"An exhibition of Wifredo Lam is about as safe a bet as the Museum of Modern Art can place and still plausibly say that it's a bet on expanding the canon. The Cuban artist is one of the most famous painters of the 20th century, featured in almost every single key show about Surrealism. MoMA acquired his famous painting The Jungle in 1946, a few years after he made it."
"There is a long tradition of celebrating Lam as "Cuba's Picasso." He was personally close with Picasso, and many elements of The Jungle (1942-43) read as a head-on confrontation with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), Picasso's own first swaggering statement piece as a Modernist dynamo. But viewing Lam through this lens risks relegating his practice to an exercise in "applied Cubism," as if he were merely taking developments from across the sea and finding Caribbean uses for them."
The Museum of Modern Art presents Wifredo Lam with his iconic canvas The Jungle placed centrally, a mythic and unresolved masterpiece. Lam engaged deeply with Europe’s interwar Modernist avant-gardes while framing his art as a deliberate project of cultural decolonization that rejected imposed European cultural values. Personal ties to Picasso and formal resonances with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon have produced the label "Cuba's Picasso," but that framing can reduce his practice to applied Cubism. Contemporary readings often emphasize Afro-Cuban elements and links to Santería spirits, highlighting both alterity and enduring critical complexity.
Read at Artnet News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]