Interlude Marseille

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Interlude Marseille

Cuba, 1940-1941
Drawings
Ink and graphite on paper
Framed: 16 7/8 x 13 7/8 x 1 1/4 in. (42.86 x 35.24 x 3.18 cm); Sheet: 8 3/4 x 6 3/4 in. (22.23 x 17.15 cm)
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. James Luhn Sheehy (AC1998.169.5)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

During Wifredo Lam's stay in Marseille from 1940 to 1941, while he awaited passage out of France, the artist produced four or five drawings a day....
During Wifredo Lam's stay in Marseille from 1940 to 1941, while he awaited passage out of France, the artist produced four or five drawings a day. Conceived as studies for André Breton's poem Fata Morgana, they fuse cubist and surrealist styles. The drawings document the enormous anxiety of other artists also waiting to escape France. In them, Lam developed the motif of the femme cheval, or horse-headed female, the curious hybrid being that would become one of Lam's signature images, and which derives from his interest in the Afro-Cuban religion Santería and in the work of Picasso and Matisse.

Ilona Katzew, 2008
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