Summer is usually the low season for galleries, but this time around there are some rare, legendary figures on exhibit in Taipei. Wifredo Lam (
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.
PHOTO: CAVES ART CENTER
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.
PHOTO: GALERIE GRAND SIECLE
Li Hsiang-ming (李
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