As part of the auction dedicated to Modern and Contemporary Art on June 3rd, 2021, PIASA is pleased to offer for sale a beautiful oil on paper by the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam.
Wifredo Lam spent his childhood and youth in Cuba, where he studied at the Havana School of Fine Arts. The son of a Chinese merchant who immigrated to the island in the 19th century and a mixed-race woman whose ancestors came from Spain and Africa, he was able to assume and explore these rich and complex origins. In 1923, Lam embarked for Spain, where he discovered Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, the German expressionists, a European heritage that allowed him to "find himself in everything that has lost its ancestors" (Alain Jouffroy) and led him to elaborate a language of highly stylized forms.
Fleeing the Spanish war, he took refuge in France in 1938 and made the decisive encounter with Picasso (whose work he had seen a year earlier), and then through him, Michel Leiris, Joan Miró, Tristan Tzara, Christian Zervos and Henri Kahnweiler. Pierre Loeb gave him his first personal exhibition, alongside Picasso. When war was declared in 1939, Lam became close to André Breton and the Surrealists, whom he joined in Marseille and with whom he embarked for the United States in 1941.
He made a stopover in Martinique where he found André Masson and Aimé Césaire who founded the political and cultural review "Tropiques", then he settled in Cuba for ten years, alongside Pierre Loeb, Pierre Mabille and Benjamin Perret. Traveling to New York regularly, Lam was very successful: he was regularly exhibited at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, which led to the acquisition by the Museum of Modern Art of one of his masterpieces, The Jungle (1942-1943). Our painting, FemmeCheval, (1950) dates from this period of great creative effervescence, when Lam fully embraced the influences of Picasso and primitive art, without giving in to the temptation of folklore and exoticism.
Wifredo Lam (1902-1982)
Femme cheval, circa 1950
Estimate: 100 000 - 150 000 €
The Horse-Woman is a recurrent iconographic figure in Lam's painting: it does not designate a hybrid mythological creature but a woman possessed by a deity called oricha. Apart from the feminine attribute of breasts, the Horse-Woman has three hybrid parts: the hair-crested head, the buttocks-cup-tail, the face-nose. If the transformation into a horse is the very condition for entering a trance, Lam, according to the authors Georges Sebbag and Lydia Cabrera, chose to represent the Horse-Woman in a state of rest, which explains her hieratic character, but also the fact that she is covered with a white veil.
This very personal interpretation of the Afro-Cuban cults practiced on the island, giving rise to a symbiosis of the human and the animal, would have seduced the great collector Gertrude Stein, who owned this painting for a long time, before one of Lam's compatriots, Jorge Camacho, became its owner.
