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cavetocanvas: Wifredo Lam, Zambezia, Zambezia, 1950. From the Guggenheim: When Wifredo Lam arrived in Paris in 1938 he carried a letter of introduction to Pablo Picasso, with whom he had an immediate rapport. Soon he met many other leading artistic figures, among them André Breton, the dominant publicist and theorist of Surrealism. The Surrealists, who attempted to unleash the power of the unconscious through explorations of dream states and automatist writing, were fascinated by the mythologies of “primitive” people. They subscribed to an anthropology that perceived modern “primitive” cultures as the heirs to an integrated understanding of myth and reality, which they hoped to achieve themselves. Lam, as a Cuban of African, Chinese, and European descent, seemed to the Surrealists to have privileged access to that undifferentiated state of mind. In 1942 the artist returned to Cuba, where he constructed a body of work in a Surrealist idiom, creating symbolic creatures engaged in ritual acts of initiation. Lam’s vocabulary of vegetal-animal forms was inspired by Afro-Cuban and Haitian Santeria deities. He also associated with the nationalist poets of the Négritude movement, who relied in their work on the images and rhythms of their native culture. In Zambezia, Zambezia Lam depicted an iconic woman partly inspired by the femme-cheval (horse-headed woman) of the Santeria cult. He frequently used the device of transmogrification of body parts to suggest magical metamorphosis, inspired by indigenous American and African ritual objects. In this painting it is manifested in the testicle “chin” of the figure.
