Wifredo Lam
Fundamental Paintings to Understand the History of Painting
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The Jungle (1943). Wifredo Lam
Gouache on paper mounted on canvas. 239.4 cm x 229.9 cm
Moma. New York, United States
Weird figures born in a dream, with tribal masks, among sugar canes. Man and his relationship with nature and the supernatural.
Lam was an artist full of questions about cultural inheritance fed by a world of multiple mixed religious beliefs (Santería).
He was an intimate friend of the main Cubist and Surrealist artists, influence that helped to turn his work in the expression of a unique universe. Authentic. Because at that time introducing in the works primitive, popular elements, of aborigine culture was innovative. And Wifredo had that at hand: in his own blood.
The painting The Jungle is an amazing synthesis of that combination of European innovation and geometrical, unreal, oneiric figures, as well as biomorphisms (figures of “invented” living beings), a lot of imagination, Afro-Cuban culture and religion.
That is why in Europe he was considered as “a visual arts manifesto for the Third World.” In France, Picasso was fascinated with Lam and introduced him in the world of the great artists (which Lam conquered because of his talent and his inevitable Cuban charisma).
“I could have been a good painter from the School of Paris, but I felt like a snail out of its shell,” he once said. A Cuban artist who went to Pars to acquire its culture and ended filling Paris with Wifredo Lam.
Recommended links:
Picasso and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.
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