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Lot Essay
“It was left to a painter from America,” concluded Alejo Carpentier in the prologue to El reino de este mundo, “the Cuban Wifredo Lam, to show us the magic of tropical vegetation, the unbridled Creation of Forms of our nature—with all its metamorphoses and symbioses—in monumental canvases of an expressiveness unique in contemporary painting” (El reino de este mundo, Mexico City, 1967, p. 4). Published in 1949, Carpentier’s classic novel of the Haitian Revolution developed the concept of lo real maravilloso—magical realism—through a stylized narrative rich in the transgressive power of hybrid identities and transculturation. Lam and Carpentier had earlier renewed their friendship in Paris, following Lam’s arrival from Barcelona in 1938, and they reunited again in Havana, both of them fleeing Europe at the time of the Second World War. Their mutual interests in Cuba’s African and colonial pasts meaningfully rerouted Lam’s incursion into Surrealism, begun in Europe in dialogue with Pablo Picasso and André Breton, through a distinctively New World imaginary. His seminal paintings from this period, in particular the paradigmatic Jungle (1942-1943; Laurin-Lam, no. 43.12; Museum of Modern Art, New York) and its progeny, including Phénomènie phaline, teem with fantastical figures, beings that issue from the rich Antillean cosmos to which he was exposed.
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 made to illustrate 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 Phénomènie phaline, her amalgamated (and punning) anatomy—round breasts, bulbous-phallic chin, flowing mane-tail tresses—manifests a powerfully Antillean vision of Surrealism’s convulsive beauty.
“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 wrote of Lam’s emergent practice in 1941. “The head’s architecture melts into the scaffolding of totemic animals which one thought one had scared away but which are still prowling around” (“Wifredo Lam: The long nostalgia of poets…” in Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, p. 171). The supernatural subject of Phénomènie phaline, anticipated in Personnage parmi les palmiers, (1943; Laurin-Lam, no. 43.42) and further elaborated in Harpe Astrale (1944; Laurin-Lam, no. 44.58), embodies this ritual transformation. Framed by brightly stippled palm fronds, her body moves into metamorphosis—the “phenomenon” implied in the painting’s title—with brilliant, painterly drama, the jewel-toned pigments radiant and suggestively divine. The presence of the occult is further implied by the two horns on her head, which evoke 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…” in ibid., p. 172).
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 made to illustrate 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 Phénomènie phaline, her amalgamated (and punning) anatomy—round breasts, bulbous-phallic chin, flowing mane-tail tresses—manifests a powerfully Antillean vision of Surrealism’s convulsive beauty.
“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 wrote of Lam’s emergent practice in 1941. “The head’s architecture melts into the scaffolding of totemic animals which one thought one had scared away but which are still prowling around” (“Wifredo Lam: The long nostalgia of poets…” in Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, p. 171). The supernatural subject of Phénomènie phaline, anticipated in Personnage parmi les palmiers, (1943; Laurin-Lam, no. 43.42) and further elaborated in Harpe Astrale (1944; Laurin-Lam, no. 44.58), embodies this ritual transformation. Framed by brightly stippled palm fronds, her body moves into metamorphosis—the “phenomenon” implied in the painting’s title—with brilliant, painterly drama, the jewel-toned pigments radiant and suggestively divine. The presence of the occult is further implied by the two horns on her head, which evoke 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…” in ibid., p. 172).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park