Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle, Image via the MoMa’s website
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Anyone who has stepped foot inside Yves Klein’s empty gallery of “Invisible Art” in 1958 and exhibits that share a likeness with it has cause to be skeptical about the future of art. “Modern Art” began as early as the 1860s, and features an extremely wide variety of sculptures, paintings, and digital artworks. The modern art movement sought to reinvent traditional conceptions of what “skilled” or “accomplished” art is.
The result was a revolution of visual and artistic concepts, albeit some more successful than others. Without the constraints of classical techniques, artists were free to use any subject— any medium. Admittedly, that freedom has yielded some questionable innovations such as the aforementioned “Invisible Art” and Haaning’s “Take the Money and Run,” which is simply two blank canvases hung perpendicular to one another. However, modern art has pioneered an important and overdue sub-movement, “artistic decolonization.”
Oxford Art Online characterizes decolonization in artistic practice as, “using local materials as a way of rejecting European academic artistic traditions in favor of indigenous knowledge.” European art was developed in tandem with the conception of whiteness. Even now, art history and artistic appreciation tend to exclude art which does not have proximity to whiteness, a harm which is only beginning to become undone in recent decades.
Art is and always has been political; it has the power to radicalize. The Modern Art revolution has created an opportunity to permanently alter the art world, and by extension societal and cultural values. This article explores the movement taken up by 20th century artists, with an emphasis on Wifredo Lam, whose exhibit When I Don’t Sleep I Dream is on display at the MoMa, and their role in recovering what was lost by colonialism.
Wifredo Lam is a Cuban artist with Afro-Asian heritage. He left Cuba in 1923 to begin his formal artistic training in Spain. In 1938 he fled the Spanish Revolution after serving as a soldier for two years, and traveled to France. In doing so, he left behind one bloody path and unknowingly thrust himself into another.
Once in France, his world began to change once again due to the rise of the Third Reich and Second World War. Part of a generation trying to reconcile the horrors of war that had been loosened upon them, many artists in Lam’s community, Picasso among them, took refuge in “surrealism.” The connections forged in this stage of his life were pivotal. Especially his friendship with Picasso, who would later help him to open his first gallery in Paris.
Despite this, Lam regretted that he is most commonly remembered as a French surrealist, because this portrayal does not reflect the true soul of his art. He describes his time in Europe as having a disproportionate colonial influence on his early work. Amidst the general revolt of modernism, Lam was himself revolting.
After being denied entry to the United States and Mexico, Lam concluded his 18 years abroad and returned to Cuba. Returning to his home, beautiful but fraught, was a Reconciliation. Lam’s celebration of Indigenous knowledge is precisely what makes his return to Cuba so significant for his art and the movement itself.
Lam was radicalized by disconnecting with his European past, and by the tides of violence that had brought him home. He believed that “the only way to begin is to end the world and start anew.” He encapsulates this theme in both his later works and in his friendships. He worked in collaboration with poet Aimé Cesairé, one of the architects of Negritude, a colonial resistance movement, which would be very influential to the changes in his style upon returning to Cuba.
Through artistic partnerships like these, movements are created and fueled. Art acts as a catalyst for change. He began to focus on artistic components which “emanated from [his] history, [his] geography, tropical flowers, and black culture”. Quickly, with only paper and watered down paints, he began to create “The Jungle,” which would become his most famous work.
In “The Jungle,” he incorporated many aspects of African religions, and how they toiled under the hand of colonial Catholicism. His work provokes. Even among the colorful celebration of cultural complexity, there are allusions to a dark future. On the right side of the painting, a woman holds scissors. She is the darkness that lingers in dripping paint, an omen for how humanity will be the means to its own destruction. The painting renounces the Western belief that humanity is superior to nature, and the hands that wrought this division.
Lam is not an isolated example. The Latin American-artistic revolution was also deeply linked with religion and the breaking of colonial bondage. Artist Manual Vilar shifted the narrative around indigenous Tlaxcaltecan people from weak and subjugated to strong dignified resisters in his paintings. Anti-colonialist art has a prevalent role in internally shaping a nation and how it is viewed by outsiders. Artists do this by using artistic license to translate into reality their authentic experience, and shatter projected narratives in the process.
One floor beneath Lam’s exhibit at the MoMa, is an exhibit on African portraiture. The various framed pictures are meant to portray the idea of “Africa” as a diasporic movement. In depicting subjects from around the globe as regal, important, and joyous, photographers began to reshape the traditional borders of what was considered to be Africa, and by extension African people. Art has the power to give agency back to ethnic groups in redefining their history and national identity. There is much to learn from decolonialist art. Thinkers like Lam and his counterparts initiated a movement which continues to change the art world for the better, and in doing so are shaping the future of Modern Art.
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This article was edited by Brianna Leathem-Brazzini and Adam Sharqawe.
Esme Carson 
Stan Refermat