Clarividencia

Author: Marijke Peyser

The works that Wifredo Lam, the Cuban painter of Chinese-African descent, painted after his return to Cuba from Europe in 1941 are characterized by motifs that reference the culture and religion of the indigenous population. Cuban descendants of the African Yoruba and Fon tribes, who were once shipped to Cuba as slaves, believe in Santeria, a religion with many gods. The dominant figure in Lam’s painting Clarividencia is a standing being which has human as well as animal features – the ‘horse-woman’.^[1] Her right arm ends in a tail, her legs end in hooves. On top of her neck there is a triangular head with horns, a spherical chin and a goatee beard. The small round head attached to an elongated shape with wings connected to the triangular head refers to Eleggua, the god of roads. The weapon that the reclining – probably dead – woman holds in her right hand refers to Oggun, the god of iron.^[2]

At the age of fourteen Lam moved to Havana to study law and train as a painter at the Escuela Profesional de Pinture de l’Academia de San Alejandro. But Europe exerted an irresistible power of attraction on the young artist, who wanted to free himself from the academic visual idiom of his training. In 1923 a scholarship gave Lam the opportunity to go to Spain, where he joined anti-fascist groups. In 1936 he fought on the side of the Republicans. When fascism gained the upper hand in 1938 he exchanged Spain, his home for fourteen years, for Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso. His work inspired him and Picasso’s large collection of ethnographic sculpture aroused his admiration.^[3] Lam realised that unlike his fellow countrymen in Cuba, European artists and intellectuals, the Surrealists in particular, admired non-western art and ethnographic objects. The work he made before the outbreak of the Second World War was influenced by this appreciation. Picasso and his then lover Dora Maar introduced Lam to important figures in the Parisian art world, including Paul Éluard, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger.^[4] He also met André Breton in the summer of 1939.^[5]        

When the Germans marched into Paris in June 1940 Lam was one of the many who fled to the South of France. In Marseille he met up with Breton and other Surrealists. During the ten months that preceded his departure to Martinique, Lam was in close contact with Breton.^[6] The Cuban immersed himself in Surrealist thinking – automatism, the significance of dreams and the subconscious – and gave these elements a place in his visual work: fantastic beings with horns and masks began to feature in his paintings. Lam’s illustrations for Breton’s publication Fata Morgana in 1942 are evidence of this and anticipate his visual idiom after his return to Cuba, when he increasingly began to include the culture and identity of the land of his birth in his work.^[7] The title Clarividencia – clairvoyance – can also be linked to the abandonment of reason and the acceptance of the irrational.