The Jungle, currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has an undeniable presence within the gallery: the cluster of enigmatic faces, limbs, and sugarcane crowd a canvas that is nearly an 8 foot square. Lam’s bold painting is a game of perception.

18,054 drawings online. Wifredo Lam. The Jungle (La Jungla). 1942–43. Oil on paper on canvas. 94 1/4 x 90 1/2" (239.4 x 229.9 cm). Inter-American Fund. 140.1945. © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Drawings & Prints.

“The Jungle,” crafted by Wifredo Lam in 1943, is a work that embodies elements of Cubism and Surrealism. Utilizing gouache, canvas, and paper, this figurative artwork measures 239 x 229 cm and resides in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, New York, US.

Wifredo Lam was born and raised in Sagua La Grande, a village in the sugar farming province of Villa Clara, Cuba.He was of mixed-race ancestry: his mother, the former Ana Serafina Castilla, was born to a Congolese former slave mother and a Cuban mulatto father and his father, Yam Lam, was a Chinese immigrant. [2] In Sagua La Grande, Lam was surrounded by many people of African descent; his ...

‘The Jungle’ was created in 1943 by Wifredo Lam in Cubism style. Find more prominent pieces of figurative at Wikiart.org – best visual art database.

Wifredo Lam taps into the core of The Jungle with this masterpiece. Jungles are messy mixtures of plant, animal, and man. Wifredo capitalizes on that essential chaotic trait. He blends subjects and even artistic movements here. We can see a Cubist and Surrealist influence in Lam’s work.

La jungla (The Jungle), made two years after his return to Cuba, is a monumental drawing of life-size figures in a sugarcane field, a location invested with the island’s history of slavery.

This large, nearly-square painting is densely crowded with stylized figures and plants. The Jungle evoked by the work’s title and setting refers to the history of enslaved African peoples in Cuba practicing their religions in hidden settings such as the woods. Everything in this composition is emphatically vertical.

This study belongs to a series of works related to The Jungle, Lam’s masterpiece and major statement about his rediscovery of African Cuba. The Bergmans bought the work directly from Lam, whom they visited in Havana in 1956.

The Jungle Wifredo Lam. 1943 C.E. Cuban. Gouache on paper mounted on canvas. The work, "intended to communicate a psychic state," Lam said, depicts a group of figures with crescent-shaped faces that recall African or Pacific Islander masks, against a background of vertical, striated poles suggesting Cuban sugarcane fields.