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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 (in L. Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, 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 the present Femme and the paradigmatic Jungle (Museum of Modern Art in New York; 1942-43), describe fantastical figures, hybrid 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.
The iconic femme cheval, or horse-headed woman, exemplifies Lam’s unique contribution to twentieth-century and modern art by bridging the language of European vanguard movements within a distinctly new vocabulary rooted in the Americas and inspired by Afro-Caribbean cultural practices. The figure first appeared in Lam’s Fata Morgana drawings (1940-41), made to illustrate André Breton’s Surrealist poem during the eight months 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 point of origin in Santería practices in which devotees are transfigured into “horses” and mounted, or possessed, by supernatural orishas. In the amalgamated (and punning) anatomy—papaya-shaped breasts, bulbous-phallic chin, mask-like head, flowing mane-tail tresses—of Femme, she manifests a powerfully Antillean vision of Surrealism, a kind of painting that “could not have been conceived by a European artist,” as the writer Alejo Carpentier declared. “All of the magical, the imponderable, the mysterious in our environment is revealed in his recent works with an impressive force,” he continued. “The monumental painting, The Jungle, and all those that anticipated and derived from it, constitute a transcendental contribution to the new world of American painting” (“Reflexiones acerca de la pintura de Wifredo Lam,” Gaceta del Caribe, 5 July 1944, p. 27).
The marvelous subject of the present Femme, framed by a headdress-like array of leafy foliage, embodies this liminal condition of the femme cheval, betwixt and between two worlds. Magical and metamorphic, she materializes here in a shimmering haze of mauve and pink, her figure subtly illuminated against the warm, roseate ground. Her incipient transformation is inscribed across a supernaturally hybridized face: the horned head of a deity—plausibly Elegguá, the mischievous god of portals and crossroads—appears against an elongated, proto-equine visage lined by ritual scarification and animated by a large, almond-shaped eye turned watchfully toward the viewer. “The head’s architecture melts into the scaffolding of totemic animals which one thought one had scared away but which are still prowling around,” Breton mused of Lam’s emergent femme cheval in 1941. In awe of “the hieratic power governing these millennial postures and contorsions,” he exalted “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” (“Wifredo Lam,” in Surrealism and Painting, 2002, p. 171).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
The iconic femme cheval, or horse-headed woman, exemplifies Lam’s unique contribution to twentieth-century and modern art by bridging the language of European vanguard movements within a distinctly new vocabulary rooted in the Americas and inspired by Afro-Caribbean cultural practices. The figure first appeared in Lam’s Fata Morgana drawings (1940-41), made to illustrate André Breton’s Surrealist poem during the eight months 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 point of origin in Santería practices in which devotees are transfigured into “horses” and mounted, or possessed, by supernatural orishas. In the amalgamated (and punning) anatomy—papaya-shaped breasts, bulbous-phallic chin, mask-like head, flowing mane-tail tresses—of Femme, she manifests a powerfully Antillean vision of Surrealism, a kind of painting that “could not have been conceived by a European artist,” as the writer Alejo Carpentier declared. “All of the magical, the imponderable, the mysterious in our environment is revealed in his recent works with an impressive force,” he continued. “The monumental painting, The Jungle, and all those that anticipated and derived from it, constitute a transcendental contribution to the new world of American painting” (“Reflexiones acerca de la pintura de Wifredo Lam,” Gaceta del Caribe, 5 July 1944, p. 27).
The marvelous subject of the present Femme, framed by a headdress-like array of leafy foliage, embodies this liminal condition of the femme cheval, betwixt and between two worlds. Magical and metamorphic, she materializes here in a shimmering haze of mauve and pink, her figure subtly illuminated against the warm, roseate ground. Her incipient transformation is inscribed across a supernaturally hybridized face: the horned head of a deity—plausibly Elegguá, the mischievous god of portals and crossroads—appears against an elongated, proto-equine visage lined by ritual scarification and animated by a large, almond-shaped eye turned watchfully toward the viewer. “The head’s architecture melts into the scaffolding of totemic animals which one thought one had scared away but which are still prowling around,” Breton mused of Lam’s emergent femme cheval in 1941. In awe of “the hieratic power governing these millennial postures and contorsions,” he exalted “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” (“Wifredo Lam,” in Surrealism and Painting, 2002, p. 171).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park