{"id":279529,"date":"2025-11-13T03:06:14","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T03:06:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/279529\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T03:06:14","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T03:06:14","slug":"see-inside-momas-retrospective-for-surrealist-painter-wifredo-lam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/279529\/","title":{"rendered":"See Inside MoMA’s Retrospective for Surrealist Painter Wifredo Lam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWifredo Lam, a Cuban-born painter, is not exactly little-recognized. Even during his day, he was considered a cornerstone of the Surrealist movement, befriending Andr\u00e9 Breton, Pablo Picasso, and others through connections forged in France, where he first gained fame. But Lam\u2019s work beyond Europe, which he left in 1941, remains lesser-known outside the Caribbean\u2014something that a new retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art aims to remedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tCurated by Christophe Cherix and Beverly Adams, along with Damasia Lacroze and Eva Caston, the MoMA show, billed as Lam\u2019s first US retrospective, comprises some 130 works, including rarely seen paintings and drawings that attest to the artist\u2019s engagement with Afro-Caribbean traditions such as the Lucum\u00ed religion. Among those pieces is one newly acquired work from MoMA\u2019s holdings that is making its public premiere after years in a private collection. More on that piece and others below.<\/p>\n

\n\tRead a full review of the show here.<\/a><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Capriles Cannizzaro Family Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tSome of Lam\u2019s earliest works were made in Spain, where he finished out art school. This one responds to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Museum of Modern Art\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tFata Morgana was produced as an illustration for a book by Andr\u00e9 Breton, who has commonly been credited as the leader of the Surrealist movement. <\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Museum of Modern Art\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tCommonly regarded as Lam\u2019s masterpiece and produced upon his return to Cuba in 1941, La jungla situates a group of beings amid sugarcane. Their faces resemble African masks, to which Lam often referred.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2025\/Private Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tLam continued producing dazzlingly colored paintings of beings in settings dense with foliage during the 1940s. This painting\u2019s title could allude to an instrument played by an angel.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Museum of Modern Art\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tGrande Composition spent years in a private collection abroad. The Lam show\u2019s co-curator, Christophe Cherix, coaxed the collector in parting with the piece, which has now entered MoMA\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"An
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Private Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tDuring the \u201950s, Lam began making abstractions that contain no obvious figures. The MoMA show asserts that these, too, are rooted in his Afro-Caribbean perspective, alluding to the landscape of Cuba.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Collection Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tA horse-like figure known as a femme-cheval recurs throughout Lam\u2019s oeuvre, which frequently elides the boundary between humanity and other animals.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"A
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: \u00a9Wifredo Lam Estate\/Adagp, Paris\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/Courtesy McClain Gallery\/Private Collection\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tDamballa, the deity mentioned in the title of this painting, recurs throughout traditions of the African diaspora, including Vodun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wifredo Lam, a Cuban-born painter, is not exactly little-recognized. Even during his day, he was considered a cornerstone…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75,78235,127296],"class_list":["post-279529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-museum-of-modern-art","tag-wifredo-lam"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}