Wifredo Lam: A Vision That Transformed 20th-Century Art
- Jun 3
- 2 min read
MoMA presented Wifredo Lam: When I Don't Sleep, I Dream (November 10, 2025 – April 11, 2026), the most extensive retrospective devoted to the artist in the United States. With more than 130 works, paintings, large-scale drawings, illustrated books, prints, ceramics, and archival material, the exhibition spanned six decades of his career and revealed how Lam embodied, like no one else, the figure of the transnational artist of the 20th century.
Wifredo Lam was born in 1902 in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, the son of a Chinese immigrant father and a mother of African, Spanish, and indigenous descent. That layered heritage would profoundly shape his work and worldview. He studied fine arts in Havana and later in Madrid, where he lived for over a decade. The Spanish Civil War left a deep mark on him , his monumental gouache La Guerra Civil (1937) stands as direct testimony to that collective trauma.
In 1938 he arrived in Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso, who welcomed him as an equal and introduced him to Surrealist circles. His friendship with André Breton and his group proved decisive: Lam absorbed Surrealism without surrendering to it, transforming it through his own cosmology. In 1941, as Europe collapsed under Nazi occupation, he returned to Cuba after 18 years away. That reunion with the Caribbean was a revelation. Lam immersed himself in Afro-Cuban traditions , particularly Santería and Yoruba culture and from that synthesis emerged his most powerful visual language: hybrid figures caught between the human, animal, and vegetal, inhabiting a mythical and unsettling jungle.
His most iconic work, La jungla (The Jungle) (1942–43), belongs today to MoMA's permanent collection. In that monumental canvas, fragmented bodies, sugarcane stalks, and spirits coexist in a dense ritual atmosphere. Lam described it as "an act of decolonization": a visual response to centuries of slavery and cultural erasure.
He spent the rest of his life moving between Cuba, Paris, and Italy, working relentlessly until his death in 1982. He was a painter, but also a ceramicist, printmaker, and illustrator, collaborating with poets such as Aimé Césaire and André Breton.
Note: the exhibition closed on April 11, 2026, so it is no longer on view.
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