The Museum of Modern Art in New York has unveiled a groundbreaking retrospective of Wifredo Lam, titled "When I Don't Sleep, I Dream," which reveals the Cuban-born artist as one of Surrealism's most misunderstood figures. The exhibition, curated by MoMA's new director Christophe Cherix alongside Beverly Adams with assistance from Damasia Lacroze and Eva Caston, presents rare masterpieces that showcase Lam's profound engagement with Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions and his role as a decolonizing force in modern art.
The show's crown jewel is "Grande Composition" (1949), a monumental 14-foot-wide painting that MoMA acquired earlier this year from a private collector in Paris. Cherix spent two years convincing the collector to part with this extraordinary work, which represents Lam's largest painting. Created with oil paint thinned to near-transparency on paper, the piece features a complex arrangement of angular, elongated creatures intertwined with one another. The bottom portion reveals charcoal outlines of three-toed feet belonging to a tailed figure with prominent breasts, creating an eerily unfinished quality that enhances the work's mystical atmosphere.
While Lam's iconic 1942-43 painting "La Jungla" (The Jungle) has been a prized MoMA possession since 1945, the exhibition provides crucial historical context that previous interpretations have overlooked. The curators emphasize that this jungle specifically depicts the Antilles, where Lam relocated after fleeing war-torn France for Cuba in 1941. The painting's figures with moon-shaped faces are situated within a thicket of sugarcane, creating an explicit reference to the commodity's central role in the enslavement of Black people in the Caribbean.
The exhibition draws heavily on Lam's own words about his artistic mission, particularly a 1980 interview with art historian Gerardo Mosquera conducted two years before the artist's death. In this conversation, Lam described his paintings as "an act of decolonization," explaining that "Africa has not only been dispossessed of many of its people, but also of its consciousness." The Afro-Cuban artist with Chinese heritage expressed his desire to "relocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world."
Central to understanding Lam's work is the recurring figure of the femme-cheval, a horse-human hybrid that appears throughout his Cuban period paintings from the 1940s onward. This figure, which features a distinctive scrotum dangling from its chin, represents a Lucumí worshipper possessed by a deity known as an orisha. The exhibition reveals how European and American observers, whether intentionally or not, generally failed to recognize these allusions to Afro-Cuban spiritual traditions, instead focusing on the dreamlike qualities of Lam's imagery.
A 1950 ARTnews profile exemplifies this misunderstanding, centering on a painting featuring an equine figure that the writer simply called "The Horse." Across 3,000 words, the profile never mentions Lucumí traditions or the true spiritual significance of the femme-cheval figure. This pattern of interpretation effectively "defanged" Lam's work, as the current exhibition suggests, by emphasizing surrealist dreaminess over spiritual and political content.
The MoMA retrospective also highlights Lam's significant friendship with Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet who founded the Négritude movement and co-edited the journal Tropiques with Suzanne Roussi-Césaire and René Ménil. Their collaboration is well-documented, including Lam's illustrations for Césaire's 1936 long-form poem "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal." The exhibition features prints by Lam that accompanied Césaire's poetry in a 1982 portfolio called "Annonciation" (Annunciation), showing elongated arms pushing away mask-like faces and creatures with cinched waists moving through darkness.
However, the show also raises questions about the extent of Césaire's influence on the interpretation of Lam's work. The painting "Madame Lumumba" (1938), featuring a woman with a thrown-back head and flowing greenish hair, is generally viewed as homage to Pauline Opango, widow of assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Yet this title was assigned by Césaire well after the painting's creation, when Opango was still a baby, suggesting that the work's decolonial context may have been retroactively imposed.
The exhibition's early galleries trace Lam's artistic development from his beginnings in Madrid and Paris. Raised in Cuba where his godmother was a Lucumí priestess, Lam departed for Spain in 1918 to complete his art education. His work from the 1920s and 1930s heavily borrowed from Picasso's style, featuring almond-shaped eyes, thickly outlined nudes, and blocky Cubist forms. Yet occasionally Lam produced something entirely original, such as "La Guerra Civil" (The Spanish Civil War, 1937), which depicts crying women, helmeted soldiers, and nude babies tumbling over one another in a composition that prefigures "Grande Composition."
Lam's move to Paris in 1938 brought him into contact with André Breton, the self-appointed leader of Surrealism. In both Paris and later Marseille, Lam participated in Surrealist collaborative drawing games called "exquisite corpses." Even in these collective works, Lam's distinctive contributions are identifiable, including a 1941 drawing featuring a hand holding a flame beside bulging eyes and wavelets, along with his characteristic femme-cheval figure.
The pivotal moment in Lam's artistic development came during his brief stay in Martinique in 1941, where he connected with the Tropiques literary circle. Though this period lasted less than four months before he established new roots in Cuba, it appears to have deepened his engagement with Caribbean spiritual traditions. This transformation is evident in works like "Ogue Orisa" (1943), where the Shango orisha Oggué hides among palm fronds, and "Omi Obini" (1943), a painting that briefly held the record as the most expensive Latin American artwork ever sold.
Lam's work from the late 1940s and early 1950s took on a darker, more menacing quality compared to the kaleidoscopic greens and reds of his earlier Caribbean pieces. "Canaima III" (1947), a large painting rivaling "La Jungla" in visual intensity, features rows of giant thorns enclosing a tangle of shadowed appendages. The work is simultaneously ravishing and repellent, much like a kanaima—an evil spirit central to the folklore of some Indigenous Caribbean cultures.
The later stages of Lam's career saw experiments with abstraction and pottery, which the MoMA exhibition suggests he never fully mastered. However, until his death in 1982, Lam continued creating portals to other universes that seemed intimately connected to our own reality. A 1955 painting featuring a being with a mask-like face, two sprawling arms, one leg, and one squat hoof exemplifies this visionary quality. The work's title, "Quand je ne dors pas, je rêve" (When I Don't Sleep, I Dream)—which also gives the exhibition its name—suggests not the waking nightmares of European Surrealism but something entirely different: a genuine vision of Lam's spiritual world where one person's dreams become another's reality.
