A Note On Wilfredo Lam’s Phallic Woman - by Donald Kuspit

 Wilfredo Lam
 

By DONALD KUSPIT January 31st, 2026

            Wilfredo Lam’s Zambezia, Zambezia, 1950 must be a woman, as her breast, with its conspicuous nipple, strongly suggests, but the light bulb, bright white, in the curve of her upper body, seems like the tip of an erect penis.  In The Jungle, 1943, Lam’s most famous work, breasts and especially buttocks abound, and most conspicuously legs, but nothing that could be called a body, a torso, male or female.  The long legs on the foreground figure on the left are implicitly erect penises, as their rigid uprightness and slenderness suggests.  The Femme Cheval, also 1943 has an erect phallic form in its center, holding up the female horse’s neck, implying that it has the power of a man.  The work is said to allude to the Amazons, in effect men in female form.  They supposedly cut off one breast to make it easier to shoot their arrows, implicitly turning themselves into men.  It is worth noting that in French cheval is masculine but refers specifically to a hybrid; “jument is the correct word for a female horse.”  The horse headed woman supposedly alludes to Lam’s godmother, who taught him about the Santeria religion.  Is she the woman in Satan, 1942?   Or the monster—witch?—in Mofumbe, 1943?  The Seated Woman, 1955, with her claw-like hands and peculiar head, with what seems like a male head, is another mythopoetic incarnation of her.  I suggest she is the hydra-headed figure in Le Sombre Malembo, Die du carrefour, 1943 and the confrontational female in The Murmur, 1943.

            Lam’s godmother was a Santeria priestess and renown as a healer and sorceress.  “Santeria is an African diaspora religion that developed in Cuba during the late 19^th century.”  It is a fusion of Catholicism and various African beliefs.  Through his grandmother he became aware of “orishas…divine spirits that play a key role in the Yoruba religion of West Africa.”  I think orishas are phallic women, that is, women who may be outwardly female but inwardly male, a fusion of opposites that makes them sacred, gives them godlike power.  Such a union of opposites—for Jung the conscious and unconscious (light and shadow), in dialectical intimacy and inseparableness—achieves wholeness and with that individuality.  I suggest that Santeria was unwittingly a Jungian psychology, and that Lam used it to psychoanalyze himself, which is what his art is all about.