Wifredo Lam is widely regarded as one of the most important avant-garde artists of the 20th century. Born in Cuba to a Chinese father and a Congolese-Cuban mother, he first attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Havana before traveling to Spain on scholarship to study at the San Fernando Academy in Madrid.
In 1938, Lam moved to Paris, where he met leading figures of the avant-garde—most notably Pablo Picasso, who would become his closest artistic ally and patron. Picasso, in turn, drew inspiration from Lam and saw him as naturally closer to the African culture he so admired. Picasso also introduced him to the renowned art dealer and gallery owner Pierre Loeb. Shortly thereafter, in 1939, Lam’s first solo exhibition took place at Galerie Pierre in Paris, where critics gave it rave reviews. That same year, Lam and Picasso exhibited together at Perls Galleries in New York. It was primarily through his encounter with Picasso and his engagement with African objects in Picasso’s private collection that Lam began to reflect more consciously on his African and Cuban cultural and artistic heritage. Encountering these objects was a revelation for Lam: he possessed a keen sensibility for both the abstract and figurative potential of their archetypal, radically reduced forms. A few years later, however, Lam also reflected on how disconcerting it was to see these artifacts uprooted, stripped of their original context, and acquired by people who did not understand their origins. He sought to reference them in his own work while preserving their dignity and acknowledging their original meaning and purpose: “I have tried to relocate Black cultural objects in relation to their own world. My painting is an act of decolonization—not in a physical sense, but in a mental one.” (Wifredo Lam, 1980, quoted from: Gerardo Mosquera, “‘My Painting Is an Act of Decolonization’—An Interview with Wifredo Lam,” Bohemia, vol. 71, No. 25, June 20, 1980, p. 12). This idea also characterizes the present work, created in late 1939, to a particular degree. In this luminous, dignified portrait, Lam most likely depicted his partner and later wife, the German scholar Helena Holzer, whom he met in 1938. The figure is composed of loosely assembled geometric shapes. Helena’s face, in particular, recalls the African masks in Picasso’s collection: slanted, vigorously contoured eyes and lips appear as geometric, minimalist planes. Her strikingly long hair recalls a horse’s mane and extends beyond the picture's boundaries. This may already hint at the “woman-horse” imagery that Lam would later develop in his “Femme cheval” series.
In a Europe on the eve of war, Wifredo Lam reflected on his Afro-Caribbean roots and developed a distinctive visual language in which cultural memory, formal reduction, and the impulses of the European avant-garde converge. “Jeune fille sur fond vert” combines these influences and transforms them into a new visual vocabulary in which the personal, cultural, and political elements are inextricably intertwined. [KA]