The painting was one hard get.
Which is why Christophe Cherix, the successor to Glenn D. Lowry as director of the Museum of Modern Art, looked jubilant in August as he beheld “Grande Composition,” a towering 1949 work on paper by the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, in an empty gallery at MoMA.
“Here is the largest work, the most ambitious work the artist ever made,” Cherix said, examining the painting with Beverly Adams, the museum’s Latin American Art curator.
He grinned, adding, “And it’s never been in a retrospective.”
Until now. The oil and charcoal work, which depicts strange figures, part-human, part-horse, was recently acquired by MoMA for its first major survey of Lam (1902—1982), a European-trained artist whose surreal works expressed the Afro-Cuban experience.
The process of acquiring “Grande Composition” is a window onto a painstaking three-year endeavor by Cherix and Adams to gather artworks and scholarship that would shed new light on Lam for a major survey that is to begin on Nov. 10. It also happens to be Cherix’s debut show as director (he compiled a hefty résumé of exhibitions while serving as MoMA’s chief curator of prints and drawings, and hopes to do more shows).
In interviews on Zoom and at the museum, the two curators described their quest for work by the artist, who is best known for “The Jungle,” a large painting of fantastical figures half-hidden in dense stands of sugar cane, purchased by the Modern in 1945.
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The post How Christophe Cherix Welcomed a Cuban Master Back to MoMA appeared first on New York Times.
