Rare are the shows that reveal a bona fide masterpiece to the public; the Museum of Modern Art’s rich, fascinating Wifredo Lam retrospective is one of them. I’m not talking about his iconic 1942–43 painting La jungla (The Jungle), a landmark of the Surrealist movement that has been a prized possession of MoMA’s since 1945. The real star here is Grande Composition (1949), a 14-foot-wide tangle of angular, elongated creatures that twist through each other.Grande Composition was Lam’s largest work, and he made it by painting onto paper with oil so thinned down that it appears semitranslucent. Note the bottom portion of the painting, where charcoal outlines delineate the three-toed feet belonging to a tailed figure with bulging breasts. That area of the canvas appears unfinished, but the work’s incompleteness only enhances its eeriness. The work looks like a world coming into being.Before MoMA acquired Grande Composition earlier this year, the painting was held in a collector’s Paris apartment. MoMA’s new director—Christophe Cherix, who curated the Lam retrospective with Beverly Adams, working with the assistance of Damasia Lacroze and Eva Caston—spent a couple years cajoling this collector into giving up the painting. Thank goodness he did. Standing before this magnificent work, one must wonder: If this painting received little recognition, what else don’t we know about Lam?Quite a lot, the MoMA show proves. In wall texts, Adams and Cherix repeatedly point to the artist’s own words about his paintings, which Lam famously labeled “an act of decolonization” in an interview that art historian Gerardo Mosquera conducted with Lam in 1980, two years before the artist died. “Africa has not only been dispossessed of many of its people, but also of its consciousness,” Lam, who was Afro-Cuban and had Chinese heritage, told Mosquera. Lam described wanting to “relocate Black cultural objects in terms of their own landscape and in relation to their own world.”Consider the case of Grande Composition, one of many paintings by Lam that features a horse-human figure with a scrotum dangling from its chin. That figure is known as a femme-cheval, and its hybrid form refers to a Lucumí worshipper who’s possessed by a deity known as an orisha.Wifredo Lam, Grande Composition (Large Composition), 1949.©Wifredo Lam Estate/Adagp, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Museum of Modern ArtThe femme-cheval figure recurs throughout works by Lam produced in Cuba following his return to his home country during the ’40s. Here she is, sitting elegantly in a chair, hands clasped near her lithe human legs, in one ca. 1949 painting in which she has a breast for a face. There she is again in Les Invités (The Guests), a 1966 painting in which her equine head has been abstracted beyond recognition, with long, pointy legs and gigantic hands.Because Lam befriended Surrealist thinkers such as André Breton, Lam and his femmes-chevals were not exactly unknown in Europe. But whether intentionally or not, observers in Europe and the US generally did not see allusions to Afro-Cuban traditions in his art. A 1950 profile of Lam that ran in ARTnews centers around the creation of a painting featuring an equine figure that the piece’s writer named The Horse. Across its 3,000 words, the profile never mentions Lucumí or the true meaning of the femme-cheval figure.Wifredo Lam, La jungla (The Jungle), 1942–43.©Wifredo Lam Estate/Adagp, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Museum of Modern ArtThe MoMA retrospective does a good deal of necessary historical rewriting for Lam, whose Afro-Cuban heritage has been downplayed—defanged, you might even say—by many American and European museums, which instead place an emphasis on the dreaminess of his figures. The exhibition points out, for example, that La jungla does not depict just any jungle but one in the Antilles, to which Lam had recently relocated himself, having fled war-torn France for Cuba in 1941. The painting’s figures with moon-shaped faces are not simply manifestations of a tormented subconscious, as they would be in the hands of another Surrealist. Lam situated his buxom beings within a thicket of sugarcane—an explicit allusion to the commodity’s central role in the enslavement of Black people in the Caribbean.[See pictures of works in the show.]Elsewhere, the MoMA show turns its focus on Lam’s friendship with Aimé Césaire, a Martinican poet who founded the Négritude movement and ran the journal Tropiques with Suzanne Roussi-Césaire and René Ménil. Lam’s ties to Césaire are well-documented—still today, you can easily buy a copy of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, a 1936 long-form poem by Césaire, with illustrations by Lam.But Lam and Césaire’s collaborations are rarely so foregrounded here in the US as they are right now at the MoMA show, which has prints by Lam that appeared alongside Césaire’s poetry for a portfolio known as Annonciation (Annunciation, 1982). In Lam’s engravings, elongated arms push away mask-like faces, and creatures with cinched waists sashay through darkness. While the portfolio’s title refers to the archangel Gabriel’s divine announcement to the Virgin Mary, the subject matter has less in common with Catholicism than it does with “the sacred territory reluctantly conceded by the leaves,” as Césaire once put it—a zone unbound from reason that he wrote was “reclaimed from wild beasts.” (Those are quotations from Césaire piquantly titled poem “façon langagière,” or “tongue fashion,” which lent its name to one of Lam’s prints on view.)Wifredo Lam, Les Invités, 1966.©Wifredo Lam Estate/Adagp, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New YorkBased on the MoMA show, one would be right to ask whether Césaire didn’t play too much of a role in determining what Lam’s art was really about. Lam’s painting Madame Lumumba (1938), featuring a woman with a tossed-back head and a flow of greenish hair, has generally been viewed as an homage to Pauline Opango, the widow of the assassinated Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Bear in mind that Lam’s grandmother was Congolese and had herself been enslaved, and you might interpret the work as a decolonial treatise of a sort. But the title is essentially a red herring: Opango was a baby when Lam painted this work, which received its name from Césaire well after it was made. Lam’s original title isn’t specified in the MoMA show, though whatever that prior name may have been, the painting’s decolonial context—if it even had one at all—was certainly less explicit before Césaire’s intervention.Still, it’s worth heeding the words of Lam, who once described himself as a “Trojan horse” with the ability to “disturb the dreams of the exploiters.” What else is Trojan-horsed in Lam’s paintings? The MoMA show only begins to raise that question.Installation view of “Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream,” 2025, at Museum of Modern Art, New York.Photo Jonathan DoradoAnswers arrive in the exhibition’s first galleries, which survey Lam’s early years in Madrid and Paris. Having been raised in Cuba, where his godmother was a Lucumí priestess, Lam departed for Spain in 1918 to finish out an art education that he began in Havana. The works he produced there during the ’20s and ’30s were essentially Picasso lite, liberally cribbing that Spaniard’s women with almond-shaped eyes, thickly outlined nudes, and blocky Cubistic forms. But every so often, Lam produced something singular, as he did in La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War, 1937), in which crying women, helmeted soldiers, and nude babies tumble across one another. Produced the same year that Picasso painted Guernica, the piece evinces a palpable since of chaos and grief—and feels like the obvious predecessor to Grande Composition in form, suggesting that these two works, made more than a decade apart, were not entirely separate in Lam’s mind.Wifredo Lam, La Guerra Civil (The Spanish Civil War), 1937.©Wifredo Lam Estate/Adagp, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Capriles Cannizzaro Family CollectionLam relocated to Paris in 1938 and linked up soon after with Breton, the self-appointed leader of Surrealism. In the French capital and later in Marseille, Lam took part in Surrealist games known as “exquisite corpses,” wherein multiple people contribute to a collaborative drawing, with one artist picking up where the last left off. Yet even in the works attributed to a collective, it’s possible to pinpoint Lam’s contributions. In one 1941 drawing, there’s a hand holding a flame beside bulging eyes and wavelets—and a femme-cheval that unmistakably belongs to Lam’s hand.That same year, Lam and many other refugees departed France and ended up in Martinique, where he fell in with the Tropiques crowd. Though Lam’s Martinican period was short, with the artist putting down new roots in Cuba less than four months later, it appears to have induced a turning point in his art, which started to display a deeper engagement with Caribbean tradition.He began painting unforgettable images like Ogue Orisa (1943), in which the Shango orisha Oggué hides among palm fronds. On view nearby is Omi Obini (1943), a painting that briefly held the distinction of being the most expensive Latin American artwork. Both works make it difficult to tell where Afro-Caribbean deities end and the land around them begins.Wifredo Lam, Fata Morgana, 1941.©Wifredo Lam Estate/Adagp, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Museum of Modern ArtWhere these two paintings enchant the eye, with kaleidoscopic arrays of emerald green and cherry red, Lam’s works from the late ’40s and early ’50s are darker and more menacing. Canaima III (1947), a large painting that rivals La jungla in visual intensity, features rows of giant thorns that enclose a tangle of shadowed appendages. The painting is ravishing, even as it is repellent. That might also be an apt way of describing a kanaima, or an evil spirit central to the lore of some Indigenous cultures of the Caribbean.The latter stages of Lam’s career saw him try his hand at abstraction and pottery, neither of which he entirely mastered, if the MoMA show is any proof. But until his death in 1982, Lam continued opening portals to other universes that he seemed to suggest were closely related to our own.Take the case of one 1955 painting featuring a being with a mask-like face, two sprawling arms, one leg, and one squat hoof. (Might this be yet another femme-cheval?) The painting’s title, Quand je ne dors pas, je rêve (When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream), suggests not the waking nightmares of European Surrealism but something else entirely: a true vision of Lam’s world. In this case, it’s the stuff of one man’s dreams becoming another man’s reality.