“I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country,” Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) famously said, “but by thoroughly expressing the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic arts of the blacks. In this way I would act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”
This is a fittingly surreal way for Cuba’s original surrealist to describe his intentions on returning home in 1941 after an absence of seventeen years, having completed his apprenticeship among the likes of Picasso, Matisse, André Bréton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in Madrid, Paris, and Marseille. In Cuba, Lam encountered once again the sensory overload of the tropics; he also became reacquainted with the lingering racism and colonialist attitudes of Caribbean culture. Lam’s “hallucinating figures,” which began appearing in his work in the 1940s, not only reinvigorated aspects of his African-Spanish-Chinese ancestry, but also reimagined what he had absorbed of cubism, surrealism, leftist ideologies, and emerging literary and political efforts such as Aimé Césaire’s Négritude movement. Later in his life and especially after his death, Lam was enthusiastically adopted by the postcolonialist theorists. This is not surprising—being a mixed-race artist inspired by a growing ethnic awareness in a society of cultural and racial injustice makes Lam irresistible to the academy. The good