Wifredro Lam. Femme Chevale Sotheby, Latin American Sale, Nov. 2015

Sotheby, Latin American Sale, Nov. 2015. FEMME-CHEVAL, 1954, oil on canvas, 50 x 38 1/4 in. 

The form and meaning of the horse-headed woman, otherwise known by its familiar French name femme-cheval, was fully developed in Wifredo Lam’s art by 1942. The horse-headed woman is a hybrid, whose human, horse, and vegetal features combine to suggest a spiritual union between the devotee and deity (orisha) in the Lukumí religion (formerly known as Santería) in Cuba. With this composite figure, Lam conferred an African-derived inflection to his subjects in portraiture, still life, figures in landscape, and allegory, thereby infusing the work with a particular religious, cultural, and national identify. 

In the late 1940s the single-figure female subject underwent several radical transformations, one of which resulted in the powerful series of Canaima figures (1947) influenced by the Oceanic sculpture that Lam had become interested in during his trip to Paris in 1946. By that time Lam’s femme-chevals, by then a discrete category within portraiture, were configured with motifs including birds, Eleggua heads, fish, diamonds, horns, phalluses, or fragments of mouths derived from his Afro-Cuban background. Throughout his practice, Lam inventively recast the femme-cheval figure in his single and multifigural compositions in painting, ceramic sculpture, and printmaking. The symbolic motifs assume different meanings as his work evolved.

In 1954, however, Lam initiated a significant formal shift, as noted in this Femme-Cheval. Although the painting is a cousin of Zambezia-Zambezia (1950) in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the 1954 figure does not have a candle at the top of its head or a beard-phallus as does the figure in the 1950 work. The lusciously painted Femme-Cheval is also more reductively rendered than the early figure. Lam continued reinventing and refining modernists’ modes, which accounted for a thorough understanding of Matisse’s palette, Picasso’s reconfigured spatial experiments, and the odd, unexpected formal and thematic juxtapositions of the Surrealists.

Femme-Cheval is the central figure behind which another presence is constructed by overlapping planes. Femme-Cheval is drawn with its head, neck, and shoulder in a swooping ‘C’ shape. Her shoulder and arm meet at a ninety-degree angle; her arm, legs, abdomen, and mane-tail are drawn as vertical elements counterpoised by the curves of the back and elongated neck, both of which continue to form a strange rectilinear head with three spiky white projections and painted red tips, signature features of many femme-chevals from this time. The figure behind the grey Femme appears like a silhouette emerging from a very dark ground, barely distinguishable from the allover black background. 

Lam painted that partial figure in a blue-grey tone with dashes of greens and stokes of purple-black to highlight the contours. A knife, symbolizing Ogún’s warrior presence, enters the pictorial space at the top of the canvas and extends down behind the grey-blue Femme forming the head of the silhouetted figure. The presence of a partial figure behind the central one is further confounded by the horse’s braid-tail, a carefully detailed element that appears to morph into the knife-head-face of the secondary figure. Thus Lam painted a picture within a picture of a totemic presence—a horse-headed woman—in front of other allusive images.

In 1954 Lam was in several group exhibitions in Paris, including Phases at Studio Paul Fachetti and the Xe Salon de Mai at the Musée National d’Art Moderne. His work was also seen in Basel and Lima. Encouraged by his good friend, the Danish artist Asger Jorn, Lam visited Albisola, Italy for the first time. There he participated in an international meeting on sculpture and ceramics, organized by the Movement for an International Bauhaus, also attended by Lucio Fontana, Matta, and Corneille. Jorn introduced Lam to the artistic community where he established his studio some six years later. As Lowery S. Sims concluded, both artists “reconciled modernism and nationalism through their interest in the mythic tradition of their respective nations, and coped with subject matter through a mediation of figuration and abstraction.”

Femme Cheval was painted during the year that Nasser came to power in Egypt, the French left Indo-China, and the war in Algeria broke out. In the light of those events,  Ogún’s presence, symbolized by the knife, as a power to destroy and construct, is especially appropriate.

 1. Wifredo Lam and the National Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 72.