, and that its magic, its sorcery, its witchcraft (I am speaking technically now), is only a secondary, collateral, sometimes sinisterly twisted by-product of Voodoo as a faith, precisely as the same tthing was true in Catholic mediaeval Europe.¹⁰William Seabrook, The Magic Island, Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York, 1929, p. 12

According to Seabrook, the country had at least half a million voodoo altars in 1929. For his part, Lam was entranced by what he saw in Haiti, recalling how:

‘The negro ceremonies of Cuba could not compare with these, which were prodigious. One of them began at dusk and ended at nearly five.’ o’clock in the morning. It included sacrifices of animals and the calling forth of the dead. Unforgettable. Women dressed in white danced in a state of trance. Enormous drums almost deafened us. What wild, savage beauty! A non-intellectual beauty, skin-deep, an absolutely naked human emotion, But André [Breton] could not stomach the spectacle and began to feel sick. I could not resist teasing the man who had written that ‘beauty must be convulsive or it is not true beauty’. ¹¹Wifredo Lam, quoted in Fouchet, p. 209

Created during Lam’s time in Port-au-Prince, Damballah, 1945, is a large and vibrant painting named after the most important loa, or spirit, in Haitian voodoo, the great serpent god, the creator of all life in primordial times. In his 1929 book, Seabrook describes a voodoo ceremony dedicated to Damballah that involved the slaying of sacrificial animals (goats, kids, sheep and a small black bull), the drinking of their blood and its sprinkling over the assembled crowd: ‘from this swirling, milling ceremony of purification, figures leaped out dancing and screaming glory; here and there in the crowd a still higher, shriller, more unearthly shriek announced the Pentecostal, invisible, yet flame-like descent of the lois, spirits of the gods and of the mystères, entering the bodies of individual dancers’. ¹²Seabrook, Magic Island, p. 41, p. 209 Those imbued with the loa of Damballah slithered across the floor like serpents.

Lam’s spectacular and talismanic painting is not a literal depiction of the Damballah ceremony or the deity itself, but rather an evocative and mesmerising tribute to the latent power and majesty of the voodoo religion and Haitian belief systems that were, at the time of the painting’s creation, being actively expunged by the government under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. In Lam’s own words: ‘My painting is an act of decolonization not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.’ ¹³Lam, ‘Decolonization’, p. 3

Dr Ted Gott is NGV Senior Curator, International Art.

This essay was published in NGV Magazine Issue 56| Jan–Feb 2026.

Notes