À Point

Wifredo Lam was born to an elderly Chinese father and Afro-Cuban mother in Sagua La Grande, province of Las Villas, Cuba. Lam was the youngest of nine children and the only male. Although the family wanted young Wifredo to study law, he eventually studied art at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana (1918-1923), and at the age of twenty-one he arrived in Madrid to continue his studies at the San Fernando Academy. During the next seventeen years he abandoned academic painting for modern experimentation; working his way through fauvism, cubism and constructivism. Lam fought in the Spanish Civil War, found refuge in Paris where he befriended Picasso and joined the surrealists in 1939. Lam would not return to his native Cuba until the summer of 1941, after which his art matured into a highly personal synthesis of cubism, surrealism and the content of santería. In the early 1940s his paintings, which depicted human forms with animal parts within lush Cuban landscapes, possessed rich and vibrant colors evocative of the tropics. By the later part of the decade, his palette became more monochromatic and dark, favoring the colors brown, gray, black and blue. At this time his application of oil paint became thinner and more fluid, resembling water color washes, while the line of his drawing acquired a precision and crispness that recalls the elegance of neoclassicism. It is within this context that a work like Á Point was painted.

Within Lam's oeuvre Á Point is a very abstract work with minimal recognizable elements. The title in French can mean a situation or at a point or spot. The work is a vertical composition where the majority of forms seem to be descending from the top. A background of layers of Prussian blue shifts from dark to lighter throughout the surface, while two black scythe-like forms plunge downward from the upper left and upper right. Their sharp angular points balance each other off and simultaneously contain the central form in the picture, which is a gray arrow with horns covered by a veil of cobalt blue. Out of the lower left corner a black spear form pierces horizontally across. In front of it, on the lower left, what could be the back of a bird with horns ascends towards an arrow coming down on the upper left. The six forms that occupy the composition all possess sharp points. Whether placed horizontally or vertically, they are headed towards a collision with each other. The three large black forms evoke the sculpture of New Guinea, which Lam began to collect in the 1950s. Like the sculpture, the forms in Lam's painting are charged with a disturbing appearance, in spite of their apparent abstraction. Á Point depicts a world of mystery and tension that is about to explode into violence.

Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D.