The Jungle

Gouache on paper mounted on canvas
94 1/4 x 90 1/2" (239.4 x 229.9 cm)
MOMA

"Lam painted The Jungle, his masterpiece, two years after returning to his native Cuba from Europe, where he had been a member of the Surrealist movement. The work, “intended to communicate a psychic state,” Lam said, depicts a group of figures with crescentshaped faces that recall African or Pacific Islander masks, against a background of vertical, striated poles suggesting Cuban sugarcane fields. Together these elements obliquely address the history of slavery in colonial Cuba." (Gallery label from 2011 MOMA)