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
