?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
WIFREDO LAM Taureau-trois-graines s'est laissé pousser les dents.
Color lithograph, 1973. 650x500 mm; 25 1/2x19 3/4 inches (sheet), full margins. Signed and numbered 9/99 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Ateliers Guillard, Gourdon à Cachan. Published by Editions La Mata and Editions Agori, Paris. From Le Regard Vertical. A very good impression with strong colors.
Lam (1902-1982) was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. He was of mixed-race ancestry, on his maternal side the descendant of a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father, and his own father, Yam Lam, was a Chinese immigrant. Lam studied law initially in Havana, before becoming interested in the arts and moving, in 1923, to Madrid to pursue a career as a fine artist. He trained with the artist Fernando Zaragoza, the curator of the Museo del Prado and also the teacher of Salvador Dalí. At the Prado, he discovered and was awed by the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel I.
During the late 1930s, with Spain in the throes of civil war, he went to Paris and there fell into the orbit of the surrealists and other important artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and Georges Braque. In Paris, Lam began to forge an individual style, equally and significantly influenced by Picasso and Surrealism, that also combined primitivism and Afro-Cuban motifs, and is characterized by the prominence of hybrid figures.
With the outbreak of World War II and the invasion of Paris by the Germans, Lam left for Marseille in 1940. There he rejoined many intellectuals, including the Surrealists, with whom he had been associated since he had met André Breton in 1939. While in Marseille, Lam and Breton collaborated on the publication of Breton's poem Fata Morgana, which Lam illustrated with surrealist images. He eventually returned to Cuba as the war in Europe worsened and spent the next two decades there, only returning to Europe, settling in northern Italy, in 1960, for the remainder of his career. Tonneau-Ryckelynck 7303.
