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This is all of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A reminder. Our get lit with all of it book club event is exactly three weeks away, so you have plenty of time to finish the book. We are reading the acclaimed new novel for Flashlight by Susan Choi. The story hinges on one mysterious night. A girl named Louisa and her father head out to the beach at night, but her father can't swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach alone and her father has disappeared. It follows this family before and after that fateful night as Louisa and her mother try to figure out what has happened. Susan will be joining us on Thursday, December 4th at our partners at the New York Public Library. Tickets are already going very fast, so get yours. Now head to wnyc.org getlit there you can also find your way to borrow an E copy. Again, go to wnyc.org getlit and happy reading. In the late 1940s, perhaps the most famous painting by artist Wilfredo Lam hung in the lobby of the MoMA, right next to the coat check. It was positioned in what the museum now calls, quote, prominent limbo. Now it is displayed as part of the first American retrospective of the artist's work. The exhibit is titled Wilfredo When I Don't Sleep, I Dream. The exhibit tracks Lam's career from his early training in Madrid and his involvement in the Spanish Civil War to his time in Paris with artists like Picasso to his creative, fruitful return to Cuba. With a semi surrealist, semi cubist, semi abstract style, Lam used his work to depict traditional Afro Caribbean life and spirituality. His work is often colorful and dense and Full of interesting faces, creatures and plants. His artistic practice used his European training to remain grounded in the African diaspora. You can see this work by heading to MoMA between now and April 11th. You can also see some examples of his art by heading to our Instagram llavenyc to follow along during our conversation. Joining me now to discuss the exhibit are co curators Christophe Tirix and Beverly Adams. Christophe has been a guest before, but this time he's joining us as the new director of the Museum of Modern Art. It is nice to speak with both of you.
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C
Great to be here.
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D
Thank you for having us.
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B
So, Christophe, there's been a long history between Lam and moma. When did the relationship begin?
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D
It started very early. It started in 1939, so only 10 years after the very founding of the Museum of Modern Art when its first director, Alfred Barr, visited a show. The first exhibition Viffred Lamb had in Paris at a gallery named Galerie Pierre, a very well known place, was also Miro's gallery. And Lamb had his show under the advice of Pablo Picasso, who we had met not long ago. And what's exceptional is that Alfred Barr acquired a work on the spot, Mother and Child, a beautiful work from the late 30s, made the same year, which now hangs in the exhibition. But it didn't stop there. So there was a commitment for emerging artists, but there was also an international vision. And three years later, Alfred Bauer goes to Cuba, visits Lamb in his studio in Havana and acquire a second work, the Beautiful Satan, another large gouache. And three years later, in 1945, James Sweeney acquired for the Museum of Modern Art the John Goddard at Pierre Matisse Gallery. So in three years, in six years, the museum acquired three key works by.
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B
Now, Beverly, for many years, the jungle hung in the lobby of MoMA, not within the galleries. Would you explain why?
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C
Well, when it was first exhibited, actually it did hang in the galleries. It was considered contemporary art and it hung alongside other contemporary artists in this big reinstallation of the museum's galleries. But very soon after that, it kind of fell out of the major narrative that MAMU was trying to put forth on modern art. And it would show up in exhibitions or galleries of Latin American art or of paintings that were large scale or like other kinds of thematic things. But most of the time it greeted people at the very. The entryway of the museum. So I think it was because as, as the narrative of modernism at the institution became narrower and more of a straight line, an arrow through history, they didn't know what to do with this artist. He was a transnational artist. He was from Cuba, he was black, he was Chinese. He made this amazing picture which they recognize as important, important enough to hang and not keep in storage. But he didn't fit tidily into any of the categories that the museum was trying to create and maintain at that time.
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B
And I have to say, this exhibition is beautiful. It's huge, first of all. So I tell people, set aside time to go see it. But I understand, Christophe, that some of these works were challenging for the Museum of Modern Art to get to bring to New York. What was the most challenging piece for you to acquire?
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D
So I think one of the complexity of the project is that Lamme's work is very much scattered all around the world. So it's an exhibition that bring together 59 lenders, 39 private collectors, 20 institutions. And we really, Beverly and I wanted to go back to drawing board, just try to really look at everything we could put our sight on and really pick what we felt was the most decisive picture. And one of them, maybe the most challenging of all, was his largest ever made work, almost 15 foot long, almost mural size, and on paper, mounted on canvas, making fragile. And that work was so large, so fragile, that it had not been exhibited since the mid-50s. So it became for us, absolutely a priority to bring it back and to show it for the first time in New York.
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E
Do you have a favorite image, Beverly? You took the most difficult one perhaps to bring.
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C
You know, it's really hard. It's like choosing your favorite child. Because we worked so long and so hard on this exhibition. And one of the goals of the exhibition was to bring people past the jungle into the later work. And for me, that's been really important. The way the installation is, you get to the jungle almost right away. You enter the museum, you look one way, you see the Civil War, you look another way, you see the jungle. And we really wanted people to understand how full and complex and gorgeous his career was and what an amazing art maker he was. So I'd have to say I can't narrow it down to one, but I was thrilled to learn about these works from the late 1950s that verge on abstraction called the Bruce paintings. I had not seen those in person before, and it's their first time in New York. So I hope people will be as surprised and excited about them as I was when I first saw them.
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We are speaking about the new exhibit at MoMA. Wilfredo Lam. When I don't sleep, I dream. My guests are MoMA director and curator Christophe Turiques. And Co curator Beverly Adams. It is up through April 11th. All right. He was born Wilfredo Oscar de la Concepcion Lam y Castilla in 1902. He became known as Wilfredo Lem. He was Cuban, Congolese and of Chinese descent. What do we know or what is signal?
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What do we.
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What signals to us how he thought about his ethnic background?
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D
CHRISTOPHE It's a very good question. It's a question we ask ourselves. And we started by trying to understand the facts. In fact, lan is a well known artist, but so much primary research still needed to be done. So we hire a genealogist to help us to see where does he come from. We had read that his father was Chinese. He was almost 80 years old when Filfred Olam was born. So an older man. And we knew very little about his mother. And we discover, for instance, very moving facts, like his mother was the first member of her family to be born as a free woman. Connects us to this kind of absolutely tragic times, making it so close to us. And of course, you understand how Wilfredo Lahm felt the urgency to connect his culture, his people, with what he had acquired in Europe. Lam goes to Cuba as a very young man, spent 15, 20 years there, and he's forced to go back home. He doesn't want to go back home. He'd like to go to New York, but he can get to New York. And here he reconnect with his roots, with Afro Caribbean culture, with religion, without forgetting what he had discovered in Barcelona, in Madrid and in Paris. And that makes the singularity of this work to bring all those threads together.
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BEVERLY during his time in Paris, Lam became friends with Picasso. What did their relationship mean for Lam's art and his career?
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C
I think what's kind of remarkable about their relationship is that Picasso really empowered him. There was a lot of early critics who mischaracterize a relationship and say that Picasso was his teacher or that he was a student, but there's no, that's not really the nature of the relationship. He had a letter of introduction to meet Picasso, who immediately was taken by him. And they struck up for friendship. I'm sure they had lots of things in common. They both spoke Spanish language. Wilfredo had fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. There were other interests and convictions that they shared. Picasso suggested the first gallery, the gallery owner of Galerie Pierre. He said, you need to look at this artist's work. So I think he empowered him like a mentor, but not like a teacher, more like someone who encouraged him and made sure that his Work was seen and appreciated. He also, when Lam had to leave Paris because of the French, I mean, the German occupation of France, Picasso looked after all of the work that Lam had to abandon in his studio in Paris. So he also helped him in those kinds of ways. And they were friends throughout their entire life.
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E
That was so interesting, him taking all the pictures of his work and rolling them up and shipping them to Picasso. That was such an amazing part of the exhibition. There's a film at the end. Why did you think it was important to put that film at the end?
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D
Because we wanted to take the viewer on a journey from country to country, style to style, medium to medium. And we felt how great if at the end, we can connect all those dots together, just go through the show one more time, but have also a little bit of a behind the scene to talk to the people who help us build that exhibition, to Wilfred Holland's very family. Eski Lamb, Wilfredo's son, is now in charge of the archive. Our amazing conservators, both on paper and on painting, who help us to understand its working method, its processes, and they are interviewed in that film. So the way it was like, I want to leave people with a sense of first, we wanted the work to be first, that the discovery, the surprise take place, but after, allow people to go a bit deeper and to leave the museum with some of sense, some of the facts, some. Some of the discovery that we made throughout the exhibition.
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E
We discover in the exhibition, he went through a lot of personal tragedy. He lost his wife and his young child to tuberculosis. He fought in the Spanish Civil War. Beverly, what is interesting to the art, the art that he made about war?
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C
Well, I think all of those experiences helped sort of forge his convictions. I mean, he was becoming a modern artist at the same time that he was finding out who he was in the political world. You know, one of the things that he says again and again about losing his wife and child is that he feels terribly responsible as a starving artist that he couldn't provide health care and medications for them. And so he becomes very much a person who is fighting for the cause of the people in the Spanish Civil War. But I think that also that commitment to kind of inclusive politics also has a resonance throughout his work.
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B
After World War II broke out, Lam returned to Cuba. Christophe, how did his return to Cuba mark a turning point for him?
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It's not a choice. He has to go back home, and he hadn't been home for a long time. And Cuba got poorer and poorer. So suddenly there's this kind of great empathy in la, you just see what happened to his country, and that's. We believe, that he really become Wilfredo Lam. He found his very identity by reconnecting not only to that culture that he hadn't forgotten, but he had clearly put aside. He had spent so many years in Europe, but also to the environment, tropicality, vegetation, the colors. All those things just come into his work in a very dramatic fashion. So that give him a voice, and he understands that his work is not going to be just about his voice, but the voice of his people. So it gives it also an extraordinary meaning, an extraordinary sense of purpose at that moment. And the jungle, I think, is a perfect embodiment of that new purpose.
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B
We have to talk about the jungle. But first of all, let me reintroduce the segment. Well, Fredo Lamb, when I don't sleep, I dream. It is now at MoMA. My guests are Christophe Seriques and Beverly Adams. All right, this was wild. This is not painted on canvas. That kind of blew my mind. Why did he paint this on paper?
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C
Well, his use of paper, and it's just plain brown wrapping paper, known as craft paper.
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B
It was amazing.
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C
Well, it starts in Spain. He's trying to paint and make art during the war, and materials are scarce, and what can he get his hands on? He can get his hands on paper, and he's making his own gouaches. He's like catch as catch can, trying to make art, but he doesn't have the money or the availability of materials. And when he paints Spanish Civil War, this great picture in 1937, he does it. He gets to scale by piecing two large pieces of this brown paper together. And then when he goes back to Cuba, when he wants to paint a statement, painting a big picture, he still doesn't have any canvas. And so he goes back to this wrapping paper, not some very fancy, like artist paper, but this brown kraft paper. And for him, it becomes this touchstone. He actually falls in love with this material and he goes back to it every time. We see this sort of great statement or experimentation, grand composition. His largest picture that Christophe was talking about earlier is also on this paper, as are the Bruce pictures. So it really becomes something, a kind of freedom for him to work on this, with this material.
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B
Those are the practical aspects. I can afford this material. I can afford to use it. Let's talk about his spirituality a little bit. Christophe, how does spiritual influences. How do we see it in his art?
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D
I think we see it. I think first there's a sense of Again, a sense of purpose, a sense of civic engagement. The idea that art is not just about art itself, art is also for a cause. And how he's going to bring together very, very powerful motif that talk about that, about the mission of art, to transcend art itself and to be about our contemporary lives. And you'll see in his work, particularly in Cuba, a number of motifs that really come directly out of the Cuban religion, the Afro Caribbean religion, you can even identify. And he's going to play with those motifs, integrate them within his own vocabulary. So creating a world that's both immersive, magical, but also deeply, deeply collected to a sense of faith. And you see also that earlier in Spain is attracted by the way we can use very powerful motifs that allow to bring people into a new world. And the jungle is very much about that. It's sugar cane. And between the sugar canes you'll see those extraordinary creatures. You don't know if they're friendly or they could be a bit hostile. And you have to catch them to find them, the creatures of the night sometimes. And they bring the viewer into a place that is completely unexpected.
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E
You mentioned the latter work, which seems.
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A little spookier than his previous work.
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What was going on in his life when he was creating the work in his later years?
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C
I think the big break actually comes in 1946. He's spent the war in Cuba. He's been showing the whole time in New York City. And when he's finally able to travel again, he goes first to New York, then shows in London some works that he had done while he was in Haiti, where he'd exhibited, and then goes back to Paris and post war Europe, really kind of, for lack of a better word, freaks him out. He sees the devastation. He's just like, oh my God, I can't believe this. And you know, he thought, well, maybe he would go back and continue his career that he had left in Paris in, you know, in 1940. And he's not happy. Another thing he sees there, which impacts him, I think greatly is he sees, he sees his friend Aime Cesaire, who he had met in Martinique on his way back to Cuba. But he also sees African art being sold like baubles in the street, you know, and he sees the separation between, you know, the cultural production of these people from Africa divorced from its context, its spiritual context, its day to day context, its life and meaning. And that really impacts him a lot. So when he returns to Cuba after this trip, he has a lot to digest. But one of the things that he states in some very powerful letters that he writes is that he doesn't want to be objectified like that, and he wants to sort of find a way to recontextualize African art of the diaspora in a new kind of way. So he abandons colorful tropical light and plants and makes these darker, more brooding compositions. But they are very theatrical and very stately and sort of. I don't know, there's a kind of epicness to them because they're so theatrical. That I think is motivated by this trip back to Europe in 1946.
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E
Christophe, how do you hope this exhibition will contribute to Lum's artistic legacy?
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D
One thing we wanted to bring him back among his peers to say he is an extraordinary figure that hasn't been acknowledged as it should, and there are reasons for that. It was kind of hard to understand. His work keeps changing. He moves from one place to another, from one style to another, from one medium to another. But we wanted to give him a place in the 20th century, and not in the margins of the 20th century, in the periphery, but really very much a central place. He is a transnational figure that embodies really so many of the ideas that are so alive today. And for this reason, we thought it would be amazing to bring Lamb to his piece of today. The legacy of Lamb is extraordinary. There are so many artists today who mine his work and his trajectory. So to be able to give a portrait of that practice today and to offer it to so many emerging voices very much as a model to go further.
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B
Is there anything you wanted to add?
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C
I think that's really it. We wanted to make sure that he had the opportunity to be seen, that people would appreciate the work, that it wouldn't just be about, oh, it used to be by the Kochak or, you know, he's from this place or that place or this category. This category. We just wanted to lay it out so that people could actually rediscover and re see the work and look at it and appreciate it anew, just like he was trying to build a world anew in his works. And what Christophe says about legacy is remarkable too. Like so many poets and artists were really inspired and empowered by Lam's work and Lam's, you know, trailblazing ways. And we wanted to bring that to the surface again and show it again.
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B
My guests have been Christophe Chariks and Beverly Adams. We were talking about Wifredo Lam. When I don't sleep, I dream. It's at moma now. Thank you so much for being with us.
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D
Thank you for having us.
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C
Thank you so much.
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A
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