Wifredo Lam: From boyhood fantasy to the canvas

Summer is usually the low season for galleries, but this time around there are some rare, legendary figures on exhibit in Taipei. Wifredo Lam (林飛龍) is one of them. This Cuban artist, already well-established in Europe and the States, is still quite a new name in Taiwan. He is most famous for his drawing of dragon-like beasts, which, on view at the show as prints, are imaginative and bizarre, the stuff of hallucinations. Because of that, local art critic Hsieh Li-fa (謝里法) gave him the Chinese name of Fei-lung, which means flying dragon.

Lam is a significant figure in the modern art history of the 20th century. He is closely related to Picasso and other surrealist artists. Alleged as the first Third World artist that went beyond the frontiers of his own cultural and religious origins, Lam paints with a hybrid style, a mixture of surrealistic figures with Cubist character.

Born to a Chinese father and African mother, Lam's mixed origins influenced his magical and mysterious style, and added richness to the surrealistic quality of his works. At the age of 12, Lam already possessed a flair for distilling figures down to their most basic characteristic features. Lam had fantasies ever since he was a child, seeing bat-like or dragon-like beasts in shafts of sunlight that leaked through his windows. The funny, unreal beasts on view at the gallery are good testimony to his childhood musings. Also evident in the prints on display is his practice of using African sculptural totems in his art, a trademark that stretched throughout his artistic career.

Lam left Cuba for Europe in 1923. He studied in Madrid and then left for Paris in 1938. He quickly became a good friend of Picasso, who also introduced him to other prominent artists, such as Henri Matisse and Joan Miro. In reading Picasso, he said he felt empathy with his paintings because of the presence of African art and the African spirit.

In his early days, Lam used broad and thick brushstrokes to outline his images. His most representative and precious work is The Jungle, dated 1942. The pictorial world that Lam created in The Jungle showcases numerous creatures in Cubist dimensions, with a thick, greenish backdrop of trees and leaves, a rarity to his latter works that had mostly empty, cleaner backgrounds.

When Lam shifted to using thinner outlines, his work took on a greater sense of precision. The imaginative beasts in his pictures became thinner and sharper, with triangular faces, hollow eyes, and over-stretched bodies.

Li Hsiang-ming (李祥明), a collector of and researcher on Lam, said the artist's prints are more common than his oil paintings as the latter are far more expensive. Li also said Lam is different from his peers. Picasso detaches his images from the backgrounds while Lam integrates them. Miro has gone on to an abstract path and Matisse uses exaggerated colors that blur the lines. Lam, on the other hand, still stays with concrete figures and uses geometric lines to highlight his surrealistic images.