Wifredo Lam’s Fruta Bomba

Essay by Julia P. Herzberg

Wifredo Lam’s Fruta Bomba is an exemplary painting distinguished by its style, subject, iconography, and provenance. Among the most beautiful of Lam’s landscapes of the 1940s, the picture features papaya fruit on slender trunks against a background of abstracted palm fronds. The outlines are delicately rendered, with small touches of paint and fine lines on a white ground, creating the sensation of flickering tropical light.  

In the vernacular, in parts of Cuba, papaya is a forbidden word because of its sexual connotations of the female genitalia.1 Fruta bomba is a more commonly used term.  Lam’s Fruta Bomba are charged with different erotic associations, namely, the female breasts -- symbols of nurturing. Through the metamorphoses of diverse elements, the papaya fruit doubles for breasts, eliciting the notion of nature as female. If we follow ever so closely the lines of the thin trunk in the lower right hand of the picture to the point where it is transformed into the vein of a palm frond, we glimpse Lam’s deft punning.  The vein of the palm frond seems to support the back of an abstracted image of a seated woman whose anatomy is redefined by the flowering papaya in place of her head, the fruta bomba, her breasts, and the tree trunk, the rest of her body. Along the back of this barely visible, unsuspected hybrid of human form and vegetation are wispy strokes suggestive of the horse’s mane, an image, which in turn conjures up that of the woman-horse (femme-cheval).2  In this painting, as in most from this period, Lam merges Surrealist and Afro-Cuban worldviews. One calls for the free assertion of the creative spirit, and the other affirms that the animal, vegetal, and mineral kingdoms are spiritually united in nature. 

The friendship between Lam and Pierre Loeb (1897-1964) grew during the years the French dealer lived in exile in Havana, 1942 -1945. Loeb, Andrè Breton, Lydia Cabrera, Pierre Mabille, Benjamin Peret, and Alejo Carpentier were among the first connoisseurs to write about Lam, providing contemporary scholars with important points for departure. It was Loeb who first illustrated Fruta Bomba in Voyages à travers la peinture par Pierre Loeb. There he wrote, “If there was ever an artist who, by means of fragile lines and immaterial touches, could synthesize the blinding light of his country, its ethnic secrets, the richness of its vegetation, it is he [Lam].“3  

Fruta Bomba has a distinguished exhibition history. The painting was first shown in Paris, in an exhibition entitled “Wifredo Lam,” at the Galerie Pierre in 1945.  That exhibition was the first organized by Loeb after the war. Later it was shown in different European capitals but not in the United States. 

To date Fruta Bomba is one of the few Lam paintings to have remained in the same family for the last fifty years. Fruta Bomba is a singular large-scale landscape of 1944. It is an example of the artist’s achievement, in which he expanded the language of modernism through the addition of new cultural expressions and aesthetic modes.

Endnotes

1 In reference to Lam, see Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vaya papaya (Paris: Le Polygraphe Editeur, 1992), n.p.

2 The horse-woman image is a leit motif in the 1940s work.  The hybrid signals that moment of spiritual possession, when in Santería ceremony the deity possesses the believer.

3 Translation from French by the author from Pierre Loeb, Voyages à travers la peinture par Pierre Loeb p. 113.