Lam and Picasso

As a young man living in Cuba in the early fifties I came in contact with the 30's generation of Cuban painters. A cut above all of them as far as fame was concerned stood Wifredo Lam. He left Spain at the collapse of the war in 1938 and arrived in Paris armed with aletter of recommendation to Picasso. Already influenced by African art as can be witnessed in the Demoselles de Avignon and possesing a large collection of African primitive sculpture Picasso was charmed by the AfroCuban roots of Lam's work. Picasso's and Lam's work of those periods are quite akin in their celebration of the primitive, the mysterious.

Lam was referred by Picasso to Andre Breton and soon was integrated to the surrealist movement of that time.



Thus, similarities in Lam and Picasso of the 30's abound. Nevertheless there is a persistent tendency in museum curators to show Lam and Matta side by side. I personally saw this happen in the Houston Menil Collection years ago.



Lam and Matta may have a superficial similarity in their brush strokes but Lam speaks of the primitive and harks back to the intuitive, mysterious, the personal innermost regions of the soul of man and Matta speaks of industrialization and modernism. To rationalize grouping them as Surrealist betrays the most inexact of appraisals of these artists' works.



As a coda to this comment, the Cuban School of painting of the 30s to the 50s was often referred to as Picasso in the tropics.