How MoMA’s New Director Welcomed a Cuban Master to the Museum

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.

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.

At around 14 feet wide and 9 feet tall, “Grande Composition” was too big to move on its stretcher and too delicate to be easily rolled. It had hung for 20-odd years in the vestibule of a Paris apartment, which, Cherix noted, had a doorway barely the size of the horse-figures it depicts. It has not been on public view since 1963.

This did not deter Cherix, who early last year flew with Adams to Paris.

“We went begging,” to see the painting, he said, laughing. Cherix, who was born in Switzerland and speaks English with a European inflection, added, “There’s a lot of begging in our job.”

The curators made five or six more trips to Paris between them. They tracked down the French conservator, Isabelle Drieu La Rochelle, who had installed the work. And, after months of discussion, they purchased it from its owner.

In July, five conservators crowded into the Paris foyer and lowered the painting onto a trestle, moving around the work “like dancers on pointe.” They rolled it with a layer of protective film onto a tube two feet in diameter, and in its own crate, they flew it to New York.

The curators described flying from country to country to see “hundreds” of artworks; hiring a genealogist to pin down information about Lam’s family; analyzing the composition of his paints; and visiting his home in Cuba.

The effort to advance scholarship about Lam, and to assemble works not normally lent, was “exhilarating,” said Cherix. It also made the show “very, very challenging,” he said.

“To make our case by showing these works together is a huge anxiety,” he said.

“We all know Lam, but we don’t really know Lam,” Adams added. “We have a lot to learn.”

The curators threw their firepower into unearthing new material about the artist, who was born in 1902 in Cuba to a Chinese father and a mother of African and Spanish descent, but spent most of his life in Spain, France and Italy. A friend of Picasso, he moved in an international circle of Surrealist artists, writers and poets. He fled Paris to escape the advancing Nazi army in 1940 and returned to Cuba, where he spent much of the following decade. While he never lived in New York, his history was interwoven with that of MoMA. The museum’s founding director, Alfred Barr, bought Lam’s painting “Mother and Child,” for the museum in 1939, and MoMA bought two more works, including “The Jungle,” over the following years.

But after this “incredible moment,” said Cherix, “we have never given him the attention that Beverly and I believe he deserved.”

Ramón Cernuda, a gallerist in Coral Gables, Fla., who specializes in Lam’s art, said the retrospective was “well overdue,” speaking by phone, adding that Lam “deserves a place in the highest levels of international Surrealism.”

MoMA’s neglect was partly generational, said Cherix, and partly owing to the fact that Lam was “hard to categorize,” being viewed as a surrealist, a primitivist, a protégé of Picasso (with whom he had a joint show in New York in 1939), and a regional artist.

The curators are riding a wave of fresh interest in Lam globally: the Pompidou Center co-produced a Lam retrospective in 2015 with the Tate Modern and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.

“It’s expensive, it’s complicated,” she said.

Eskil Lam, a son of the artist, manages his estate, based in Paris. With his mother, Lou Laurin-Lam, who has since died, he cataloged Wifredo Lam’s work, which was widely scattered. He gave Cherix and Adams a list of some 300 pieces, he said. They, in return, found works that even he had been unaware of, he said, adding, “They know their stuff.”

Lam was struck, too, by Cherix’s persistence. A couple of collectors had been very resistant to lending works, he said, but Cherix “went all out.”

One piece that surfaced in MoMA’s search is “La Guerra Civil,” a 7-foot by 8-foot gouache on paper that depicts a cluster of people under attack from Spanish Fascist troops, whose owners had stopped lending it for fear it would be damaged, Adams said.

Another is “Harpe Astrale,” a brightly colored oil on canvas that was shown in the 1940s in Haiti alongside “Le Présent Éternel,” an oil of godlike creatures. It disappeared about 20 years ago.

The curators looked everywhere for “Harpe Astrale” but came up empty, Cherix said. Then in December, they got a phone call. The painting had appeared.

They had less luck in Cuba, where officials did not lend works from the extensive Lam collection at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana out of fear the art would be confiscated. Even with clear provenance, works could be seized by a U.S. court as part of claims by Cuban exiles and others seeking compensation for property confiscated in the revolution, according to American and Cuban officials and experts familiar with the discussions who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of the issue.

Cuba has balked in the past at lending artwork to American institutions, and the sources said that the odds of a loan fell to nil after Donald Trump won the 2024 election. President Trump has reinstated a hard-line policy toward Cuba, re-designating the country as a state sponsor of terrorism (a reversal of a last-minute Biden administration decision that removed Cuba from the list); increasing sanctions and tightening travel restrictions.

Still, Adams and Cherix last year traveled to Cuba — Cherix, twice — after Lowry, who was then MoMA’s director, approached Cuban officials in New York with the help of Wendy Luers, a philanthropist whose organization, the Foundation for Culture and Society, supports cultural exchange with Cuba.

The Modern invited Cuban curators, including Jorge Fernández, the director of the National Museum, to a two-day study session with European and American scholars of Lam in New York in fall 2024.

The museum was interested in “La Silla,” a 1943 oil painting of a chair among tropical foliage that was donated to the museum by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier; and “El Tercer Mundo,” a large composition in oil of stretched figures with giant, flexed feet, which Lam made at the National Museum between 1965 and 1966.

“Sometimes people say, “Oh, we’re not going to lend,” and you push back,” Cherix said. “And sometimes you don’t push back.”

The retrospective will, however, include a “blown-up” photo of an abstract mural, “Untitled” that adorns the lobby of a government building in Havana, the curators said.

In New York, the conservators Laura Neufeld and Anny Aviram worked to correct damage to Lam’s fragile works, and, with Catherine H. Stephens, used infrared spectroscopy to settle the question of whether “The Jungle” was oil or gouache (the verdict was oil). The painting is a “defining work,” the curators said, marking a shift from Lam’s work of the 1940s, where the figures emerge from backgrounds of tropical plants and sugar cane, to the more geometric works and stylized figures of his later art.

Soon, it will be the public’s turn to judge whether the curators have moved the conversation about Lam forward.

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