“It was like some sort of hell…For me, trafficking in the dignity of a people is just that: hell. I refused to paint cha-cha-cha.”
On adopting a new form of painting in Cuba in “Wifredo Lam: the unlikely comeback of the Cuban Picasso” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/art/what-to-see/wifredo-lam-the-unlikely-comeback-of-the-cuban-picasso/ in The Telegraph (2016 Aug 31)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Do you have more details about the quote "It was like some sort of hell…For me, trafficking in the dignity of a people is just that: hell. I refused to paint cha…" by Wifredo Lam?
Wifredo Lam 2
Cuban artist 1902–1982Related quotes
Aretha Franklin
(1942–2018) American musician, singer, songwriter, and pianist
"Think", written with Teddy White, from Aretha Now (1968)
Song lyrics
“I am not like
other people.
I am
burning in hell. the hell of
myself.”
Charles Bukowski
(1920–1994) American writer
“I am not like other people. I am burning in hell. The hell of myself.”
Charles Bukowski
(1920–1994) American writer
“… had just apologized to me. Hell must have been experiencing some climate change.”
Source: Frost Burned
“I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth and they think it's hell.”
Harry Truman
(1884–1972) American politician, 33rd president of the United States (in office from 1945 to 1953)
Source: As quoted in My Fellow Americans : The Most Important Speeches of America's Presidents (2003) by Michael Waldman, p. 137
Ingmar Bergman
(1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker
Torsten Manns interview <!-- p. 40 -->
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: Now let's get this Devil business straight, once and for all. To begin at the beginning: the notion of God, one might say, has changed aspect over the years, until it has either become so vague that it has faded away altogether or else has turned into something entirely different. For me, hell has always been a most suggestive sort of place; but I've never regarded it as being located anywhere else than on earth. Hell is created by human beings — on earth!
What I believed in those days — and believed in for a long time — was the existence of a virulent evil, in no way dependent upon environmental or hereditary factors. Call it original sin or whatever you like — anyway an active evil, of which human beings, as opposed to animals, have a monopoly. Our very nature, qua human beings, is that inside us we always carry around destructive tendencies, conscious or unconscious, aimed both at ourselves and at the outside world.
As a materialization of this virulent, indestructible, and — to us — inexplicable and incomprehensble evil, I manufactured a personage possessing the diabolical traits of a mediaeval morality figure. In various contexts I'd made it into a sort of private game to have a diabolic figure hanging around. His evil was one of the springs in my watch-works. And that's all there is to the devil-figure in my early films... Unmotivated cruelty is something which never ceases to fascinate me; and I'd very much like to know the reason for it. Its source is obscure and I'd very much like to get at it.