.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
‘I have made the journey of Christopher Columbus in reverse, from the Antilles to Liguria,’ Wifredo Lam once remarked (W. Lam, quoted in L. Vicenti, ‘Mi credevano lo stregone che beve sangue,’ Oggi Illustrato 25, 17 July 1972). His transatlantic crossings had begun a half-century earlier, when he left Havana for Madrid in 1923, and shaped his practice in the intervening decades as he crisscrossed the Atlantic. The most internationally acclaimed member of Cuba’s historical vanguardia, Lam found his way to Paris (and to Picasso) in 1938, and he was welcomed into the Surrealist circle that included Benjamin Péret, André Breton, Yves Tanguy, and Roberto Matta. In 1941, he set sail from Marseilles to Havana and soon re-engaged with the Afro-Cuban rituals of the island, imaging the strange and surreal confluences of Western and ‘primitive’ cultures in paintings that probed the colonial past and present. He left the revolutionary tumult in Cuba in April 1958 and eventually settled between Paris and the coastal Italian town of Albissola, where he found respite in the mild Mediterranean climes and entered a period of retrospection in his work.
These years saw new distillations of his Afro-Cuban iconography, evolved from his early studies of the Lucumí, or Santería religion with his godmother Ma’Antonica Wilson, a Yoruba priestess. The New World mythology of now-familiar characters – the famed femme-cheval, syncretic orishas (deities) – manifested in increasingly clarified visual forms in works ranging from the monumental Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité (1970) to the present Untitled. Here, the horned heads characteristic of the orisha Elegguá materialize out of a tenebrous sepia ground, their schematized forms commingled with the angular appendages of his femme-cheval. ‘While Cubism and Surrealism were essential to the development of his style, his painting was always something on its own, and even more so in the later years – the work is more abstract, the hybrid figures more menacing,’ Lam’s son Eskil observed. ‘By the time he’s in Albissola, you tend to see monochrome backgrounds with hardly any detail, often just a simple wash – everything becomes concentrated in the line’ (E. Lam, ‘Wifredo Lam: The Albissola Years,’ in Tate Etc., no. 38, Autumn 2016, London, p. 6).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
These years saw new distillations of his Afro-Cuban iconography, evolved from his early studies of the Lucumí, or Santería religion with his godmother Ma’Antonica Wilson, a Yoruba priestess. The New World mythology of now-familiar characters – the famed femme-cheval, syncretic orishas (deities) – manifested in increasingly clarified visual forms in works ranging from the monumental Les Abalochas dansent pour Dhambala, dieu de l’unité (1970) to the present Untitled. Here, the horned heads characteristic of the orisha Elegguá materialize out of a tenebrous sepia ground, their schematized forms commingled with the angular appendages of his femme-cheval. ‘While Cubism and Surrealism were essential to the development of his style, his painting was always something on its own, and even more so in the later years – the work is more abstract, the hybrid figures more menacing,’ Lam’s son Eskil observed. ‘By the time he’s in Albissola, you tend to see monochrome backgrounds with hardly any detail, often just a simple wash – everything becomes concentrated in the line’ (E. Lam, ‘Wifredo Lam: The Albissola Years,’ in Tate Etc., no. 38, Autumn 2016, London, p. 6).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park