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Lot Essay
“My return to Cuba meant, above all, a great stimulation of my imagination, as well as the exteriorization of my world,” Lam recounted of his celebrated homecoming in August 1941. “I responded always to the presence of factors which emanated from our history and our geography, tropical flowers, and black culture.” His embrace of what he termed “la cosa negra” came to define his re-immersion into the island’s way of life, after nearly eighteen years in Europe, and informed the cubanidad of his work over the decade that followed (quoted in L. Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, Austin, 2002, p. 35). Lam’s arrival dovetailed with rising interest in Caribbean vernacular culture, spanning the diasporic Négritude movement led by his friend Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, and the pioneering ethnographic and anthropological studies of Lydia Cabrera and Fernando Ortiz. Their recuperation of Afro-Cuban culture, particularly its folklore and religious customs, paralleled Lam’s own engagement with the Lucumí, or Santería, religion, which he had studied as a child with his godmother Ma’Antonica Wilson, a Yoruba priestess. His seminal paintings from this period, among them Femme assise avec fleurs and the paradigmatic Jungle (Museum of Modern Art in New York; 1942-43), teem with fantastical figures, beings that issue from the rich Antillean cosmos to which he was exposed. Other works from this early, breakthrough body of work may be found in such prestigious museum collections as those of the Art Institute of Chicago, MALBA in Buenos Aires, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
“Since I had left everything behind me in Paris…I had to start from scratch, as it were,” Lam recalled of his re-acclimatization to the island. “I no longer knew where my feelings lay” (quoted in ibid., p. 33). Yet he soon recognized the significance of his new direction, describing his paintings in a letter to Breton on December 31, 1942 as “the beginning of a long road I will pursue, and in which I hope to realize something that will justify my pretensions.” Lam went on to thank Breton for penning the “marvelous” preface to his solo show at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which had opened in November (quoted in L. Stokes Sims, “Myths and Primitivism: The Work of Wifredo Lam in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952,” ed. M. Balderrama, Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952, exh. cat., Studio Museum, New York, 1992, p. 71). “I will content myself with stressing the quality of palpable effusion inherent in this aspect of the human being scarcely emerged from the idol, half-buried still in humanity’s legendary treasure-house,” Breton had written. “The head’s architecture melts into the scaffolding of totemic animals which one thought one had scared away but which are still prowling around,” he forewarned, giving due deference to “the hieratic power governing these millennial postures and contorsions” (“Wifredo Lam: The long nostalgia of poets…,” Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, p. 171).
The hybridized head seen in Femme assise avec fleurs embodies the animism to which Breton alluded and positions its subject within the pantheon of Lam’s iconic femmes cheval, or horse-headed women. The figure first appeared in Lam’s Fata Morgana drawings (1940-41), made to illustrate Breton’s Surrealist poem during the eight months that they spent in Marseilles awaiting passage to the Americas. Drawn partly from post-Cubist and Surrealist sources, including Picasso’s Minotauromachy suite and Weeping Woman series of the mid- to late 1930s, the femme cheval acquired a savage carnality by the time of Lam’s prodigal return to Cuba. A personification of Afro-Cuban divinity, she had a further point of origin in Santería practices in which devotees are transfigured into “horses” and mounted, or possessed, by supernatural orishas. The subject of Femme assise avec fleurs emerges here in such a state of transformation: her body appears doubled, one torso and set of limbs molting—almost receding into the unpainted ground—while another materializes, holding aloft a vase of tropical flowers against a vividly stippled background seen in many of Lam’s works from this time. The presence of the occult is further implicated in the two horns on her head that may suggest the deity Elegguá, a mischievous god of portals and crossroads. “In times like our own,” Breton advised, “we should not be surprised to see that the Loa Carrefour—Elegguá in Cuba—is everywhere in evidence, armed with horns here and breathing upon the doors’ wings” (“Wifredo Lam: At night in Haiti…,” Surrealism and Painting, op. cit., p. 172).
Lam’s invocation of this ritual world functioned more expansively as part of a cosmic vision conditioned by his response to the “eternal presence” of Afro-Cuba and to a broader Caribbean ethos and ecosystem. Poised between two worlds, Femme assise avec fleurs inhabits the oneiric universe of lo real maravilloso americano, as the writer Alejo Carpentier apprehended. “Lam began to create his atmosphere by means of figures in which the human, the animal, the vegetal mix without specification, animating a world of primitive myths with something ecumenically Antillean, profoundly tied not only to the Cuban soil but also to the entire string of islands,” Carpentier wrote in 1944. “His painting, without local anecdotes, could not have been conceived by a European artist. All of the magical, the imponderable, the mysterious in our environment is revealed in his recent works with an impressive force. . . . The figures metamorphose, are transfigured. . . . Reality and dream are confused. The poetic and the visual become one. There is an atmosphere of myths and color, completely original. There is a world of its own” (“Reflexiones acerca de la pintura de Wifredo Lam,” Gaceta del Caribe 5, July 1944, p. 27).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Since I had left everything behind me in Paris…I had to start from scratch, as it were,” Lam recalled of his re-acclimatization to the island. “I no longer knew where my feelings lay” (quoted in ibid., p. 33). Yet he soon recognized the significance of his new direction, describing his paintings in a letter to Breton on December 31, 1942 as “the beginning of a long road I will pursue, and in which I hope to realize something that will justify my pretensions.” Lam went on to thank Breton for penning the “marvelous” preface to his solo show at Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which had opened in November (quoted in L. Stokes Sims, “Myths and Primitivism: The Work of Wifredo Lam in the Context of the New York School and the School of Paris, 1942-1952,” ed. M. Balderrama, Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938-1952, exh. cat., Studio Museum, New York, 1992, p. 71). “I will content myself with stressing the quality of palpable effusion inherent in this aspect of the human being scarcely emerged from the idol, half-buried still in humanity’s legendary treasure-house,” Breton had written. “The head’s architecture melts into the scaffolding of totemic animals which one thought one had scared away but which are still prowling around,” he forewarned, giving due deference to “the hieratic power governing these millennial postures and contorsions” (“Wifredo Lam: The long nostalgia of poets…,” Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, p. 171).
The hybridized head seen in Femme assise avec fleurs embodies the animism to which Breton alluded and positions its subject within the pantheon of Lam’s iconic femmes cheval, or horse-headed women. The figure first appeared in Lam’s Fata Morgana drawings (1940-41), made to illustrate Breton’s Surrealist poem during the eight months that they spent in Marseilles awaiting passage to the Americas. Drawn partly from post-Cubist and Surrealist sources, including Picasso’s Minotauromachy suite and Weeping Woman series of the mid- to late 1930s, the femme cheval acquired a savage carnality by the time of Lam’s prodigal return to Cuba. A personification of Afro-Cuban divinity, she had a further point of origin in Santería practices in which devotees are transfigured into “horses” and mounted, or possessed, by supernatural orishas. The subject of Femme assise avec fleurs emerges here in such a state of transformation: her body appears doubled, one torso and set of limbs molting—almost receding into the unpainted ground—while another materializes, holding aloft a vase of tropical flowers against a vividly stippled background seen in many of Lam’s works from this time. The presence of the occult is further implicated in the two horns on her head that may suggest the deity Elegguá, a mischievous god of portals and crossroads. “In times like our own,” Breton advised, “we should not be surprised to see that the Loa Carrefour—Elegguá in Cuba—is everywhere in evidence, armed with horns here and breathing upon the doors’ wings” (“Wifredo Lam: At night in Haiti…,” Surrealism and Painting, op. cit., p. 172).
Lam’s invocation of this ritual world functioned more expansively as part of a cosmic vision conditioned by his response to the “eternal presence” of Afro-Cuba and to a broader Caribbean ethos and ecosystem. Poised between two worlds, Femme assise avec fleurs inhabits the oneiric universe of lo real maravilloso americano, as the writer Alejo Carpentier apprehended. “Lam began to create his atmosphere by means of figures in which the human, the animal, the vegetal mix without specification, animating a world of primitive myths with something ecumenically Antillean, profoundly tied not only to the Cuban soil but also to the entire string of islands,” Carpentier wrote in 1944. “His painting, without local anecdotes, could not have been conceived by a European artist. All of the magical, the imponderable, the mysterious in our environment is revealed in his recent works with an impressive force. . . . The figures metamorphose, are transfigured. . . . Reality and dream are confused. The poetic and the visual become one. There is an atmosphere of myths and color, completely original. There is a world of its own” (“Reflexiones acerca de la pintura de Wifredo Lam,” Gaceta del Caribe 5, July 1944, p. 27).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park