Wilfredo Lam, The Jungle, 1942-44
A lifelong, born and bred New Yorker, shouldn’t say this, I suppose, but yesterday in Manhattan was une journée en enfer.
From Penn Station to Penn Station the city was a wild sordid assemblage of grimacing grotesques.
Everyone looked unhappy or insane (I don’t think it was the heat, which was intense) and, oddly, I didn’t observe a single person who looked like any other person or anyone I knew.
My phone rang constantly and everyone I spoke to seemed to have lost their mind and be consumed by anger. It really was a lot like a Twilight Zone episode, with all the terror but no art.
It’s a cliché, but I really can’t work out how I ever lived there.
Wilfredo Lam, Sans Titre, 1973
