Looking for Sorolla, Finding Lam

I went looking for Joaquín Sorolla and found myself standing (once again) in front of Wifredo Lam, This time at the Hispanic Society in New York

Sorolla irremediably leads to Washington Heights, to the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in Upper Manhattan, at Audubon Terrace. Archer Huntington brought him and his Vision of Spain in front of the American public in 1909. A century on, the two stories are impossible to pull apart: Sorolla in America is Huntington's museum on Audubon Terrace.

So that's where I was, visiting Sorolla's provincial journey through Spain, when Wilfredo Lam stopped me on my track.

The Hispanic Society had recently acquired his Portrait of a Boy (1927), and I stood in front of it longer than I meant to. It wasn't only the painting. It was the strange sensation of having walked out of one of my documentary film project and into another.

Portrait of a Boy, 1927. Wilfredo Lam

Because Lam belongs to The Lost Republic — currently in development, a film about a time when Havana spoke with New York, Paris and Madrid: painters, writers, composers, an entire republic of culture now half forgotten.

Lam was born in Cuba, shaped by the European avant-garde. He doesn't sit still in any one country or tradition. Neither, it turns out, does the Hispanic Society. Huntington built it as a forum to reinterpret the Iberian heritage, and here we are; today a Cuban modernist hangs there among the Spaniard who brought me here for the first time. I had walked in thinking about Valencia. Lam brought Cuba into the room.

Films get made this way more often than I like to admit. The best material is rarely what you set out to find.

I went looking for Sorolla.

I found Lam.

Wifredo Lam (Sagua la Grande, Cuba, 1902 – Paris, 1982). The son of a Chinese immigrant father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, Lam left Cuba in 1923 to study painting in Madrid, where he remained through the Civil War. In Paris he found a mentor in Picasso and a place among the surrealists; back in Havana in the 1940s he painted The Jungle, now at the Museum of Modern Art.