The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has opened a major retrospective of Afro-Cuban Surrealist painter Wifredo Lam, featuring over 200 works. The exhibition highlights Lam's masterpiece *Grande Composition* (1949), a 14-foot-wide painting recently acquired by MoMA after years of negotiation with a Paris collector. Curated by MoMA's new director Christophe Cherix and Beverly Adams, the show reexamines Lam's career, emphasizing his Afro-Cuban heritage and his use of hybrid figures like the femme-cheval, which reference Lucumí spiritual traditions.
This retrospective matters because it corrects decades of Eurocentric interpretation that downplayed Lam's Afro-Cuban identity and the decolonial intent of his work. By foregrounding Lam's own words—calling his art "an act of decolonization"—and contextualizing symbols like the femme-cheval within Afro-Cuban cosmology, MoMA challenges the historical erasure of non-Western influences in Surrealism. The acquisition of *Grande Composition* also underscores the museum's commitment to expanding its canonical holdings, making this show a pivotal moment for rethinking modern art history.