The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Wifredo Lam · gouache on paper mounted on canvas, a nearly square field larger than a standing person, about 239.4 by 229.9 centimetres · four elongated standing figures with mask-like heads, one a crescent face, set frontally across the whole field among tall jointed stalks of cane, bamboo and leaf, a hand at the upper right holding a pair of scissors; no horizon, no ground and no sky · painted in Havana, 1943 · the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Inter-American Fund · the unit scored is the single picture, as Lam made it and as it now stands
Mode
Caribbean modernism of the 1940s: the frontal mask-headed figures of Cubist primitivism and the hybrid of Surrealism, grounded in an Afro-Cuban world and a Cuban cane field
Mythos
Metamorphosis: the body that is also plant and animal; the sacred forest of Afro-Cuban belief, the monte, as the dwelling of the orishas
Phase
One unchanging state of the field, without a moment or a turn; painted in Havana in 1943, two years after Lam’s return to Cuba
Presentation
Gouache on paper mounted on canvas, about 239.4 by 229.9 centimetres; blues, greens, yellows and ochres, with orange and pale flesh tones; the paper showing through thin colour in places
Register
An uncanny, crowded dread mixed with a fierce vitality, in a nocturnal glow; one intensity across the whole field
Scale
Four figures at or above life size in one field of cane, faced as a thicket is faced
Governing Proposition
A field of cane fills the picture to every edge, and the cane is peopled: four tall figures with mask heads and swollen thighs stand frontally among the stalks, their legs become stalks and their hands become leaves, and at the upper right a hand holds up a pair of scissors, the one made thing in a field of growth. There is no ground, no horizon and no sky. The wager of the picture is that the forms European modernism took from African art as a style can be returned from inside, by a painter of African and Chinese Cuban descent, as a living and local force; and that the Caribbean landscape, refused as the tourist’s tropic, can be shown as one substance of land, labour and the sacred.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Wifredo Lam (1902 to 1982) painted The Jungle, La jungla, in Havana in 1943. He had come back to Cuba two years before, after his Paris years near Picasso from 1938; in 1941 he sailed from Marseille on the same ship as André Breton and Claude Lévi-Strauss. The picture is gouache on paper mounted on canvas, about 239.4 by 229.9 centimetres, nearly square and larger than a standing person, and it belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, through its Inter-American Fund. The unit scored is the single picture, as Lam made it and as it now stands. His other large gouaches of 1942 to 1945, The Chair, Light of Clay and The Eternal Presence of 1944, and his illustrations for Césaire are context and are not scored.
Four principal figures stand across the whole field, elongated and frontal, with mask-like heads, one of them a crescent face, with swollen buttocks and thighs, small breasts, and very large hands and feet. They stand among tall jointed stalks that read as sugar cane, bamboo and leaves. At the upper right a hand holds up a pair of scissors. There is no horizon, no ground plane and no sky. The palette is blues, greens, yellows and ochres, with orange and pale flesh tones, and in places the paper shows through the thin gouache. The figures share parts, and how many heads and limbs there are, counted strictly, is not something the picture lets the eye settle.
Lam’s own account of the picture is known in paraphrase rather than in exact words: that he wished to paint the drama of his country, and to set the Black presence in the Cuban image against the picturesque made for tourists. The picture does not need the account. It refuses the tourist’s tropic on its face: no palms against a sky, no picturesque peasant, no view. What it shows instead is the cane field, the site of slavery and of the island’s wealth, and it shows it peopled.
Movement II
The construction of every figure is metamorphosis. Legs are stalks, limbs end in leaves and hooves, and the long verticals that make the cane make the bodies too, so that the eye cannot say where a figure ends and the field begins. Limbs belong to two bodies; faces become leaves. This is the picture’s first knowledge, and the form carries it: people and land are one substance, which no figures set in a landscape could say. Take the verticals away and the figures stand in a place; keep them and the figures are the place.
The field has no outside. With no ground and no sky there is nowhere from which to see it as landscape, and so the viewer cannot stand where the tourist stands. At more than life size, in a near-square frieze, the figures meet the viewer bodily, as a thicket is met: the scale is compelled, since the field must be larger than the viewer to be a forest. The gouache belongs to the knowledge as well. Thin, quick, matte colour on paper, the ground showing through, gives the flicker of light through leaves and the quality of an apparition rather than a solid body. In oil the figures would weigh, and stand apart from the cane.
The colour is orchestrated so that the field glows without a source: the blues and greens against the warm ochres and oranges, a nocturnal light, a forest lit from within, with no figure allowed to dominate. The curves of buttocks, breasts and crescents set a rhythm against the verticals across the whole surface, and the junctions of limb and stalk are controlled at every point. To keep a water medium coherent across more than five square metres is a real feat. The costs are plain: the drawing of the figures is schematic and its vocabulary repeated, some passages of leaves and lesser stalks are fill, and the paint, thin by the medium’s nature, has little variety of touch.
Movement III
At the upper right a hand holds a pair of scissors aloft. It is the one made thing in the picture, the one tool in a field of growth, and the eye goes to it as to a knot. In a cane field a blade means cutting and labour, and the history of the field is the history of that labour. Slavery is not shown anywhere on the surface. It is present by implication, through the cane and through the blade, and the picture holds it there and no further.
What the scissors mean is one of the questions the picture keeps open: labour, cutting, castration or, by some readings, a rite. Whether the whole picture is an indictment of the plantation or a celebration of what survived it is open in the same way. The image does not decide, and its return yields detail rather than a verdict. The hand that holds the scissors is half leaf, and so the one made thing obeys the law of the field: even the tool is hybrid.
That law reaches the most distant elements. The scissors at the upper right and the crescent-faced head near the left, a mask become a moon riding on a stalk, are human, plant, animal and object at once, vertical, frontal, in one light. There is no realist passage, no spatial recession and no second kind of mark. The law is total over the field, and the field is narrow: one register, one kind of figure. Within it, from cane to body to sacred head, the range is wider than its sameness first suggests, and the law holds across it.
Movement IV
The frontal, mask-headed standing figures recall Les Demoiselles d’Avignon plainly, and Lam absorbed Picasso’s Cubism and primitivism in Paris; from Breton’s circle he had Surrealism, automatism and the hybrid. The formal means are largely the inherited ones, and part of what the vertical frieze of nudes carries it carried before. The departure is in source and standpoint. The forms that European modernism took from African art as a style come back from a painter of African and Chinese Cuban descent as a living, local and unsettling force, and the borrowing becomes a disclosure from inside. The Surrealist hybrid is grounded in a specific religion and a specific landscape.
Behind the figures stands the sacred forest of Afro-Cuban belief, the monte as the dwelling of the orishas, made visible as a place rather than named. The heads draw on the horse and rider of possession, on the mask and the crescent. Which orisha a given head names, if any, is contested: Eleggua has been proposed, and the possessed horse, against readings of a general sacred, and the image does not settle it. The particulars stay particular. Whatever the title says, these are the cane stalks of a Cuban field, not a generic jungle, and in setting them in place of the guajiro and the palm the picture sets aside the criollo image of the nation for its Black presence.
The heads look out without eyes one can meet. The elevation they give is one kind throughout: an uncanny, crowded dread mixed with a fierce vitality, arriving at first sight and sustained, not renewed, since the field is all one intensity and has no summit moment or turn. Much of what the picture gives is atmosphere, a dense and uneasy presence, and the meanings it articulates lean in part on what is known of the painter and his circle. What it states unaided holds: the refusal of the tourist’s tropic, and the identity of the people with the land.
Movement V
The picture belongs to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has been shown and reproduced from there, in the city where the next generation of painters was forming; for decades it stood less central to the museum’s account than its fame now suggests. It was central to Lam’s standing in the circle of Breton and Césaire, it became a reference point for Caribbean and Afro-diasporic painting after it, and since the 1980s it has been a type case in the postcolonial revision of modernism. Its emblematic standing is easier to document than any particular redirection of later work, and the claim that it influenced the New York painters is unproved.
At eighty-three years the image is whole, the one the painter made, never cut or reworked by another hand. Its fabric is its risk. Gouache on paper is light-sensitive and fragile at any size, and at nearly two and a half metres, mounted on canvas, it is more open than an oil to fading, abrasion and the strains of mounting, so that its display must be rationed. No damage is known beyond that general risk of the medium. The orders it holds are the natural order, labour and its history, the sacred, the body and sexuality, and the Caribbean set against its colonial image; it holds no state, no family, no individual consciousness and no story.
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (8.8), the source of its syntax, stands above it on the swerve and on reach, as the inheritance should; The Jungle comes closest on the archetype and leads on the inner law. The Two Fridas (8.4), the nearest Latin American picture of its decade, stands two tenths above, though The Jungle leads it on the making. Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World (8.5), from the same Havana circle and the same claim of a Caribbean marvellous rooted in Afro-Caribbean belief, stands above on most axes, the picture leading on the living form. Picasso’s The Old Guitarist (8.0) stands below it. In the field the hand still holds the scissors up among the stalks, and there is still no sky.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure and stalk by stalk. The four figures cannot go: they are the frieze, and the picture’s claim is that the field is peopled, so that each body taken out would leave the cane merely cane. The scissors cannot go: they are the one made thing, the one sign of cutting and of labour in a field of growth. The verticals cannot go: they make the figures stalks and the stalks figures. What yields is the density. The leaves and lesser stalks in the margins and the lower band could be moved or lost with small effect, and the four bodies share a vocabulary so closely that one of the middle pair could go and the frieze would close up.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Credited through the image. Two things can be stated and hold. The Caribbean landscape is not scenery but a peopled and sacred place: the cane field, site of slavery and of the island’s wealth, is inhabited by presences that belong to the Afro-Cuban world, so that land, labour and the sacred are one thing. And, sharper, the forms European modernism took from African art as a style are returned by a painter of African and Chinese Cuban descent as a living, local, unsettling force: a borrowing becomes a disclosure from inside. Held below the top because much of what the picture gives is atmosphere, and its articulated meanings lean in part on what is known of the painter and his circle.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation is real and of one kind: an uncanny, crowded dread mixed with a fierce vitality. It comes at first sight, the field filled to every edge with bodies that are also plants and no sky to rest in; it comes in the heads, the crescent face and the masks, which look out without eyes one can meet; it comes in the scale, figures at or above life size before which the viewer stands as before a thicket. The colour lifts it, cool blue and green against warm ochre and orange, a forest lit from within. What holds it is the evenness: one intensity throughout, with no summit moment and no turn. It is the sublime of density and strangeness, not of space.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Built more than evoked, though not built throughout. The load-bearing archetype is metamorphosis, the body that is also plant and animal. It is not summoned by allusion: it is the construction of every figure, whose legs are stalks and whose limbs end in leaves and hooves. Behind it stands the sacred forest of Afro-Cuban belief, the monte as the dwelling of the orishas, made visible as a place rather than named. The heads draw on the horse and rider of possession, the mask, the crescent. The particulars stay particular: these are the cane stalks of a Cuban field. Held below the top because the specific iconography is evoked and contested rather than built into a legible order.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is double: Picasso’s Cubism and the primitivism of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, absorbed in Paris and plainly recalled in the frontal, mask-headed standing figures; and Surrealism, Breton’s circle, automatism and the hybrid. The departure is in source and standpoint: the borrowed African form returned to an Afro-Caribbean world it could speak for; the Surrealist hybrid grounded in a specific religion and a specific landscape; the colonial picturesque of Cuban painting, the guajiro and the palm, refused for the cane field as a sacred and haunted place. The stake was real: Lam risked being read as Picasso’s follower. Held below the gate because the formal means are largely the inherited ones.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Substitute a different form and much is lost. The all-over field with no ground and no sky is the knowledge: there is no outside to the forest, no place from which to see it as landscape, and so the viewer cannot be a tourist. The fusion of figure and stalk says that the people and the land are one substance, which no figures set in a landscape could say. The gouache is part of the knowledge: thin, quick, matte colour with the paper showing through gives the flicker of light through leaves and the quality of an apparition; in oil the figures would weigh and stand apart. Held a step below the top because the vertical frieze of mask-headed nudes is an inherited form.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: eighty-three years, and a literature that grew sharply in the last four decades. The questions stay open and are real: whether the picture is Surrealist, Cubist or a third thing made in the Caribbean; how far its figures carry specific orishas, Eleggua or the possessed horse, and how far a general sacred; what the scissors mean, labour, cutting, castration or ritual; whether the picture indicts the plantation or celebrates what survived it. It yields detail on return: limbs that belong to two bodies, faces that become leaves. Held below the top because much of the debate turns on the picture’s place in the history of modernism rather than on depths found in the image alone.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Field: Caribbean and Latin American painting and the international avant-garde of the 1940s. The intrinsic force is high and specific: the picture reorganises the relation of modernism to its “primitive” sources by placing the source in the painter’s own place and people, and it gives Caribbean modernism a founding image that is neither nationalist genre nor imported style. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: held by the Museum of Modern Art in the city where the next generation of painters was forming; central to Lam’s standing in Breton’s and Césaire’s circle; a reference point for Caribbean and Afro-diasporic painting; since the 1980s a type case in the postcolonial revision of modernism. Particular redirection is harder to document, and influence on the New York painters is unproved.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighty-three years. Form: whole; the image is the one the painter made, never cut or reworked by another hand. Presence: in a major public collection and widely reproduced, but for decades less central to the museum’s account than its fame now suggests, so not at the widest. Fabric is the charge that lowers the figure. Gouache on paper is light-sensitive and fragile at any size, and at nearly two and a half metres, mounted on canvas, it is more open than an oil to fading, abrasion and the strains of mounting; its display must be rationed. No damage is known beyond the general risk of the medium, and only that risk is charged.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged as command of gouache at mural scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. Colour: the blues and greens are set against the warm ochres and oranges so that the field glows without a light source and no figure dominates, and the paper left showing gives breath to a dense surface. Line: the long verticals and the curves of buttocks, breasts and crescents set a rhythm across the field, and limb and stalk interlock at every junction so that the eye cannot separate figure from ground. To keep a water medium coherent across more than five square metres is a real feat. The costs: schematic, repeated drawing of the figures, passages of fill, little variety of touch.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the hand with the scissors at the upper right, a made tool held aloft, and the crescent-faced head near the left, a mask become a moon. They obey one law: everything in the field is hybrid, human, plant, animal and object at once, set vertical and frontal, without ground or sky, in one light. The scissors are held by a hand that is half leaf; the crescent rides a stalk. No realist passage, no recession, no second kind of mark: the law is total. But narrowness is not coherence: one field, one register, one kind of figure. Within it the range, cane to body to sacred head, is wider than it looks.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held: the natural order, as the cane and the forest; labour and its history, through the cane field of the plantation and the scissors, with slavery present by implication rather than shown; the sacred, as the Afro-Cuban spirits of the monte; the body and sexuality, insistently, in breasts, buttocks and feet; and a cultural order, the Caribbean set against its colonial image. Several are integrated: land, labour and the sacred are one substance in the fused figures. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: no state, no family, no individual consciousness, no story, and history only by inference from the cane. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Inner Law at 8.5, The Swerve, The Living Form and The Made at 8.4. An image whole as the painter made it at eighty-three years, held below its row only by the fragility of its medium; one law, everything hybrid, vertical, frontal and in one light, that governs the scissors and the crescent head alike; a turn of source and standpoint that returns borrowed African form from inside; a field with no outside that makes the people and the land one substance; and a water medium held coherent across more than five square metres.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: the natural order, labour, the sacred, the body and a cultural order are held and partly fused, while the state, the family, individual consciousness and story are absent and history is present only by inference from the cane. Above it, The Sublime at 7.9: one intensity across the field, a sublime of density and strangeness with no summit moment and no turn. Then The Inevitable at 8.0, for marginal stalks and leaves that could go, and four bodies so alike that one could be lost.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.9 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.2, The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 fall short of it, the disclosure leaning in part on what is known of the painter, the iconography evoked and contested, the formal means largely inherited, and particular redirection hard to show. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Sublime at 7.9, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.4, an average of 8.20 that displays 8.2, in the Canonical tier, short of the 9.0 the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the picture in its composition and colour, from reproductions, and of its documented history in outline. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single picture, gouache on paper mounted on canvas, painted in Havana in 1943, as it now stands in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Inter-American Fund. Lam’s other large gouaches of 1942 to 1945 and his illustrations for Césaire are context and are not scored. The iconography of particular figures, which orisha a given head names, if any, is contested and is stated as contested. Lam’s statements about the picture are given in sense, as paraphrase; the only words quoted are the title. The fragility of gouache on paper is charged on The Imperishable as the general risk of the medium; no damage is known. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the year of the museum’s acquisition and the exhibition that preceded it, the date of the mounting, the condition of the picture, the strict count of its heads and limbs, stories of where in the museum it hung, and the details of later exhibitions.