林飛龍

Private Collection, Paris

Private Collection, Geneva

Private Collection, Lausanne

Private Collection, Europe (sold: Sotheby’s, Paris, 8th December 2010, lot 47)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Venice, XXXVI Esposizione biennale internazionale d'arte, Cuban Pavillion, 1972, no. 13
 

Alain Jouffroy, Lam, Paris, 1972, illustrated p. 42 (titled Fruits des Tropiques)

'Misura d'un uomo: Wifredo Lam', Quinta Parete 5, Turin, Winter 1972-73, illustrated in colour p. 5

Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam, Barcelona & Paris, 1976, no. 172, illustrated in colour p. 140

Sebastià Gasch, Wifredo Lam a París, Barcelona, 1976, no. 54, illustrated in colour p. 135

Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam, Barcelona, 1986, no. 107, illustrated in colour 

Lou Laurin-Lam & Eskil Lam, Wifredo Lam, Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work, Lausanne, 2002, vol. II, no. 69.57, illustrated in colour p. 90; illustrated p. 321

The present work, dating from 1969, is a beguiling example of Wifredo Lam's distinctive and poetic form of expression. The Cuban artist arrived in Paris from Spain in the 1930s at a time when many modern artists were increasingly seeking inspiration from 'primitive' art, and African masks and statues in particular, in their quest to formally revolutionise Western art. Picasso, who had been at the forefront of this movement with his early Cubist experiments, would become an important influence in Lam’s work. As Lam explained: ‘What made me feel such empathy with his painting, more than anything else, was the presence of African art and the African spirit that I discovered in it’ (quoted in Max-Pol Fouchet, op. cit., 1986, p. 23). When Lam returned to Cuba in 1941, he was able to engage with the prevailing interest in primitivism on a more personal level, rediscovering the environment and mythology of his native country. This experience was to have a profound effect on the artist; although he returned to Europe and ultimately settled in Paris in 1952, the Cuban spirit remained integral to his work.

Fruits tropicaux is testament to the artist's stylistic evolution from his early emulation of more sober, geometric interpretations of 'primitive' themes to what Lou Laurin-Lam describes as a 'more internal use of these elements' (L. Laurin-Lam, op. cit., p. 97). Lam's mature work is dominated by a figuration that, although indebted to Cubism, distances itself from the analytical deconstruction of forms, embracing instead a more Surrealist impulse for invention (fig. 1). Lam met Breton in Paris in 1939 and became involved with his circle, absorbing both the visual aesthetic and the playful subversion of the Surrealists. This is particularly evident in Fruits tropicaux where the double entendre of the title and the deliberately eroticised elements of the composition imbue the canvas with whimsical quality. 

Ostensibly a depiction of tropical fruit, the present work directly references the visual traditions of European Art whilst simultaneously transfiguring them; it viscerally embodies the hybrid reality of the Afro-Cuban world where everything is connected and everything participates. The combination of curious human-animal figures with rich tropical vegetation in the present work exemplifies this sense of interconnectedness. In her discussion of the paintings of the period, Laurin-Lam notes: 'there is a baroque gathering of natural and fantastic elements in these works', whose aim was, 'to communicate, rather than strictly represent, a mythology of the Caribbean... the unity of life' (ibid., p. 90). With its fragmentation of forms and Surrealist metamorphosis of subject, the present work balances aesthetic values with cultural politics as Lam succeeds in marrying a visual language drawn from European avant-garde art with the evocative themes of his native country.