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Lot Essay
The appropriation and re-invention of myths and legends of both Western and non-Western peoples from a wide variety of time periods (ancient Greek to modern) have been a cornerstone of much of the radically new art produced at mid-century. The members of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism (particularly Jackson Pollock) relied in many instances on ancient Greco-Roman mythology as a starting point for their compositions. Among Latin Americans, the cosmology of the pre-Hispanic Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and other indigenous peoples influenced the production of artists in Mexico, Peru and elsewhere. Master painters of the modernist era in Caribbean countries, such as the Dominican Republic and especially Cuba, tended to rely more directly on the mythology derived from the syncretistic blending of Christian and West African traditions which formed the basis of Santera. The art of Wifredo Lam is steeped in the epic fables in which the orishas of Afro-Cuban religion play a highly significant role.
Lam's art cannot be interpreted as a conventional illustration of any specific elements or principles of the religion. Nativit (also called Annunciation and Birth) is a perfect example of his powers of suggestion through his use of references (both direct and oblique) to his personal and artistic engagement with Santera.
This painting represents the merging of a number of elements that already made their appearances in other earlier paintings by Lam. The femme cheval (literally the 'woman horse'), a reference to spirit possession and a theme that the artist had cultivated on many occasions, shares the stage with the image of the bird, a snake-like form and other less easily definable shapes in a composition that recalls the artist's interest in fetish-like forms and the sculptural images of the African pieces that he had collected in his home in Havana.
This painting, executed in 1947, also represents a major shift in Lam's style. He had spent the years of the Second World War in his native Havana after many abroad (living in Madrid and then in Paris). His work from the first half of the 1940s is characterized by his use of deep, jewel-like colors. The variegated shades of green with which he defines the forest dwelling places of the orishas (as in his 1943 masterpiece The Jungle) or the ruby-reds and shimmering blues of his early 1940s compositions are hallmarks of Lam's coloristic sensibility at this time. In contrast, the paintings and drawings executed after approximately 1946 display a notably more sober approach to color. Blacks, browns and grays now dominate the artist's compositions. To some extent, forms are reduced in their complexity and we are presented (as is the case in Nativit) with a more direct or 'totemic' image. The backgrounds become more shallow, providing less of a landscape in which his figures function in space and more of an amorphous area of existence for his increasingly more iconic forms to function.
Nativit may be conceived of as the perfect blending of the characteristics which we most often associate with the art of Lam: his use of Santera-related figures, the spiky animal or bird-like forms, the refences to ritual and ceremony as well as a consciously ambiguous atmosphere, vaguely threatening and highly sensualized. This imagined environment inevitably leads us to link Lam's work to the aura cultivated by the Surrealists (with whom the artist exhibited in Paris). Intimations of Cubist form also appear in Nativit; the inclusion of the lamp, for example, at the lower left is an inevitable reminder of Picasso's Guernica.
After the end of the war, Lam wished to return to Europe and in July of 1946, following a visit to New York, he left for London and Paris. While Lam did not stay in France definitively, he renewed his contacts with many figures of the international art world and participated in exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas. The rest of the 1940s and the 1950s was a period that witnessed the artist's continued cultivation of a type of dramatic, iconic, highly distilled and more simplified imagery. Dramatic and direct confrontations with the viewer became the rule in his art and we may look to Nativit as a significant harbinger of this new, mature style in the work of Cuba's greatest modern master.
Edward J. Sullivan
New York 1998
Lam's art cannot be interpreted as a conventional illustration of any specific elements or principles of the religion. Nativit (also called Annunciation and Birth) is a perfect example of his powers of suggestion through his use of references (both direct and oblique) to his personal and artistic engagement with Santera.
This painting represents the merging of a number of elements that already made their appearances in other earlier paintings by Lam. The femme cheval (literally the 'woman horse'), a reference to spirit possession and a theme that the artist had cultivated on many occasions, shares the stage with the image of the bird, a snake-like form and other less easily definable shapes in a composition that recalls the artist's interest in fetish-like forms and the sculptural images of the African pieces that he had collected in his home in Havana.
This painting, executed in 1947, also represents a major shift in Lam's style. He had spent the years of the Second World War in his native Havana after many abroad (living in Madrid and then in Paris). His work from the first half of the 1940s is characterized by his use of deep, jewel-like colors. The variegated shades of green with which he defines the forest dwelling places of the orishas (as in his 1943 masterpiece The Jungle) or the ruby-reds and shimmering blues of his early 1940s compositions are hallmarks of Lam's coloristic sensibility at this time. In contrast, the paintings and drawings executed after approximately 1946 display a notably more sober approach to color. Blacks, browns and grays now dominate the artist's compositions. To some extent, forms are reduced in their complexity and we are presented (as is the case in Nativit) with a more direct or 'totemic' image. The backgrounds become more shallow, providing less of a landscape in which his figures function in space and more of an amorphous area of existence for his increasingly more iconic forms to function.
Nativit may be conceived of as the perfect blending of the characteristics which we most often associate with the art of Lam: his use of Santera-related figures, the spiky animal or bird-like forms, the refences to ritual and ceremony as well as a consciously ambiguous atmosphere, vaguely threatening and highly sensualized. This imagined environment inevitably leads us to link Lam's work to the aura cultivated by the Surrealists (with whom the artist exhibited in Paris). Intimations of Cubist form also appear in Nativit; the inclusion of the lamp, for example, at the lower left is an inevitable reminder of Picasso's Guernica.
After the end of the war, Lam wished to return to Europe and in July of 1946, following a visit to New York, he left for London and Paris. While Lam did not stay in France definitively, he renewed his contacts with many figures of the international art world and participated in exhibitions throughout Europe and the Americas. The rest of the 1940s and the 1950s was a period that witnessed the artist's continued cultivation of a type of dramatic, iconic, highly distilled and more simplified imagery. Dramatic and direct confrontations with the viewer became the rule in his art and we may look to Nativit as a significant harbinger of this new, mature style in the work of Cuba's greatest modern master.
Edward J. Sullivan
New York 1998