Wifredo Lam

Double Personage

1979

Double Personage Color lithograph, 1975 (?) Unsigned (as issued) Edition: Large Edition Limited, (estimated to be approximately 2000) Published in: XXe Siecle, No. 52, Juin 1979 Published: G. di San Lazzaro Printer: Mourlot Imprimeur, Paris, France Reference: Lam-Tonneau-Ryckelynck L7513 Condition: Excellent, fresh colors Traces of glue residue along margin edge where it was bound in the book Image/sheet size: 12 1/4 x 9 1/4 inches Wilfredo Lam (1902-1982) Biography Wifredo Lam was born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, on December 8, 1902. He was the eighth child born to Lam-Yam―born in Canton around 1820, an immigrant to the Americas in 1860―and to Ana Serafina Catilla―born in 1862 in Cuba of mixed African and Spanish ancestry. The luxuriant nature of Sagua la Grande had a strong impact on Lam from early childhood. One night in 1907, he was startled by the strange shadows cast on the wall of his bedroom of a bat in flight. He often recounted the incident as his first magnificent awakening to another dimension to existence. In 1916, Lam and part of his family settled in Havana. He was enrolled in the Escuela Profesional de Pintura y Escultura, Academia de San Alejandro, where he remained a student until 1923. This period, with exhibitions at the Salón de Bellas artes, was determinant in his choice to become a painter. In 1923, the municipality of Sagua la Grande awarded him a grant to study in Europe and by the autumn of that year, at the age of twenty-one, he left the country for Spain. His time in Spain―initially intended as a short stay on his way to Paris―lasted 14 years. In Madrid, he was exposed to the ideas and movements of modern art. He spent long hours at the Archeological Museum and the Prado. He studied the great masters of Spanish painting, Velázquez and Goya, but felt particularly drawn to the works of Bosch and Bruegel the Elder. In 1931, his first wife, Eva (Sébastiana Piriz) and their son Wilfredo Victor died of tuberculosis. The terrible suffering he endured led to numerous paintings of mother and child. Lam found solace in the company of his Spanish friends and made contact with several political organizations. In 1936, with the help of his friend Faustino Cordón, he joined the Republican forces in their fight against Franco. He designed anti-Fascist posters and took part in the struggle by working in a munitions factory. The violence of the struggle inspired his painting La Guerra Civil. In 1938, Lam left Spain for Paris. Shortly before leaving, he met Helena Holzer, who would become his wife in 1944. His meeting Picasso in his studio on the Rue des Grands Augustins proved decisive. Picasso introduced his new “cousin” to his painter, poet and art critic friends, Braque, Matisse, Miró, Léger, Eluard, Leiris, Tzara, Kahnweiler, Zervos. Lam also met Pierre Loeb, the owner of the Galerie Pierre in Paris, which hosted Lam’s first solo exhibition in 1939. Shortly before the Germans arrived, Lam left Paris for Bordeaux and then Marseille, where many of his friends, for the most part surrealists, had gathered around André Breton in the Villa Air Bel: Pierre Mabille, René Char, Max Ernst, Victor Brauner, Oscar Domínguez, André Masson, Benjamin Péret. In the Villa Air Bel, a meeting place for creativity and experimentation, Lam worked and produced, most notably, a series of ink drawings that set the tone for what would become his signature style of hybrid figures, a vocabulary he would develop more fully during his years in Cuba from 1941 to 1947. In January and February 1941, Lam illustrated Breton’s poem Fata Morgana which was censored by the Vichy government. On March 25, Lam and Helena Holzer embarked on the “Capitaine Paul Lemerle” headed for Martinique, in the company of some 300 other artists and intellectuals―André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss among them. Upon arrival, the passengers were interred at Trois Îles. It was during this forced passage in Martinique and before leaving for Cuba that Lam and Aimé Césaire met for the first time to become life-long friends. Newly settled in his native land after almost twenty years, Lam delved deeper into his artistic investigations, finding nourishment for his ideas in the surroundings of his childhood and youth. His sister Eloisa, whom he was closest to, explained to him in much detail the workings of Afro-Cuban rituals and he began attending ritual ceremonies with some of his friends. This contact with Afro-Cuban culture brought new impetus to his art. He painted over one hundred canvases, most notably La Jungla, making the year 1942 his most productive of this period. Over the next few years, a number of exhibitions followed in the United States, at the Institute of Modern Art of Boston, at the MoMA of New York, at the Galerie Pierre Matisse, where La Jungla was presented and created a scandal. In 1946, Lam and Helena travel to Haiti and attend voodoo ceremonies in the company of Pierre Mabille and André Breton. Talking about his experience in Haiti, Lam said, “It is often assumed that my work took its final form in Haiti, but my stay there, like the trips I made to Venezuela, Colombia or to the Brazilian Mato Grosso only broadened its scope. I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell. What really broadened my painting is the presence of African poetry.” Picasso_Lam_Vallauris_1954_vignette Wifredo Lam et Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, 1954 Lam then went on to New York where he renewed contact with Marcel Duchamp and made new acquaintances: Jeanne Reynal, James Johnson Sweeney, Arshile Gorky, John Cage, Roger Wilcox, Mercedes Matter, Ian Hugo, Jesse Fernández, John Cage, Sonia Sekula and Yves Tanguy. By the end of the 1940s, Lam divided his time between Europe, Havana and New York, where they stayed with Pierre and Teeny Matisse...

El Ultimo viaje del buque fantasma, Plate I Color lithograph, 1976 Signed and numbered in pencil (see photos) Edition: 99 (6/99) From: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, El Ultimo viaie del buq...

El Ultimo viaje del buque fantasma, Plate IV Color lithograph, 1976 Signed and numbered in pencil (see photos) From: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, El Ultimo viaie del buque Fantasma (The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship (1868), 12 illustration by Wilfredo Lam Edition: 99 (6/99) This one of an edition of 99 from the deluxe edition of the book of the same title There was an additional edition of 200 books, signed and numbered on the justification page Publisher: Poligrafa, Barcelona Printer: Poligrafa, Barcelona The Gabriel Garcia Marquez/Lam book is an illustrated version of the short story, a man recalls the night during his boyhood when an enormous passenger ship went aground in his small town on the shores of the Caribbean. It is considered a Latin American masterpiece of surrealism and transculturation. (See below analysis of the story) Condition: slight yellows (aging) of paper small paper scuffs verso from previous hinges Sheet size: 22 x 29 7/8 inches About the author and the storyline of the book by Marquez: Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927, he is a famous Colombian writer, novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. In 1982 he received the Novel Prize for Literature. He is an author sometimes inherently related to magical realism and his best-known work is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude in which we find this literary genre. Summary of "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship" (1868): The novel by Gabriel García Márquez, The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship, written in 1968, is written in a single great sentence, which tells the surprising and amazing adventure that has changed the existence of a child living in a coastal town with a small port sunny, almost forgotten by civilization. The days are peaceful, the nights are silent and illuminated only by the rotating beacon that, every fifteen seconds, transforms the town into a lunar camp with phosphorescent houses. During one night in March, the boy saw an immense afterlife ship that sails through the seas with all the dead crew and sometimes appears to the living, silently crossing the deserted sea, a huge and unexpected mass whose trajectory suddenly it seems to drift, and then runs aground on the reefs. This cataclysm is accomplished without disturbing the night's silence, and the next day the boy found no traces of the shipwreck and no one believed it, not even his mother. Time passes, and the same shipwreck occurs again, every year, on the same night in March; the adolescent...

El Ultimo viaje del buque fantasma, Plate I Color lithograph, 1976 Signed and numbered in pencil (see photos) Edition: 99 (6/99) From: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, El Ultimo viaie del buq...

Alain LE YAOUANC Flying Elements Original lithograph Handsigned in pencil On Arches vellum, 76 x 56 cm (c. 30.4 x 22,4 inch) Excellent condition

Alain LE YAOUANC Fall of Black and Withe Cubes Original lithograph Handsigned in pencil On Arches vellum, 76 x 56 cm (c. 30.4 x 22,4 inch) Excellent condition

Maravillas con Variaciones Acrosticas is an Original Mixed colored lithograph on Guarro Paper, realized in 1975 by Joan Mirò (1893-1983) Good conditions. Joan Miró (20 April 1893 ...

"41 Budmen" - 1975 Lithograph on Paper Black and white figurative lithograph by Jim Crabb (American, b. 1947). Numerous abstracted figures take up the paper, with black, white and g...