MoMA to Survey Cuban Modernist Wifredo Lam through 150 Works

Wifredo Lam 1902-1982, Cuba Follow +

Next November, New York‘s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will open a retrospective of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam—a pivotal figure in Latin American modern art, whose Cubist-inspired paintings sought to subvert dominant representations of Afro-Caribbean culture.

On view from 10 November to 28 March 2026, the eponymous survey will span six decades of Lam’s career and feature more than 150 works made between 1920 and 1960, including paintings, collaborative drawings, prints, illustrated books, ceramics, and archival materials.

The exhibition will explore how Lam—who was born in Cuba, but lived abroad most of his life—came to represent the idea of a ‘transnational artist’, his practice informed by a confluence of European modernity, African diasporic culture, and Caribbean traditions.

Born in the town of Sagua La Grande in 1902, Lam later emigrated to Madrid to study painting. The exhibition will include early works he made in Spain, such as La Guerra civil (The Spanish Civil War) (1937), Lam’s first monumental work on paper mounted on canvas.

In 1938, Lam moved to Paris where he met artists and writers such as Pablo Picasso and André Breton. Among his collaborative works, Lam produced a collection of drawings for Breton’s poetry volume Fata Morgana (1941), which are included in the MoMA survey.

Upon returning to Cuba in 1941, Lam created important works such as The Jungle (1942–1943), which references the tropical Caribbean landscape, with its history of sugarcane plantations and slavery.

‘Lam’s visionary commitment to making his painting an “act of decolonisation”, as he put it, forever changed modern art,’ Christophe Cherix, Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at MoMA.

The exhibition will be Lam’s most extensive U.S. survey to date. It follows his Hong Kong retrospective Homecoming, which was held earlier this year at Asia Society, paying homage to his Cantonese roots. —[O]

Main image: Wifredo Lam. The Jungle (1942–1943) (detail). Oil on paper on canvas. 239.4 x 229.9 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Inter-American Fund. © 2024 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.