For Wifredo Lam, modern art ceases to be a demarcated territory and becomes a field of forces. With "When I Don't Sleep, I Dream," the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is dedicating the first major American retrospective to a painter whose work, long relegated to the margins of the Western canon, now appears as one of its most decisive turning points.
I was lucky enough to see this exhibition at MoMA, and it's absolutely magnificent! From the very first rooms, you enter Wifredo Lam's world as if it were a territory unto itself: the scenography and the hanging create a truly immersive experience, where each work seems to converse with the next in an almost organic continuity. You leave with the feeling of having traversed a dense, inhabited, vibrant inner world.
Born in Cuba in 1902, trained in painting in Spain, and having lived in Paris and Marseille, before returning to the Caribbean and finally settling permanently in Europe, Lam embodied the transnational artist before his time. But his itinerant lifestyle was far from insignificant: it shaped a body of work deeply marked by the tensions of the 20th century—colonialism, exile, racism, wars—which his paintings did not seek to illustrate, but rather to metabolize. The MoMA exhibition, featuring more than 130 works spanning six decades, retraces this complex trajectory without ever reducing it to a mere stylistic synthesis.
The early works created in Spain, marked by the Civil War, already reveal a painter for whom form is inseparable from political commitment. Very early on, Lam rejected modernist neutrality. In Paris, his encounter with Pablo Picasso and André Breton placed him within the Surrealist circle; yet, he never fully assimilated into it. Where European Surrealism drew on often fantastical imagery from the "elsewhere," Lam reversed the perspective: he mobilized graphic automatism, dreams, and metamorphosis to reactivate buried memories, diasporic cultures relegated to silence. The collaborative drawings, exquisite corpses, and illustrated books bear witness to this period of intense circulation of forms and ideas.
What is particularly striking throughout the exhibition is the power of an artistic voice that has long remained in the shadows. Lam appears as an artist still relatively unknown to the general public, even though his vision possesses a rare strength and is profoundly personal. Through his works, one clearly perceives the richness of his inspirations—African, Caribbean, European—but also his multiple cultural origins and his inner turmoil. Each hybrid figure, each landscape traversed by tensions, seems to carry the memory of displacement, of uprooting, of a quest for identity.
The real turning point came upon his return to Cuba in 1941. There, Lam radically reinvented his pictorial language. Hybrid figures, part human, part plant, emerged in dense compositions where the landscape became a ritual space. The jungleThis iconic work, preserved by MoMA since 1945, is neither exotic nor purely abstract: it appears as a visual condensation of Caribbean history, from slavery to Afro-Caribbean spiritualities, in a painting that is both sensual and unsettling.
The exhibition accurately demonstrates that Lam never stopped moving. In the late 1940s, his palette darkened, his paint application became denser, until… Large Composition, monumental work from 1949, presented for the first time in over sixty years. This painting on kraft paper, of exceptional formal ambition, marks a turning point: the space is saturated with abstract figures, as if the human body were dissolving in a field of forces.
Settled in Albissola Marina, Italy, from the 1950s onwards, Lam continued his experiments, notably in the series Bushwhere abstraction gains autonomy without ever erasing the symbolic weight of forms. In the 1960s and 1970s, he returned to an elongated, spectral figuration, populated by threadlike beings that seem to dance on the ruins of an ancient world. Neither entirely human nor completely mythological, these figures embody a vision of the world where the visible and the invisible coexist.
1942-43 LAM The Jungle
The retrospective concludes with later works, such as his ceramic creations and prints resulting from literary collaborations with Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, and René Char. Here again, Lam rejects any sense of closure. Right up to the end, he multiplies his mediums, as if painting alone were no longer sufficient to contain what he had to say.
At MoMA, Wifredo Lam appears less as a link between Europe and the Caribbean than as a critical operator of modernity. An artist who never sought to integrate the dominant narrative, but rather to displace it from within, making dreams, myths, and memories tools of resistance. More than a retrospective, "When I Don't Sleep, I Dream" acts as a reminder: the history of modern art remains an unstable field, traversed by voices long relegated to the periphery, but now impossible to ignore.
“Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream”
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
11 West 53rd Street, New York (United States)
From November 10, 2025 to April 11, 2026
