Cuban Painter Wilfredo Lam was born in 1902 and into a family of mixed descent, including African, Chinese and Spanish backgrounds. A prominent Cuban painter of modern art, he was very much involved in the avant-garde movements not only in the United States but also in Europe.
Having been born in Sagua la Grande, in 1916 he moved to Havana where he soon enrolled at the San Alejandro Academy. He studied art here for 4 years and then traveled to Spain to further his studies. Participating in the Spanish Civil War for the Republicans, he later moved to Paris.
A key moment in Lam’s career as an artist was the time he met Pablo Picasso. Through this famous Spanish painter, Lam was introduced to other artists and intellectuals belonging to the Modernist movement. In 1939 Lam formed part of the Surrealist movement and began exhibiting his art both in Europe as well as the U.S. When the Second World War broke out, Lam left Europe and by 1942 was back in Cuba.
Amelia Pelaez (1896-1968)
Amelia Pelaez was born in Yaguajay, Cuba. In 1916 she entered the Academia de san Alejandro and proved to be an outstanding pupil. She took a summer course at the Laegue of Arts in New York in1924, and then returned to Havana. In 1927 Amelia Pelaez went to Paris where she attended drawing classes at La Grande Chaumiere. She held her first individual show at Zak Galleries in Paris in 1933, and was well recived by French critics.
Pelaez returned to Cuba in 1934, making a studio at her home in the Vibora district of Havana. Although she lived and worked in relative isolation, she was an active participant in the vanguard (1927-38) and the classical (1938-51) phases of Cuban modernism Around 1940 she developed her signature style by enriching her cubist vocabulary with arabesques, bright color areas, and elaborate baroque compositions derived from nineteenth-century Cuban architectural decoration and furniture design. She found in her immediate environment--her home, garden, and neighborhood--a new source for artistic inspiration and cultural expression
In the 1940s she began to exhibit in the United States and Latin America, gaining a measure of international recognition which today is on the increase. Her paintings and ceramics are in numerous private and public collections in Cuba, Latin America, and the United States. In the United States there are important examples of her paintings in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington. D.C.
