Wifredo Lam was a Cuban painter, born in Sagua la Grande in 1902 to a Chinese father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, who died in Paris in 1982.
He studied in Havana, lived in Spain and France for eighteen years, and went home to Cuba in 1941. He is remembered for The Jungle (1942-43), a huge picture of masked figures among sugarcane that the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought in 1945.
He came back from Europe with the Spanish masters, Cubism and Surrealism behind him. What he painted next was his own country.
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The title is the first thing to doubt. Lam called the picture The Jungle, and most viewers see a jungle. But among the broad leaves and fruit around the figures stands sugarcane, a crop that is planted in fields, not found in forests. In Cuba, cane meant the plantation, and MoMA's own label ties the picture to the island's history of slavery and indenture.
Lam never hid the intention. "I wanted with all my heart to paint the drama of my country," he said, and he would do it like a Trojan horse, with hallucinating figures coming out of it to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. He said he "refused to paint cha-cha-cha," and that his painting would never be "the equivalent of that pseudo-Cuban music for nightclubs."
And the painter of those Afro-Cuban spirits was not a believer. His godmother, a Santería priestess he called Ma'Antonica, hoped he would become a babalao, a priest of the religion. He refused initiation.
What You'll Discover
Why he left Cuba for Spain.
What Picasso did for him.
Who sailed out of Marseille with him.
What he found when he went home.
How he spent his last years.