The story begins with Wifredo Lam\u2019s childhood in a small Cuban village, where he shared a home with seven older siblings, his Chinese Cuban pap\u00e1, and his African-Ta\u00edno-Spanish-Cuban mam\u00e1. His pap\u00e1\u2019s calligraphy work and his godmother\u2019s Santer\u00eda ceremonies formed the first major influences on the budding artist, whose predilection for sketching and drawing arose at an early age. His family\u2019s relocation to La Habana, where law school awaited, proved antithetical to Wifredo\u2019s desire to commune with art and nature. Engle then promptly charts Lam\u2019s artistic arc, from art school, where a self-portrait led to the realization \u201cthat he was finally learning all the skills of an artist,\u201d to his travels abroad in Spain, which galvanized the burgeoning painter to absorb from both the Old Masters and, perhaps more importantly, surrealist and cubist artists like Salvador Dal\u00ed, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Mir\u00f3. The Spanish Civil War and, thereafter, World War II pushed Wifredo from Europe back to the Caribbean, where he developed his unique style and, eventually, created his masterpiece, La Jungla. Engle omits several key details about Lam\u2019s life from the narrative (though those are fleshed out in the backmatter); instead, this is a rich look at Lam\u2019s artistic trajectory. Set on black and brown paper, Alc\u00e1ntara\u2019s superb gouache and pencil illustrations are stunning, incorporating Lam\u2019s influences with aplomb. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The story begins with Wifredo Lam\u2019s childhood in a small Cuban village, where he shared a home with seven older siblings, his Chinese Cuban pap\u00e1, and his African-Ta\u00edno-Spanish-Cuban mam\u00e1. His pap\u00e1\u2019s calligraphy work and his godmother\u2019s Santer\u00eda ceremonies formed the first major influences on the budding artist, whose predilection for sketching and drawing arose at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":7168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7167"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7167\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}