Notions of Identity and Transculturality in Wifredo Lam’s The Jungle

Javier Ortega-Alvarez

ARH 4810 Art History Methods and MediaDr. Michael D. Carrasco

It is perhaps a truism that an artist, and hence its artistic identity, is a concrete manifestation of the cultural and societal norms of a specific time. The Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, born in 1902 in the small town of Sagua la Grande to Lam Yam, a first generation Chinese immigrant, and to Ana Serafina Castilla, a descendant of slaves, embodies and identity that was, and remains until today, markedly morphed by the diatribes of modernism. A modernism that, in seeking to uproot and strive for an agenda not prescribed by tradition turned to its own social fears and the colonized world in order to contrive new ideas of a self.

The complexity of Lam’s artistic identity comes through in full display in The Jungle, a painting executed between 1942 and 1943. The painting acts as a reflection of the cultural subjugation of Cuba’s black population during the first half of the 20 th

Century and Lam’s own complex identity. During his prolonged self-imposed exile in Europe, Lam was able to portray the

myriad influences that shaped his artistic vision and using as a social instigation tool by depicting the plight of the blacks in Cuba. In spending so many years searching for a voice of his own, Lam found upon his return to the island a catalyst that allowed for an expression of this own to surface. Though he spent almost half his life in Europe he was mistakenly coined a Primitivist as a consequence of his friendship with Picasso and Breton, and also because of his heritage and place of origin. However, as I will seek to argue in this paper, the coining of such term upon Lam stifled his identity and prescribed to him a definition that carried intrinsic fallacies of European ethnocentrism emanating from an idea closely linked to the color of his skin and Caribbean heritage.

This paper will analyze The Jungle (1942-43) (fig.1) as a seminal work in Lam’s artistic oeuvre and as an important vehicle for understanding Lam’s identity. It will also analyze the virulence of European ethnocentrism in shaping an artistic persona. His artistic career was greatly shaped by his departure from Cuba in his early formative years and the period of self-discovery culminating upon his return to Cuba in 1941. In building my argument, I will discuss how traces of Picasso’s Africanism, Afro-Cuban Religion, Surrealist automatism and the idea of Tranculturalism conjure an identity that is unique but shackled by western ideology. Also, the many friendships that occupied Lam’s life are clear examples of how detrimental artistic associations can be for the creation of an independent personal identity. Specifically, his friendships with Pablo Picasso and André Breton, who saw Lam with ethnocentric eyes, and also his friendships with the shapers of the Afro-Cuban identity, who saw in Lam an artist that would give a troubled national identity a visual aspect. In Alejo Carpentier, a friend and passionate defender of Afro-Cuban culture, Lam found an enthusiast of his art. In retrospect, Carpentier said in 1944, “The monumental painting, The Jungle, and all of those that heralded it and derived from it are a momentous contribution to the new world of Latin American painting.”1

The creation of The Jungle occurred under unusual circumstances. Not unusual in the sense that they were strenuous or ill conceived, but in that the work carries everything that Lam learned during his prolonged stay in Europe and his newfound sense of heritage. Since he had arrived to Cuba the year prior the execution of The Jungle via Martinique

1 Roberto Cobas Amate, “Lam, A Visual Arts Manifesto for the Third World,” in Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, ed. Nathalie Bondil (Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Prestel Publishing, 2008), 198.

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and the Dominican Republic, the memories and influences of Europe were still present in his perception of the world. However, his genius comes from his understanding and portrayal of his influences without intentionally enhancing them. In choosing to use European influences and sensibilities to portray a surreal scene2 that depicts the condition of the blacks in Cuba, Lam creates a painting symbolic of a Neo-colonial condition. Lam thus comes full circle and arrives at a unique identity that was not directly manipulated by a colonizer, but which recognized its previous colonial history by employing its complex language. A language masked under the European influences of Primitivism and Surrealism. Much in the same manner slaves arriving in Cuba during its colonial period masked their native religions using Catholic imagery as cultural survival strategies.3

Complexity in Explaining Lam

To explain Lam’s identity through The Jungle, a point of awareness needs to be raised. There are things that are intrinsic to a man that are only his own and that develop not from an outward interaction, but from his own genetic dispensability. On this point, Wifredo Lam was a superstitious man. Most of his superstition derived from his upbringing in the small town in Cuba and from his relationship with his godmother, Mantonica Wilson. Which could explain the high degree of mysticism found in The Jungle. Also, his mixed heritage, a reflection of the intermingling of races in Cuba, gave Lam a sense of not belonging to any particular set of cultural rules, but to a mixed universal language.

Lam’s life portrays a veritable truth that rests on the idea that his identity, and hence the identity of pre-postmodernist Latin American, relies heavily on the demarcations of a field that was, and remains, intrinsically Western.4 Not to say that such is the fate of every branch of the modern Art Historical field. But at the time when Lam reached artistic maturity, and the years after the events delineated in this paper took place, a sort of errata occurred when talking about Lam. Such errors were derived from understudied influences and ethnocentric ideas that in a sense were used to explain the general demeanor towards Latin American Art. The idea of Transculturalism is henceforth instrumental in outlining my argument. The term, coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, serves as a replacement for the term acculturation, en vogue during the earlier 20th Century.5 The term serves to explain an intermingling of cultures as prescribed by cultural interaction and is the backbone of my argument when explaining Lam’s identity.

Pablo Picasso’s Africanism

Lam’s friendship with Pablo Picasso begins the traceable path that culminates in the conception of The Jungle. In 1938, Lam traveled to Paris escaping the Nationalist

2 I must add that the word is used in the sense that is not real, not with any connections to Surrealism. 3 Lowery Strokes Sims, “The Post Modernism of Wifredo Lam,” in Cosmopolitan Modernism, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005) 93-98.4 Steven A. Mansbach, “The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History,” in Exiles, Diaspora and Strangers, ed. Kobena Mercer (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 96-120.5 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1947), 97

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capture of Madrid. He traveled with few possessions and a letter of introduction from fellow artist Manuel Hugué to Picasso. The letter, however, proved to be of no great significance, since Picasso later remarked: “Even if you hadn’t brought me a letter from Manolo, I would have noticed you in the street and I would have thought: ‘I absolutely must make friend of this man!’”6

In helping begin an explanation of European ethnocentrism towards Lam, Varian Fry, the head of the Emergency Rescue Committee operating out of the confines of Villa Bel Air in Marseilles, France, described Lam as “the tragic-masked Cuban Negro who was one of the very few pupils Picasso ever took.”7 In this remark Fry makes the flawed assumption that Lam was under the tutelage of Picasso and that his ethnicity carried an aura of mysticism. Lam, however, was an accomplished artist before meeting Picasso. His work of the pre-Picasso era followed in the aesthetic guidelines of any traditionally trained artist of the time. His Retrato de Carmina Calabozo (1931) (fig.3) is an example of the works commissioned by wealthy patrons during this time. The work is finely crafted and is what Lowery Strokes Sims calls “postcard renderings.”8 Also, Michel Leiris, a French ethnographer and close friend of Picasso’s, saw Lam’s art as indicative of his ethnicity. But he did recognize that in viewing Lam’s work, an assertion that heritage permeated in the art was pointless.9

Picasso saw in Lam an artist who had reached the same artistic point as him, but who came from a different direction. Picasso thought that both he and Lam had had reached a Primitivist aesthetic but arriving at it from different paths. Picasso thought of himself as working from the perspective of an ‘outsider’ while Lam arrived at a Primitivist aesthetic relying on his own ethnicity to serve as the basis for the content of his pictures and thus working under the notion of an ‘insider’.10 Here, the word ‘outsider’ explains the idea that Picasso reached Primitivism coming from a modernist aesthetic deeply cemented in tradition and that Lam reached Primitivism working from innate African sensibility as prescribed by his ancestral connection to that continent through his mother. It is important to point out that Lam, much in the same manner as any artist of the time, started his vocational studies in an academic setting and was as professionally formed by tradition as Picasso. Nevertheless, individuality and identity are deprived from the artist because he is still perceived as the colonized, or somebody who needs guidance, and can only reach a level of individuality as explained by his relation with the colonizer.

Nevertheless, what Lam found in Picasso’s Africanism was a sense of continuity from the works that he had seen as a little boy in the house of his godmother, Matonica Wilson.11 Works associated with religious rites and the plethora of instruments used in divination and practices of the Santera, or priestess. Thus what Lam found in Picasso’s art was a formal liberation from an academic tradition. An aesthetic freedom that is not extraneous to the plastic arts but that emanates from a distinct personality. Art, then,

6 Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (Barcelona: La Poligrafia S.A., 1989), 114.7 Lowery Strokes Sims, “Wifredo Lam: From Spain to Cuba,” in Wifredo Lam and His Conemporaries: 1938-1952, ed. Maria R. Balderrama (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992), 23.8 Sims, Lowery Strokes. Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 12.9 Michel Leiris, Wifredo Lam (New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 1970). 10 Lowery Strokes Sims, “Wifredo Lam: From Spain to Cuba,” in Wifredo Lam and His Conemporaries: 1938-1952, ed. Maria R. Balderrama (New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992), 20.11 Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (Barcelona: La Poligrafia S.A., 1989), 124.

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becomes inviting and not something that stands outside the viewer’s grasp; the idea of the invitation allows the viewer to become part of the work and not to stand idly.

In a work of the time, Figure (1939) (fig.4), such liberation of form is explained. In this gouache we see Lam experimenting with a style that was unfamiliar to him. He gives us a figure that acts as a portrait of someone or of himself. But the use of the African mask and the destruction of perspective is something he would have learned from Picasso. Through their friendship, Lam began exploring different techniques and representational schemes and styles. Specifically, Picasso’s Africanized forms and his Cubist language debasing planar congruity.

Robert Linsley explains that a sense of homage is perceived in The Jungle. He argues that the idea that the “Demoiselles d’Avignon have become the Demoiselles d’Havane” comes from the close aesthetic relationship that Lam’s work borrows from the former.12 However, Linsley fails to understand Lam’s aim with this specific use of Iconography. Lam edges on an infant Post-Modernism that uses Picasso’s masterpiece in order to mask, as stated above, his true aim. In the work, we see four figures that appear to emanate from a sugar cane field. Lam borrows only iconography to explain the servile state that Cuba served in the neo-colonial era. Though the island had reached independence and became a Republic in 1902, it remained under the stifling economic grip of the United States. The painting reflects the island’s relationship with the US as recorded by the inviting prostitutes of Picasso’s Demoiselles (fig.2).

The iconography is also used to explain Primitivism and its relationship to the plastic arts. A Primitivist aesthetic is reached when the European Nations are aesthetically and ideologically colonized in reverse by their own colonies. In the process of relocation, Primitivism acquires a Western sensibility that is distorted and that is contrived from an ‘outsider’s’ perspective. To this new idea of Primitivism arrives an artist from a country in the woes of a post-colonial society. In this case, Lam learns about Primitivism through the eyes of a European.13

This quasi-primitivism is what Lam so skillfully portrays in The Jungle. In the work, the prostitutes acquire a tropical mood, and thus we no longer see prostitutes but extensions of the tropical foliage. The figures are to the sugar cane in the background as the title The Jungle is to the idea that there exist no jungles in Cuba. A hybrid misunderstood and misinterpreted. Lam also employs the polymorphism of André Masson’s figures (fig.5), whis is explained by the depiction of human figures with plant forms. Something that Lam uses fittingly to create figures that act as neither humans or as sugar cane.

Yoruba, Afro-Cuban Religious Imagery and the Mask

I must raise awareness to Lam’s use of the mask. As seen in Varian Fry’s remark about the Cuban artist, Lam’s use of the mask as a substitute for the face is an artistic choice that perhaps helps explain the general misunderstanding about his artistic persona. The use of the mask works like a coin with two heads. First, it works as a surrogate of Lam’s identity and denotes the notion that his heritage, as perceived by his peers, instead

12 Robert Linsley, “’Wilfredo Lam’: Painter of Negritude,” in Race-ing Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York: Routledge, 2002), 295.13 Ibid., 294.

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of representing his personal artistic preference, dictates the course of his art.14 The other side shows the hardship in explaining the hybrid nature of the Cuban culture and hence the Cuban identity.

The Jungle acts as a land of myth, exciting the imagination and explaining the condition of the blacks in Cuba. In doing so, Lam retorts to the Yoruba religion and its distinct Afro-Cuban traits. The Yoruba religion was one of many in existence in the region of present day Nigeria. It traveled with the slaves coming to the New World and was the religion that found greater acceptance in Cuba. By the time Lam had any conscious idea of the world around him, the religion had morphed tremendously. The hybrid that Lam encountered was a religion that used Catholic Imagery as a substitute for the image of the religion’s deities and used Cuban atavism as its language.

The religion traveled with the African slaves brought to the New World by the Spanish during the 18th and 19th Century but quickly changed. Perhaps the most unusual characteristic of the religion is that the orishas, which is the name given to the deities in the Yoruba pantheon, come from real people who have a reached the level of deity and have Roman Catholic counterparts.15 Though there are no recorded instances of Lam ever practicing the religion, it is known that before his departure from Cuba he was well acquainted with it.16

In The Jungle, there are clear instances where an orisha is portrayed. Specifically, in the crescent moon-faced figure that stands to the right. The half moon is signifier of Yemayá who is the model of the universal mother. It is unclear why Lam would choose this symbol in his painting, since the painting as a whole makes no reference to motherhood. I argue that in doing so, Lam depicts a true visual reference to the true Afro-Cuban identity, and hence his own, by constructing a place where the symbols and ideas of Santeria are exposed in close proximity to each other. The painting acts as a pseudo-progenitor to the visual aspect of the Afro-Cuban identity. Also, the scissors, located in the upper right hand corner can be attributed to Oggún, who finds in St. Peter, the holder of the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, its Roman Catholic counterpart.

Lam uses the mysticism and occult quality of the religion in order to shroud his depiction of Cuba in secrecy. Also, in using a theme that is intrinsically Cuban, he would have avoided falling pray to a sort of art that he encountered upon his return to the island in 1942. An art that catered to the taste of the tourist and that was deprived of any psychological depth. As he stated, “I wanted, with all my might, to paint the drama of my country, by expressing in depth the spirit of the blacks.”17

Lam’s reintegration into his country of origin was difficult. He arrived in a society that was no longer his own, despite being his place of birth. Since he had resided in Europe for such a long time, his Cuban identity was replaced by a European identity, which portrayed him more as an outsider rather than as a Cuban. He had to arrive at this 14 Michele Greet, “Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist Fixation,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, no. 5 (2003), http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_5/Michele_Greet/MicheleGreet.html15 Miguel Barnet, Afro-Cuban Religions, trans. Christine Renata Ayorinde (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2001), 18.16 Suzanne Garrigues Daniel, “The Early Works of Wifredo Lam, 1941-1945” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1983), 9.17 Roberto Cobas Amate, “Lam, A Visual Arts Manifesto for the Third World,” in Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, ed. Nathalie Bondil (Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Prestel Publishing, 2008), 196

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identity of a morphed modernism and sought to uproot the idea of the colonized and the colonizer. However, this also proved difficult since he had achieved artistic maturity in Europe and had learned to liberate his art through a European perspective.

Surrealist Entrenchment

Nevertheless, in his portrayal of a surreal scene that uses the language of the blacks in a setting that gives reference to no real space, Lam reaches a point of departure from his European sensibility. The picture that appears is then a Surreal image as denoted by a Surrealist idea. However, I would like to point out that as discussed in this paper, Lam was never a Surrealist but only used the visual language of Surrealism; it was a means to an end. He could not use conventional reality to explain Cuba’s deep unrest, so he resorted to Surrealism in order to explain the identity chaos that the country suffered. Fry, whose ethnocentric remark about Lam was earlier explained, would later allow Lam’s other friendship with André Breton to flourish by housing the leading exponents of the Surrealist movement who escaped Vichy France.

Surrealism is explained in a sensibility that is inherently European and operates under the notion that an image does not function within the confines of control or rationality.18 That said, it functions with the idea of arriving at Primitivism through automatism, or free association of images. To deem an artist not acquainted with this European sensibility a Surrealist is to negate his entire artistic identity. I do not say, however, that a non-European artist cannot be described as a Surrealist, but what I am saying is that their artistic identity is not shaped by the same influences that shaped Surrealism. Surrealism is driven by a return to the primitive man, who gives forth his most innate feelings and views of world deprived of social or cultural filters; the “fetishism” that occurs, can only be quelled by a return to the Primitive.

Lam was thought to be Surrealist because of his close ties with the founder of the movement. His friendship with André Breton was as complex as his friendship with Picasso. However, Breton incurred in the same fallacies as Picasso when thinking that Lam’s art emanated from his “primitive” condition and that his ethnicity was the basis of his art.

In a deliberate statement, Lam is noted to have said, “I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters.”19 Surrealism is automatically canceled in the notion that his art now operates under the confines of a clear direction. The subconscious, the basic factor at work in Surrealist imagery, is thus obliterated by an agenda that, even though fails to follow reason, is still controlled by the conscious mind. His art relies in the careful juxtapositions created by a clear aim with no clear visual direction.

Consequently, it is important to note that the previous statement would falsify many instances of erroneous coinage by leading historians and curators, such as the entry by William S. Rubin estimating Lam’s achievements. In his book, Dada, Surrealism and Their Heritage, Rubin describes Lam as a Surrealist basing his explanation solely on aesthetic principles and the overtly mythical scenes that plague Lam’s art.20

18 J.H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977), 2.19 Max-Pol Fouchet, Wifredo Lam (Barcelona: La Poligrafia S.A., 1989), 194.20 John Yau, “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” in Out There: Marginalization and Cotemporary Cultures, ed. Russel Ferguson et.al. (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1992), 134-135.

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Because the Surrealists were interested in the language of myth and legend, which they saw as an intrinsic part of a primitive culture, they saw in Lam a perfect vehicle to describe their view of the world.21 The ethnocentrism created is explained by an instance when, in a 1945 interview, Breton “ascribes metaphysics to Kandinsky, embryogenetics to Arp, optics to Magritte, mineralogy to Harold, cynegetics to Toyen, antiquity to de Chirico, alchemy to Carrington, and to Lam voodoo.”22 Notice that Lam’s artistic influence is the only prescribed by his race and heritage and not by his artistic choice, thus negating his artistic identity.

In the same manner that Picasso’s Africanism allowed Lam a liberation of form, Surrealism allowed Lam spontaneity. He used automatism let his brush paint what he really felt about his condition and that of the black population in Cuba. His surreal image is thus explained as much by Picasso’s influences as by Surrealism’s influence. An influence as seen by an automatist aesthetic that allows Lam to pepper the canvas with the imagery of his mind.

In the painting we see figures that bear no resemblance with each other besides in their bestiality. The jutting out of limbs and highly distorted bodies creates an idea of distress in the painting. This is not Cubism, for it follows no multiplicity of perspective, no sectarian plane; there is no plane in this painting. There is no foreground nor background, left nor right. This is not Surrealism either, for the subconscious is not allowed to do its ravage on the meaning of the painting. That is where the true genius of this work lies; the merging of styles and their languages to help explain an idea that is not tied to anything but to itself. Lam is an exemplar of an artist that soaks in influences and does not allow for any one of them to be prominent in his work. He takes them all and creates a morphed style that, I argue, is his true artistic identity.

The problem arises then when trying to peg Lam to any specific style. Since Surrealism was a movement that never evolved to allow for a post-Surrealism or a branch, Lam is lazily called a Surrealist to avoid the pains of allowing him be explained by a new style.

The Transculturality of Lam’s Influences

Transculturality also helps to explain Lam’s work. The term was coined by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz in his seminal work, Cuban Counterpoint, and describes:

With the reader’s permission, especially if he happens to be interested in ethnographic and sociological questions, I am going to take the liberty of employing for the first time the term transculturation, fully aware of the fact that it is a neologism. And I venture to suggest that it might be adopted in sociological terminology, to a great extent at least, as a substitute for the term acculturation, whose use is now spreading.23

21 J.H. Matthews, The Imagery of Surrealism (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977), 18.22 Michele Greet, “Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist Fixation,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, no. 5 (2003), http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_5/Michele_Greet/MicheleGreet.html

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The term is used to describe a high intermingling of cultures and national identities to form the Cuban national identity. The exogenous uprooting of entire cultures from their place of origin and transplanted to Cuba. 24

Lam is a clear case of this Transculturation. He fell in the category of cultures, such as the mulatto, that represented neither of its progenitors’ races. Lam was neither Chinese nor black, something that might help to explain his cultural assimilation to Europe and his reintegration to Cuban society. The Afro-Cuban quest for identity is thus exemplified in the writings of Ortiz. The term Transculturation works in the confines of the production of the sugar cane, an essential crop for Cuba’s economy, by the African slaves brought by the Spanish settlers. With them, the slaves brought their costumes, religions and habits that became tangled with the habits and costumes of the other cultures arriving to the island.

The term comes from the exploitation of the blacks by the other cultures of the island, specially the Spanish, in the production of sugar. It is of strange coincidence that in explaining Transculturalism, Fernando Ortiz ties it to the role of African blacks in the maintenance of the sugar crop, and that the Lam depicts a field of sugar cane as a backdrop for his painting. The painting hence works as kind of symbol that explains the African identity of the island. In choosing to portray a sugar cane crop as a jungle, Lam toys with the idea that Cuba is sugar, and that sugar is black. He makes the association that the island has a black identity that cannot be taken lightly. The painting follows a trend that had started decades prior and that directed its effort towards the studies and definition of the Afro-Cuban identity.

Lam, upon his return to Cuba, went to forge a strong friendship with the Afro-Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera. Their friendship allowed Lam to rediscover his heritage and ancestry. Cabrera, who lived near Poglotti, a black section of Cuba linked to Santeria, allowed Lam to rediscover the religion of his childhood.25

His friendship with Cabrera allowed him to depict the Afro-Cuban identity in a completely modern manner.26 He used the languages he had learned in Europe and his new found sense of identity in a place that was his own and at the same time wasn’t.

To explain Lam one has to explain all the influences that created him and, in doing so, group them in a single explanation. His complexity allows only for detailed description and nothing else. He arrives at a dichotomy of paths at this point in his artistic career. He had to employ that which he had learned from the European avant-garde and to arrive at an identity that was entirely his own. His case is exemplary in how those who came to artistic maturity during the apogee of the European avant-garde struggled to define themselves. Lam battles alone and comes to find an aesthetic that is his own and that allows for his identity to stand independently. Often misunderstood and artistically underrated, Lam reached a point in The Jungle where he had fully matured into his own

23 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1947), 9724 Suzanne Garrigues Daniel, “The Early Works of Wifredo Lam, 1941-1945” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1983), 9.25 Helena Benitez, Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam, 1939-1950 (Switzerland: Entreprise d’arts graphiues Jean Genoud SA, 1999), 91.26 Michele Greet, “Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist Fixation,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, no. 5 (2003), http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_5/Michele_Greet/MicheleGreet.html

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persona. A quest that took him from a small town in Cuba, to Spain and France, to return to his land of origin, defined a persona that was intrinsically Cuban. Lam’s jungle is the jungle of his mind trying to break free. In it, we see an artistic identity that tries to define itself.

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Bibliography

Barnet, Miguel. Afro-Cuban Religions, translated by Christine Renata Ayorinde. Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 2001.

Benitez, Helena. Wifredo and Helena: My Life with Wifredo Lam, 1939-1950. Switzerland: Entreprise d’arts graphiues Jean Genoud SA, 1999.

Cobas Amate, Roberto. “Lam, A Visual Arts Manifesto for the Third World.” in Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, edited by Nathalie Bondil, 196-203. Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Prestel Publishing, 2008.

Fouchet, Max-Pol. Wifredo Lam. Barcelona: La Poligrafia S.A., 1989.Garrigues Daniel, Suzanne. “The Early Works of Wifredo Lam, 1941-1945.” PhD diss.,

University of Maryland, 1983.Greet, Michele. “Inventing Wifredo Lam: The Parisian Avant-Garde’s Primitivist

Fixation,” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, no. 5 (2003), http://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_5/Michele_Greet/MicheleGreet.html

Leiris, Michel. Wifredo Lam. New York: Harry N. Abrahams, 1970.Linsley, Robert, “’Wilfredo Lam’: Painter of Negritude,” in Race-ing Art History, edited

by Kymberly N. Pinder, 289-306. New York: Routledge, 2002.Matthews, J.H.,The Imagery of Surrealism. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1977.Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, translated by Harriet de Onis.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1947.Sims, Lowery Strokes. “The Post Modernism of Wifredo Lam,” in Cosmopolitan

Modernism, edited by Kobena Mercer 93-101. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005.Sims, Lowery Strokes. Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982.

Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002.Sims, Lowery Strokes. “Wifredo Lam: From Spain to Cuba,” in Wifredo Lam and His

Contemporaries: 1938-1952, edited by Maria R. Balderrama, 17-51. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992.

Yau, John. “Please Wait by the Coatroom,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Cornel West 133-141. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.

Cobas Amate, Roberto, “Lam, A Visual Arts Manifesto for the Third World,” in Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, edited by Nathalie Bondil, 198-200. Montreal, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts: Prestel Publishing, 2008.

Mansbach, Steven A.“The Artifice of Modern(ist) Art History,” in Exiles, Diaspora and Strangers, edited by Kobena Mercer, 96-120. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008.

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Glossary

1. Wifredo Lam The Jungle (1942-43)

2. Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906)

3. Wifredo Lam Retrato de Carmina Calabozo (1931)

4. Wifredo Lam Figure (1939)

5. André Masson Les soupiraux (1924)

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Figure 1Wifredo Lam The Jungle (1942-43)

Figure 2 Pablo Picasso Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1906)

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Figure 3 Wifredo Lam Retrato de Carmina Calabozo (1931)

Figure 4 Wifredo Lam Figure (1939)

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Figure 5 André Masson Les soupiraux (1924)

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