The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City has opened a major retrospective exhibition, "When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream," dedicated to the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. This extensive show, running through April 11, 2026, features over 150 artworks, offering a profound look into Lam's career from the 1920s to the 1970s.
Lam's work uniquely blends European modernism with the rich imagery of the Afro-Caribbean imagination, presenting an anti-colonial perspective that reshaped Western art. The exhibition highlights his role as a "world-making modernist," according to MoMA's director, Christophe Cherix.
Key Takeaways
- MoMA's "When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream" is a major Wifredo Lam retrospective.
- The exhibition runs until April 11, 2026, featuring over 150 artworks.
- Lam's art bridges European modernism and Afro-Caribbean spirituality.
- His work often reflects social upheaval, decolonization, and personal loss.
- Key works like La jungla and La Guerra Civil are central to the show.
A Life Shaped by Global Upheaval
Wifredo Lam's life spanned much of the 20th century, a period marked by significant social and political changes. Born in Cuba in 1902 to a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother, Lam's diverse heritage deeply influenced his artistic vision. He embarked on his artistic journey by studying painting in Madrid in 1923, moving away from academic traditions over time.
His early career saw him involved in the Spanish Civil War, fighting with Republican forces. Later, he joined the avant-garde circles in Paris, collaborating with figures like Pablo Picasso and the Surrealists. These experiences in Europe, coupled with his return to a Cuba on the cusp of decolonization, fueled his restless creative spirit.
Artist's Roots
Wifredo Lam was born in Sagua la Grande, Cuba, in 1902. His father was Chinese and his mother was of Afro-Cuban descent, giving him a unique cultural background that he often explored in his art.
The Spanish Civil War and Early Political Statements
One of Lam's earliest overtly political works, La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War), painted in 1937, is a powerful testament to his wartime experiences. He created this piece shortly after serving with Republican forces and recovering from an illness contracted while working in a munitions factory.
The painting, a gouache on kraft paper, compresses the brutal reality of war into a complex arrangement of mask-like faces and distorted limbs. It was commissioned for Spain’s pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, an event that also introduced Picasso’s iconic Guernica.
In a letter to artist Balbina Barrera, Lam described the painting as "an anti-fascist subject, not very beautiful but very truthful."
This work stands as an early indication of Lam’s decolonial thinking, linking anti-fascism with a rejection of traditional aesthetic hierarchies. The flattened planes and compressed space effectively convey the chaos of violent struggle, showcasing his burgeoning unique style.
Personal Loss and Artistic Transformation
The exhibition also features Mother and Child (1939), a poignant work reflecting Lam's personal tragedy. His first wife, Eva Piriz, and their son, Wilfredo Victor, both died from tuberculosis in 1931. This painting depicts a faceless woman cradling a faceless child, rendered with precise shapes and a subdued color palette.
This piece marks a significant departure from the academic naturalism Lam had mastered during his studies. By the late 1930s, after years of war, personal loss, and exile, he found traditional art forms insufficient to express the complexities of his world. His interactions with Picasso and the Surrealists in Paris opened new avenues for formal and symbolic experimentation.
The figures in Mother and Child are reduced to planes and curves, almost reaching abstraction. This work was part of Lam’s first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Pierre in 1939. MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., acquired it, making it the first of Lam’s works to enter a museum collection globally.
Surrealist Influence
Lam's time in Paris allowed him to engage with the Surrealist movement, which greatly influenced his exploration of the unconscious and the symbolic. This period helped him move beyond academic constraints and develop his distinctive style.
The Iconic La jungla and Cuban Identity
Perhaps Lam’s most recognized work, La jungla (The Jungle), created between 1942 and 1943, is a centerpiece of the retrospective. Painted during his first year back in Cuba, this life-size oil and charcoal piece depicts hybrid figures amidst sugarcane stalks, a potent symbol of Cuba’s history and economy.
Lam returned to a Cuba grappling with colonial inequality and racial division. Disturbed by these realities, he sought an artistic language to express the country’s spiritual resistance. The result is a dense, swirling composition where limbs, stalks, and mask-like forms intertwine, creating a sense of dizzying depth.
He constructed La jungla on two sheets of smooth brown paper, a material choice influenced by wartime scarcity of canvas in Europe. He began with charcoal sketches, then applied thin layers of diluted oil paint, allowing the surface to absorb the paint and create a rhythmic, layered effect.
Symbolism in La jungla
Sugarcane, central to Cuba’s economy and its legacy of slavery, becomes a haunted landscape in La jungla. It evokes ancestral spirits and colonial ghosts, nodding to the rituals of Santería, an African diasporic religion that developed in Cuba.
For decades, this painting greeted visitors at MoMA’s entrance, becoming the defining image of Lam’s career. It remains a powerful statement on reclaiming modernist forms for the colonized world.
Expanding Scale and Abstraction
Grande Composition and Post-Colonial Renewal
In 1949, Lam created Grande Composition, a mural-sized work nearly 10 by 14 feet. This painting, made with thin oil over charcoal on kraft paper, showcases his hybrid figures on a grand scale. It marks one of his most prolific periods and reflects his search for renewal in Cuba after the colonial trauma of the 1940s.
The familiar hybrid beings from La jungla reappear here as distilled silhouettes. The composition features recurring motifs such as soaring birds, horseshoes, a knife, and Eleguá, the round-headed, horned guardian spirit of the crossroads. Its pared-down palette of ochers, blacks, and browns evokes both the tropical earth and the austerity of post-war modernism.
The curators note that Grande Composition "celebrates liberation—its sweeping diagonals and fluid transitions between paint and line echo the momentum of freedom." This monumental work foreshadowed the murals Lam would later create in Havana and Caracas, as well as the large canvases of the 1960s.
Untitled (1958) and the "Brousse" Series
Lam's later work saw a deliberate shift towards abstraction. Untitled (1958), painted in Albissola Marina, Italy, is one of six large abstractions from his "La Brousse" series. This work replaces the mythic hybrid forms of his 1940s paintings with interlocking geometric shapes and minimal color.
The "Brousse" series draws inspiration from the Cuban manigua, or bush, referring to the dense low vegetation of the Cuban landscape. This turn reflects Lam’s engagement with the avant-garde artists and ceramists who gathered in Albissola in the late 1950s. Collaborating with peers like Asger Jorn and Lucio Fontana, he translated the vitality of his earlier figural work into pure rhythmic and formal experiments.
Co-curator Beverly Adams explained, "His work transcended categorization and, by doing so, reimagined and expanded the boundaries of modernism."
These abstractions paved the way for his monumental pieces of the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating his continuous artistic evolution.
Late Works and Spiritual Unity
The exhibition concludes with powerful later works such as Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité (The Abalochas Dance for Dhambala, the God of Unity), from 1970. This painting portrays the Afro-Caribbean dance for Dhambala, the Vodou serpent deity of unity.
Against a dark green background, interlocking human and spirit figures move in a rhythmic procession. The geometric and elongated forms spread across the canvas, emphasizing the relationship between line and movement. The title refers to the priest of Santería and to Dhambala, whose entwined body with his consort Ayida Whedo symbolizes creation and renewal.
Lam’s personal connection to Afro-Caribbean ritual was deep; his godmother was a Santería priestess. He even attended Vodou ceremonies during a 1945–46 trip to Haiti with Surrealist André Breton to deepen his understanding.
This work refines compositional strategies seen in earlier paintings like Tropic of Capricorn (1961) and The Third World (1965–66). It showcases a reduced color palette and a deliberate structure, with geometric scaffolding and flattened planes revealing the enduring influence of Cubism. This late period in Lam's career solidified his legacy as an artist who consistently pushed boundaries, integrating diverse cultural and artistic traditions into a singular, compelling vision.