Wifredo Lam

Interpretation

In this painting, highly stylized silhouettes of humans and animals become shadowy presences against a complex layering of black, gray, and green washes. The dark tone of the composition is interrupted by clusters of brightly colored geometric forms that suggest clothing, hats, or other accessories. The allusions to African sculpture and Afro-Cuban deities and rituals in the Virgin Islands reflect Lam’s leading role in the Negritude movement, which flourished in the Caribbean in the 1940s.

Acquisition details

Since 1966, more than 200 works of art-including this painting-have been acquired through funding for the Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Modern Latin American Art. Nancy Sayles Day’s philanthropy was sustained by wealth her family amassed in the textile industry during the second half of the 1800s. Upon her passing in 1964, her family decided to celebrate her legacy through an art collection at the RISD Museum, and agreed to a focus on Latin American Art. The acquisition of this work built on a previous purchase-also for the Nancy Sayles Day Collection-of Lam’s celebrated 1944 painting The Eternal Presence (An Homage to Alejandro García Caturla).

-Dominic Molon, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art

This darkly tropical setting combines images from African tribal sculpture and Afro-Cuban deities and rituals with references to slavery in Cuba, including sugar cane and prostitution. During World War II Lam went to Martinique, where he strongly identified with Negritude, a movement that flourished in the 1940s. Lam became the most important painter associated with the movement, which protested the suppression of black culture in the colonized West Indies. Near the Virgin Islands is emblematic of Negritude’s celebration of authentic sources in its assured use of the linear, highly stylized pictorial forms found in African sculpture.