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拍品专文
We are grateful to Eskil Lam for his assistance cataloguing this work.
Forty-one at the time that he painted Le nid fasciné, Wifredo Lam had already experienced the hardships of both civil war and world war, life as a refugee and as an outsider within his own country, gained the friendship and support of leading artists, philosophers and gallery owners of the day and been invited to exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Lam left his native Cuba in 1923 to study art in Spain where he stayed for fifteen years until a hospitalization after fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and the impending Nationalist take over sent him to Paris. In the City of Light, Lam flourished, befriending Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Léger and many other artists until the French capital fell to the Germans, forcing him once again to flee his newly adopted home and return this time to the Caribbean. In 1941, Lam eventually arrived back in Cuba after having first traveled from France aboard a steamship—sharing passage with André Breton and other Surrealist intellectuals—bound for Martinique where he met the poet Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the Négritude movement, who would become a formative influence on the artist.
“My return to Cuba meant above all a great stimulation of my imagination”1 Lam once reflected, and indeed the time he spent on the island in the 1940s proved revolutionary for him as an artist. During this period, Lam produced his most significant works, including his magnum opus, The Jungle (1943). It was also during these years when Lam caught the attention of Pierre Matisse whose New York gallery held two solo shows on the artist by 1944. Among the fourteen works included in the second of these exhibitions were The Jungle and Le nid fasciné. Shortly after their debut at Pierre Matisse, The Jungle entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Le nid fasciné joined a private collection in Milan and was later lent to numerous international exhibitions.
In Le nid fasciné, many of the iconic elements found in Lam’s work: birds, human hands, breast-like forms and the head of Elegguá, the double-horned Santería deity, emerge as spectral presences from the center of the canvas. These indefinable figures—not quite animal, human or spirit—suggest the Surrealist practice of juxtaposing incongruous subjects to create works of disquieting originality. This syncretic approach is one that Lam first developed in France where he learned the Surrealist game of cadavre exquis, in which a drawing is completed in parts by various people unable to see the entirety of the composition. Like the wonderfully bizarre images resulting from a game of cadavre exquis, Le nid fasciné is a daring fusion of fragmented parts that unexpectedly coalesce into a harmonious whole. Struck by this confluence of disparate forms, Pierre Matisse was inspired to suggest a title for the painting2 that expressed this same notion of surprising juxtapositions. With Matisse’s recommendation, Lam’s pastel-hued, dreamlike synthesis of the animal, human and spirit worlds became a fascinated nest—Le nid fasciné.
1 Wifredo Lam, quoted in Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2002) 35.
2 L. Laurin-Lam and E. Lam, Wifredo Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work, Volume I, 1961-1982 (Lausanne, Acatos, 2002) 350.
Forty-one at the time that he painted Le nid fasciné, Wifredo Lam had already experienced the hardships of both civil war and world war, life as a refugee and as an outsider within his own country, gained the friendship and support of leading artists, philosophers and gallery owners of the day and been invited to exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Lam left his native Cuba in 1923 to study art in Spain where he stayed for fifteen years until a hospitalization after fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and the impending Nationalist take over sent him to Paris. In the City of Light, Lam flourished, befriending Picasso, Matisse, Miró, Léger and many other artists until the French capital fell to the Germans, forcing him once again to flee his newly adopted home and return this time to the Caribbean. In 1941, Lam eventually arrived back in Cuba after having first traveled from France aboard a steamship—sharing passage with André Breton and other Surrealist intellectuals—bound for Martinique where he met the poet Aimé Césaire, one of the founders of the Négritude movement, who would become a formative influence on the artist.
“My return to Cuba meant above all a great stimulation of my imagination”1 Lam once reflected, and indeed the time he spent on the island in the 1940s proved revolutionary for him as an artist. During this period, Lam produced his most significant works, including his magnum opus, The Jungle (1943). It was also during these years when Lam caught the attention of Pierre Matisse whose New York gallery held two solo shows on the artist by 1944. Among the fourteen works included in the second of these exhibitions were The Jungle and Le nid fasciné. Shortly after their debut at Pierre Matisse, The Jungle entered the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and Le nid fasciné joined a private collection in Milan and was later lent to numerous international exhibitions.
In Le nid fasciné, many of the iconic elements found in Lam’s work: birds, human hands, breast-like forms and the head of Elegguá, the double-horned Santería deity, emerge as spectral presences from the center of the canvas. These indefinable figures—not quite animal, human or spirit—suggest the Surrealist practice of juxtaposing incongruous subjects to create works of disquieting originality. This syncretic approach is one that Lam first developed in France where he learned the Surrealist game of cadavre exquis, in which a drawing is completed in parts by various people unable to see the entirety of the composition. Like the wonderfully bizarre images resulting from a game of cadavre exquis, Le nid fasciné is a daring fusion of fragmented parts that unexpectedly coalesce into a harmonious whole. Struck by this confluence of disparate forms, Pierre Matisse was inspired to suggest a title for the painting2 that expressed this same notion of surprising juxtapositions. With Matisse’s recommendation, Lam’s pastel-hued, dreamlike synthesis of the animal, human and spirit worlds became a fascinated nest—Le nid fasciné.
1 Wifredo Lam, quoted in Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2002) 35.
2 L. Laurin-Lam and E. Lam, Wifredo Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work, Volume I, 1961-1982 (Lausanne, Acatos, 2002) 350.