Christie’s announces an unprecedented single-owner collection of modern and contemporary Cuban art, CUBA MODERNA: Masterworks from a Private Collection, featured in the Latin American Art sale, November 22-23 in New York, with a public preview of highlights in Miami from October 29-30. The Miami preview is held in collaboration with Christie’s International Real Estate and EWM Realty International.
Carefully assembled over the past three decades, this extensive collection of nearly forty works spans from the historical vanguardia—with works by Victor Manuel, Eduardo Abela, Amelia Peláez,Fidelio Ponce de León, Carlos Enríquez, Marcelo Pogolotti—through modern masters of the Havana school—Cundo Bermúdez, René Portocarrero, Mario Carreño, and Mariano Rodríguez—artists that experimented in abstraction and Surrealism—Wifredo Lam, Agustín Fernández, Servando Cabrera Moreno, and José María Mijares—as well as a handful of contemporary painters who made waves in the 1980s and 1990s, once again drawing Cuban art into the international spotlight.
CUBA MODERNA is led by Wifredo Lam’s Sur les traces(Transformation), (estimate: $2,500,000-3,500,000). Painted in 1945, after Lam’s return to Havana during the Second World War, this large-scale painting exemplifies the impact of Surrealism coupled with the influence of Afro-Cuban culture, in which stippled, black brushwork insinuates myriad bodies—suggestively hybridized and otherworldly—silhouetted against a shadowy landscape.
Also highlighting the sale is Mariano Rodriguez’s Pelea de gallos, painted in 1942 (estimate: $800,000-1,200,000), one of only three works of this subject and caliber by the artist, with the others in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
