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But first…

Now, let’s get to the main event…

Wifredo Lam’s masterpiece La Jungla (The Jungle) has been a centerpiece of MoMA’s collection since it was acquired from Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1945. The monumental work on paper, mounted on canvas, depicts elongated figures blending into Caribbean sugarcane stalks. It hung in the museum’s lobby on and off for decades, literally and figuratively removed from the narrative of modern art in the galleries—until 1988, that is, when critic John Yau called out the museum for isolating the painting as if it didn’t belong in the canon. The new MoMA retrospective of Lam’s work, on view through April, more than compensates for that slight.

Lam doesn’t fit neatly into any art historical category. He was a painter, but mostly on paper; he was surrealist but also cubist; and he was born to an Afro-Cuban mother and a Chinese father but lived for much of his life in Western Europe. As the first retrospective of Lam’s work in the United States, this MoMA show looks at his art through a multicultural lens that simply wasn’t possible during his lifetime. “We finally have the vocabulary to understand transnational artists,” said MoMA curator of Latin American art Beverly Adams. She organized the show with chief curator of prints and drawings Christophe Cherix, who was named director of MoMA earlier this year. Coincidentally, it’s the first show to open at the museum since he assumed his new role.

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The exhibition is chronological and notably biographical, delving deeper into the influences and circumstances of Lam’s evolving style than into the specifics of his compositions. Born in Cuba in 1902, he traveled to Spain in his early 20s to study painting but ended up joining the Republican forces against Franco. That’s when Lam, and his work, became more political, explained Adams, inspired by the notion that art can change society. He escaped to Paris in 1938 with a note of introduction to Picasso from Catalan sculptor Manolo Hugué. Through Picasso, Lam met André Breton and other Surrealist artists and poets.

Picasso is credited with having outsize influence on Lam, somewhat stripping him of his own identity. In the exhibition catalogue, however, curator María Elena Ortiz makes the case that Lam also had an influence on Picasso. Their meeting “was an especially catalytic experience for Pablo Picasso, … who was forced to reconcile Lam’s presence with his own appropriations of African art,” she wrote. The older artist arranged a studio for Lam in Paris and made introductions that led to a solo gallery show—where MoMA’s founding director, Alfred H. Barr Jr., first acquired one of his works, Mother and Child, from 1939. After Lam’s return to Cuba in 1941, following almost two decades abroad, Picasso’s overtly Cubist influence on his work lessened as he began exploring Afro-Cuban religious imagery, like birds, horned heads, and horseshoes.

The growth in Lam’s market is perhaps best exemplified by works that have sold and resold at auction. A particularly interesting market case study is the artist’s 1959 oil on burlap painting Bonjour Monsieur Lam (Au commencement de la nuit), which appeared at auction five times between 1992 and 2019, increasing in price from $113,615 to $860,000.

Switzerland-based Galerie Gmurzynska, which has represented Lam’s estate since 2010, has taken a global approach to his market, focusing especially on building up a buyer base in China. At some point, Lam was given a Chinese version of his name, Lin Fei Long, meaning “Flying Dragon,” which Gmurzynska has predictably promoted to curators in the region. When the gallery presented his work in 2012 at the Art Hong Kong fair (now Art Basel Hong Kong), they put Lam’s name on the wall in both English and Chinese. (One of the paintings from that booth, an untitled 1958 oil and charcoal on paper mounted on canvas, is in the MoMA show.)

An exhibition last year of Lam’s work at the Asia Society in Hong Kong was dubbed Homecoming, a somewhat disingenuous moniker given that he never actually went to China, Lam’s son Eskil, who manages his father’s estate, told me. Lam’s Chinese heritage is also not particularly evident in his work—if anything, it’s merely a “sensibility” that he got from his scribe father, said Adams, pointing to one of Lam’s pen-and-ink drawings as an example.

Gmurzynska’s efforts have helped to steadily expand the artist’s market, as did a major survey of Lam’s works that toured to the Pompidou, Reina Sofía, and Tate Modern in 2015-17. Around that time, the auction houses also started rethinking their approach to Latin American art—reducing dedicated sales in the category, which typically attracted only collectors focused on Latin American work, and moving the most valuable examples to their higher-profile modern and contemporary art sales. In 2020, Sotheby’s set the world auction record for the artist by selling the 1943 oil on canvas Omi Obi— originally owned by Lam’s close friend, the Cuban writer Lydia Cabrera—for $9.6 million in a modern art evening sale.

That work, as it would happen, is part of the MoMA show, on loan from the collection of Argentine real estate developer Eduardo F. Costantini. And while it’s too soon to tell if MoMA’s renewed embrace of Lam’s work will further amplify his market value, the effect on his historical value is unmistakable. As Mathias Rastorfer of Galerie Gmurzynska said, “Lam is a timely and timeless artist.”