Lot Essay
"My return to Cuba meant, above all, a great stimulation of my imagination, as well as the exteriorization of my world," Lam later recounted of his homecoming in 1941. "I responded always to the presence of factors which emanated from our history and our geography, tropical flowers, and black culture."[1] Lam led a peripatetic existence in the years following his celebrated return to Cuba, dividing his time between New York, Havana and Paris until settling permanently in Europe in the early 1950s. His work gained a more international audience during this important period, reflecting both the cosmopolitan horizons of his mature painting and his nomadic lifestyle, which brought him into contact with the New York School, the CoBrA group, and the Afro-Cubanist movement. "Fifty-percent Cartesian and fifty-percent savage" by his own admission, Lam created a body of work that powerfully assimilated the African cultural diaspora into a visual language drawn from Europe. "In this way his artistic vocabulary began to parallel the synthesis and syncretization of African, European, and Amerindian cultures that occurred through out the Americas," the noted Lam scholar Lowery Stokes Sims has observed, and the paintings of this period viscerally embody the hybrid cultural reality of the New World.[2]
Lam's return to Cuba coincided with an upsurge of interest in Caribbean culture, spanning the Négritude movement of his friend Aimé Césaire and the pioneering ethnographic and anthropological studies of Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortíz. Within that atmosphere, a primary source of inspiration for his new imagery was the symbolism of the syncretic Afro-Cuban religion Santería, which he had studied as a child with his godmother. Figurative elements in Lam's paintings-- for instance, the horned head of Non combustible--may be traced to attributes of deities within the totemic universe of Santería, but the iconography became increasingly fluid and less systematized by 1950. Lam invoked this ritual imagery in an expansive sense, intimating a cosmic vision that, while conditioned by the rich African presence of his native Cuba, conveyed universally shared values and metaphysical phenomena.
Enriched by his study of Afro-Caribbean iconography and growing personal collection of African and Oceanic art, Lam nevertheless asserted the primacy of aesthetic values over cultural politics, marrying a sophisticated visual language with evocative themes in his mature works. "Lam continued to use the post-Cubist fragmentation of forms and shallow space typical of his Parisian compositions," Valerie Fletcher has remarked of Lam's newly emerging style of the late 1940s. "But he now also experimented with the Surrealist methodology of metamorphosing his subjects into quasihuman, quasibestial creatures. These efforts yielded brutally powerful results that passed far beyond Cubist formalism."[3] Lam's palette shifted to darker olives and browns, colors that he explained were deeper and more profound, and as his palette grew more limited his forms became flatter and more hieratic. The dim, sumptuous quality of Lam's surfaces during this period is distinctive: charcoal lines sketched both on the canvas and on top of the painted surface, as in the present work, give his painting a subtly textured, velvety quality. The pensive nature of this work is, furthermore, characteristic of the artists increasing interest in the evocation of metaphysical space. The furtive shadowy presences of Non combustible suggest what Sims has termed "dimensional simultaneity", or the concurrency of multiple states of being and existence. "The forms span the composition on the horizontal as if in transit between two worlds," Sims has noted. "The elements in these depictions diamond or triangular entities, fins, wings, cane stalks and thorny spines, shadowy netherworld presences belong to a repertoire of images that in the 1950s came to encompass Lam's working vocabulary."[4]
Abby McEwen.
[1] Wifredo Lam, quoted in L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002, 35.
[2] Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 34.
[3] V. Fletcher, Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers, Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1992, 175.
[4] Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 115.
Lam's return to Cuba coincided with an upsurge of interest in Caribbean culture, spanning the Négritude movement of his friend Aimé Césaire and the pioneering ethnographic and anthropological studies of Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortíz. Within that atmosphere, a primary source of inspiration for his new imagery was the symbolism of the syncretic Afro-Cuban religion Santería, which he had studied as a child with his godmother. Figurative elements in Lam's paintings-- for instance, the horned head of Non combustible--may be traced to attributes of deities within the totemic universe of Santería, but the iconography became increasingly fluid and less systematized by 1950. Lam invoked this ritual imagery in an expansive sense, intimating a cosmic vision that, while conditioned by the rich African presence of his native Cuba, conveyed universally shared values and metaphysical phenomena.
Enriched by his study of Afro-Caribbean iconography and growing personal collection of African and Oceanic art, Lam nevertheless asserted the primacy of aesthetic values over cultural politics, marrying a sophisticated visual language with evocative themes in his mature works. "Lam continued to use the post-Cubist fragmentation of forms and shallow space typical of his Parisian compositions," Valerie Fletcher has remarked of Lam's newly emerging style of the late 1940s. "But he now also experimented with the Surrealist methodology of metamorphosing his subjects into quasihuman, quasibestial creatures. These efforts yielded brutally powerful results that passed far beyond Cubist formalism."[3] Lam's palette shifted to darker olives and browns, colors that he explained were deeper and more profound, and as his palette grew more limited his forms became flatter and more hieratic. The dim, sumptuous quality of Lam's surfaces during this period is distinctive: charcoal lines sketched both on the canvas and on top of the painted surface, as in the present work, give his painting a subtly textured, velvety quality. The pensive nature of this work is, furthermore, characteristic of the artists increasing interest in the evocation of metaphysical space. The furtive shadowy presences of Non combustible suggest what Sims has termed "dimensional simultaneity", or the concurrency of multiple states of being and existence. "The forms span the composition on the horizontal as if in transit between two worlds," Sims has noted. "The elements in these depictions diamond or triangular entities, fins, wings, cane stalks and thorny spines, shadowy netherworld presences belong to a repertoire of images that in the 1950s came to encompass Lam's working vocabulary."[4]
Abby McEwen.
[1] Wifredo Lam, quoted in L. S. Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002, 35.
[2] Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 34.
[3] V. Fletcher, Crosscurrents of Modernism: Four Latin American Pioneers, Washington, D.C.: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 1992, 175.
[4] Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 115.