RISD Museum Summer researcher discusses Wifredo Lam's 1959 painting Près des Îles Vierges as a reflection of his complicated relationship with revolutionary Cuba and evolving understanding of Caribbean identity in a postcolonial world.
Un cri de terre qui déploie
Les nervures de son été
Parce qu’amour l’aura fouillée
Ou que la pluie est avenante
Un cri de femme labourée
À la limite des jachères
Ses seins nubiles partagés
Entre la misère et la mousse
This excerpt from the poem "Promenade de la mort seule" (Lonely Walk of Death) was featured in Édouard Glissant's 1955 poetry collection La terre inquiète (The Troubled Earth). In these lines, the dry summer earth, personified through the female body, cries out for the relief of rainfall. Wifredo Lam created four lithographic engravings to illustrate this collection of five poems by Glissant, which explores identity and culture in the postcolonial Caribbean and its relationship to a globally troubled earth. Four years later, in 1959, Lam painted the breathtaking work Près des Îles Vierges (Near the Virgin Islands) held in RISD Museum's Nancy Sayles Day Collection of Modern Latin American Art.
A near-monochrome work, Près des Îles Vierges presents a surprising contrast to Lam’s better known work from the 1930s and 1940s. In this mixed-media painting, elongated chimeric beings emerge from darkness, their forms defined by charcoal lines and occasional white highlights. Though devoid of landscape or setting, the black background achieves spaciousness through interwoven layers of subtly varying gray and black tones. At the center of the work, two hybrid horse-woman figures appear with bulbous heads and elongated snouts. One shows silhouetted breasts parted to the left and right, the other wears a colorful canotier-style straw hat. At least four more figures are distinguishable from the black space. With human features that occasionally morph into tails and hooves, they are dressed with pointed headdresses and varying adornments. Short, colorful bursts of flat geometric planes punctuate the shadowy space, anchoring the eye as it navigates the murky composition.
This work compositionally references Lam’s most famous work, La Jungla (The Jungle) from 1943, which is held in the collection at MOMA. Steeped in the Afro-Cuban spiritual symbolism of his heritage, this painting reflected a convergence of stylistic influences drawn from his Cuban homeland and his avant-garde milieu in Paris. Through a cubist geometric treatment of the figure, La Jungla depicts a meeting of Afro-Cuban deities, spirits, and devotees, in the lush and consuming space of the jungle. Vibrantly colored, the figures become almost indistinguishable from the dense foliage of the background. The figures in Près des Îles Vierges maintain continuity with the figurative vocabulary of La Jungla. In both, we see representations of mythically and psychologically loaded archetypes often repeated in Lam’s work: the femme-cheval, figures from the Afro-Cuban fraternity Abakuá, and Orishas—divinities of nature from the Yoruba religion. While earlier pieces like La Jungla reflected a lively meeting of beings in a densely colorful landscape, the figures in Près des Îles Vierges, flicker in and out of the all-consuming darkness as if spectral. Yet while ghostly, the figures in Près des Îles Vierges are made earth-bound through the inclusion of historically specific accessories. The canotier hat, for example, was a popular accessory in Cuba during the mid-century with connections to European fashion.
Lam’s shift in palette and tone reflects his exploration of new media during the 1950s, especially with etching and engraving. As his collaboration with writers and intellectuals grew, he adopted drawing and printmaking as primary media to translate the poetry and philosophy of his collaborators. Lithography’s flatter format required him to embrace more linear figuration, two-dimensional planes, and geometric illusion instead of shading to suggest depth. Près des Îles Vierges retains this flatness and linear mark-making, seen in the line contour treatments of the figure and the flat geometric representations of clothing. Yet beyond technical influence, the content of the writing profoundly shaped his aesthetic approach.
Lam began collaborating with writers in the 1940s, with the Fata Morgana series as the earliest and best-known example. Created in Marseille during the artistic exile from Paris under German occupation, this prolific series featured hundreds of line drawings that interpreted André Breton’s poetry book of the same name. Tapping into automatic drawing to reflect Breton’s surrealist vision, it established the linear figuration of the femme-cheval that we see represented in Près des Îles Vierges and much of Lam’s later work. While this early work expressed surrealist fascination with psychoanalysis and the mythical, Lam’s print work of the 1950s onward deepened his engagement with intellectual discourse that grappled with race, politics, and emerging postcolonial philosophy.
Unable to join his colleagues in their exile to New York due to immigration restrictions, Lam returned to Cuba during the war. The changing political situation there, alongside experiences of racial prejudice both in Cuba and in France during the post-war period, led him towards creative and intellectual movements that increasingly advocated for modern art’s political imperative. Friendships with artist-intellectuals such as Édouard Glissant, Alejo Carpentier, and Asger Jorn influenced a move away from the nationalism and Pan-Africanism of his earlier work, toward a more relational expression of identity and culture in a global context.
Though a longtime advocate for revolutionary politics in Cuba, Lam chose not to resettle permanently in Cuba after the revolution. In 1959, the same year that he painted Près des Îles Vierges, Fidel Castro gained control of Cuba, and Lam’s work that remained there was nationalized and deposited in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Heavy military presence and political unrest made his former neighborhood too unsafe for him and his family to remain. In the years following the revolution, Lam’s work begins to express a tension between his political beliefs and his inability to remain in his home country.
Within this context of intellectual exchange, new media exploration, and a newly complicated relationship to politics and Cuba, Près des Îles Vierges takes on a more somber, conflicted tone than his earlier work. While maintaining the place-based cultural signifiers of his homeland, he sets them within a broader conversation about a world grappling with the effects of postcolonialism, the Cold War, and globalization. The title, Near the Virgin Islands, recognizes cultural affinity among the cultures of the Caribbean archipelago grappling with identity and heritage in a global postcolonial context. Suspended in space between the island and the globe, the figures in the painting seem to haunt Glissant's troubled earth, oscillating between definition and illegibility.
References
Fouchet, Max Pol. Wifredo Lam. Spain: Ediciones Polígrafa, S.A., 1989.
Glissant, Édouard, and Wifredo Lam. La Terre Inquiète. Paris: Éditions du Dragon, 1955.
Katzew, Ilona. LACMA: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008.
Lam, Wifredo. “Study for ‘The Jungle.’” Art Institute of Chicago, January 1, 1970. https://www.artic.edu/artworks/118704/study-for-the-jungle.
Miller, Ivor. “A Secret Society Goes Public: The Relationship between Abakua and Cuban Popular Culture.” African Studies Review 43, no. 1 (April 2000): 161. https://doi.org/10.2307/524726.
Noceda Fernandez, José Manuel. “Édouard Glissant et l’héritage de Wifredo Lam.” Aica Caraïbe du Sud, October 22, 2021. https://aica-sc.net/2021/08/27/edouard-glissant-et-lheritage-de-wifredo-lam/.
Stokes Sims, Lowery. Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982. University of Texas Press, 2002. Wifredo Lam [chronology 1941-1945]. Accessed August 20, 2025. https://www.wifredolam.net/en/chronology/1941-1945.html.