The year 1955 found Wifredo Lam in transition: it was a year of landmark exhibitions for the artist, both in Europe (including a retrospective in Malmö, Sweden, in which Sans titre was included) and in Latin America (including retrospectives in Havana, Cuba and Caracas, Venezuela). Departing from the lush, verdant compositions of his initial return to Cuba in 1940s, his work of the 1950s was marked by a shift towards graphic simplicity and a distilled palette. Lam was embraced by the European Surrealists, who believed Lam to be physical embodiment of the primitivist ideals of their movement, at once “the modern and the primitive, the man of science and the man of magic.” (Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982, Austin, 2002, p. 106) At the same t.mes , Lam's work garnered growing acclaim in Latin America as he continued to draw heavily on the Antillean physical and psychic landscape. His mystical compositions of this period, muted in tone and cryptic in iconography, intentionally resist categorization.

Marked by crisp lines and rich with esoteric imagery, Sans titre is an elegant example of Lam’s confident draftsmanship of this period. At the center a horned, cycloptic arrow-like figure darts upward; casting it in stark relief against the bright yellow background, a second winged black figure shoots downward. This pair of figures, from their intricately patterned anthropomorphic forms to the harmonious tension they embody, offers echoes of the iconography of Santería that runs throughout Lam’s oeuvre. These shifting figures remain mysterious, at once occult and organic, belonging neither to the human nor the divine world.