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拍品專文
“My attention was caught at once by a young lady who had just returned from Europe,” the Italian-American conductor Massimo Freccia recounted of a dinner party given in his honor in Cuba, in 1939, on the occasion of his appointment as Director of the Havana Symphony Orchestra. “Her name was Maria Luisa (Nena) Azpiazu, of Basque descent on her father’s side and Catalonian on her mother’s... I was captivated at our first meeting and we soon became inseparable.” The couple married in 1945, and their shared affinity for the arts—“Nena attracted to her house not only the social set, but also painters, writers and musicians”— brought them into contact with fellow wartime travelers, among them Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Rubinstein, and Wifredo Lam (The Sounds of Memory, Salisbury, 1990, p. 116). Lam’s celebrated homecoming in August 1941, after eighteen years abroad, initiated a seminal period of work that defined a new and extraordinary American iconography, encompassing transcultural and transnational sources from Santería to Surrealism. In the modernist and primitivizing Portrait of Madame Nena Azpiazu, Lam both nods to his transatlantic experience and anticipates the masked subjects of his paradigmatic work, The Jungle (The Museum of Modern Art in New York; 1942-1943), and the enchanted femmes cheval that followed. The remarkable trajectory of his work was recently on display at the retrospective, Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream, which opened to acclaim at the Museum of Modern Art last year.
“In the pictures painted in 1941 and 1942 the structure of the face is generally that of a mask, a development already heralded in several paintings of the Paris period,” noted Lam’s biographer, Max-Pol Fouchet. “As in most African sculpture—but also in the ‘primitive’ sculptures of other continents—the face is composed of planes or elements in juxtaposition. . . . He entrusts the task of building up the components of the mask to colour and drawing” (Wifredo Lam, New York, 1976, p. 196). The stylized, mask-like visage seen in the present portrait is more feminine and refined than in earlier (and later) variations, and here it marks its subject as distinctively Cuban, her Africanized features both Antillean and suggestively Picassian in kind. “Lam started off with a great fund of the marvellous and the primitive within him, and sought to attain the highest point of consciousness by then assimilating the most skillful disciplines of European art,” wrote André Breton in 1941, “this point of consciousness being also the meeting point with the artist—Picasso” (“Wifredo Lam,” in Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, pp. 169-71). In Portrait of Madame Nena Azpiazu, Lam describes a thoroughly modern woman, the curves and angles of her slender body heavily outlined in black and draped in a fashionable purple-grey gown. Drawn against a chalky, ethereal space, she reclines in a cushioned and delicately woven armchair with her long legs crossed languorously—stretching beyond the edge of the paper—and her hands dangling idly in the air.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“In the pictures painted in 1941 and 1942 the structure of the face is generally that of a mask, a development already heralded in several paintings of the Paris period,” noted Lam’s biographer, Max-Pol Fouchet. “As in most African sculpture—but also in the ‘primitive’ sculptures of other continents—the face is composed of planes or elements in juxtaposition. . . . He entrusts the task of building up the components of the mask to colour and drawing” (Wifredo Lam, New York, 1976, p. 196). The stylized, mask-like visage seen in the present portrait is more feminine and refined than in earlier (and later) variations, and here it marks its subject as distinctively Cuban, her Africanized features both Antillean and suggestively Picassian in kind. “Lam started off with a great fund of the marvellous and the primitive within him, and sought to attain the highest point of consciousness by then assimilating the most skillful disciplines of European art,” wrote André Breton in 1941, “this point of consciousness being also the meeting point with the artist—Picasso” (“Wifredo Lam,” in Surrealism and Painting, Boston, 2002, pp. 169-71). In Portrait of Madame Nena Azpiazu, Lam describes a thoroughly modern woman, the curves and angles of her slender body heavily outlined in black and draped in a fashionable purple-grey gown. Drawn against a chalky, ethereal space, she reclines in a cushioned and delicately woven armchair with her long legs crossed languorously—stretching beyond the edge of the paper—and her hands dangling idly in the air.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park