Picasso and Wifredo Lam: Who Inspired Whom?

Lam has been called Picasso’s “Cuban pupil”; in Havana, the claim runs the other way. The archives settle the question, but less simply than one might think.

Paris, May 1, 1938.

Wifredo Lam, thirty-five, arrives from a Spain at war carrying a letter from the sculptor Manolo Hugué to his old friend Picasso. Born in Sagua la Grande to a Cantonese father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, trained in Madrid, he has lost his wife and his son and fought for the Republic. Picasso was no stranger to him when he reached Paris: he had discovered the work in Madrid as early as 1929, then seen it again at the Picasso exhibition of 1936, an experience he would later describe as a shock.

The meeting of 1938 therefore did not create the influence; it made it personal, direct and fertile. In Barcelona, in 1937–38, the simplification of his forms had already begun. Picasso, fresh from Guernica, receives him on the rue des Grands-Augustins and tells him that he has his blood, that he must be a relative, a cousin.

He introduces him to Braque, Matisse, Léger, Miró, Breton and Leiris, and places him with the dealer Pierre Loeb: Galerie Pierre, June 30 to July 14, 1939, then “Drawings by Picasso and Gouaches by Wifredo Lam” at Perls Galleries in New York, November 13 to December 2. When Lam at last dares to show him his canvases, Picasso lays a hand on his shoulder: “I have never been wrong about you. You are a painter.” And when Lam flees Paris in 1940, it is to Picasso that he entrusts his paintings.

What Lam took.

The works of 1938–40 do not lie: angular masks, mothers and children with tubular limbs, flat planes of frank color. Lam speaks Picasso’s language, learned from afar in Madrid, with a fluency that verges on quotation, and the critics promptly reduce him to a protégé. The chronology is beyond appeal: when Picasso brought back from the Trocadéro, in 1907, the mask-faces of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Lam was four years old. In the strict sense—the borrowing of forms—Picasso inspires Lam, not the reverse.

But Picasso is only one of the matrices, and Lam becomes Lam only where four of them cross. Picasso, for structure: the mask, the deformation, the Cubist armature. Matisse, for color: the flat planes he was already studying in Madrid in 1934–35. Miró, met in the summer of 1938, for space and signs. And the Afro-Caribbean world, for content: memory, cosmology, the orishas. The first three give him a grammar; only the fourth gives him a subject. Picasso is the trigger, not the explanation.

What Picasso could not give.

Lam always told the story of the meeting differently: he did not discover Africa in Picasso’s studio; he recognized there, in learned form, the world of his childhood, the world of his godmother Mantonica Wilson, a priestess of Santería. One scene from the first day says it all. Picasso leads him into the room where he keeps his African sculptures; a horse’s head, set on a rocking chair, draws Lam at once; Picasso, passing by, nudges the chair, and the sculpture sways as if it were alive.

Then he tells Lam to be proud of it—the object is the work of an African whose blood he carries—and charges Michel Leiris with teaching him “art nègre.” What Picasso hands over that day is not a language (Lam already spoke it), nor a form; it is a gesture: to make the object live. Lam would soon make of it the femme-cheval, the initiate “ridden” by the orisha.

For Picasso’s Africa is an Africa behind glass. The masks, he confided to Malraux, were “intercessors,” and the Demoiselles his “first exorcism painting”: a shock of forms and of magic, never of meaning. In 1920 he waved the question away: “L’art nègre? Connais pas!”—African art? Never heard of it.

The return.

Marseille, 1940–41: the Villa Air-Bel, Breton, the drawings for Fata Morgana, where the femme-cheval appears. March 1941: the Capitaine Paul-Lemerle, with Breton and Lévi-Strauss on board; in Martinique, Aimé Césaire, whose Notebook of a Return to the Native Land Lam will illustrate, in its Spanish edition, as early as 1943. Then Havana, after eighteen years away. A nuance the hagiographies forget: it is with Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera that he relearns an Africa that Europe had partly erased—lived and reconstructed, like Picasso’s, but his own, and turned into a program.

The Jungle dates from the winter of 1942–43: oil and charcoal on paper mounted on canvas, 239.4 by 229.9 centimeters, as established by the conservation analysis MoMA published in 2025. Four figures with crescent-moon faces and the haunches of horses rise not in a jungle—Cuba has none—but in the sugarcane, which is to say in the very economy of slavery. Lam wanted his canvas to be “a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures” to disturb the sleep of the exploiters; his painting, he would later say, is “an act of decolonization.”

And in the other direction?

There remains the thesis dear to part of Cuban criticism: that Picasso owed a debt to Lam. It stumbles on a fact: Picasso never saw The Jungle. He never crossed the Atlantic, and the painting, shipped to New York in 1944, did not come to Paris, according to the Lam estate, until 1979, six years after his death.

What came back to him was the man, not the picture, and here the archives speak: in January 1953, for Lam’s exhibition at Galerie Maeght, Picasso—who almost never wrote about his contemporaries—contributed a text to issue 52 of Derrière le miroir, alongside Braque, Breton, Césaire, Char and Leiris. He who absorbed everything, from Braque to González’s welded iron, took nothing from Lam; once, he wrote for him.

On another level the thesis is right, provided one changes the meaning of the word “inspire.” MoMA bought The Jungle in 1945 and, after a first hanging in its galleries, installed it for decades in its lobby, near the coat check. In 1988 John Yau (“Please Wait by the Coatroom,” Arts Magazine) saw in that placement a relegation and argued that Lam had conceived The Jungle in dialogue with the Demoiselles: to the gods Picasso had appropriated, he restored a domain. Lam did not change Picasso’s painting; he changed what we see in it. And the horse’s head that swayed on the rue des Grands-Augustins found, in the sugarcane, the body it lacked.

Gift and counter-gift.

Master and pupil? Too poor. Plunder and reparation? Too militant. The truest model is Mauss’s: to receive obliges one to give back, and to give back otherwise. Picasso gave Lam a grammar, a place and a gesture; Lam gave Europe back the meaning that grammar had emptied out.

MoMA, which has just devoted to Lam his first comprehensive American retrospective (“When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” November 10, 2025 – April 11, 2026), holds the two paintings that sum up the matter. Les Demoiselles, 1907, ask the question. The Jungle, 1943, answers it.

Sources: W. Lam, “Mon amitié avec Picasso,” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 359, November 16–30, 1980; M.-P. Fouchet, Wifredo Lam, Cercle d’art, 1976; A. Malraux, La Tête d’obsidienne, 1974; Derrière le miroir, no. 52, Maeght, January 1953; J. Yau, “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” Arts Magazine, December 1988; chronology of the Wifredo Lam estate by Anne Egger (wifredolam.org); MALBA, “A la búsqueda de un lenguaje visual: Wifredo Lam y la diáspora africana” (M. de L. Ghidoli, 2023) and the collection entry for La mañana verde (M. C. Bernal); G. Mosquera, “Modernism from Afro-America: Wifredo Lam,” in Beyond the Fantastic, MIT Press, 1996; MoMA, collection record for La jungla, 2025. Further reading: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, press kit for “Nouvelles perspectives. Collections XXe/XXIe siècles,” 2021; L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982, 2002; exh. cat. Wifredo Lam, Centre Pompidou, 2015; exh. cat. Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, MoMA, 2025.

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