Cernuda Arte

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Wifredo Lam (1902 - 1982)
The Encounter [La Rencontre]
(El Encuentro), 1944
oil on paper laid down on canvas
25 5/8 x 38 5/8 inches

To be illustrated in the upcoming catalog IMPORTANT CUBAN ARTWORKS,
Volume Twenty-Two, Cernuda Arte, Coral Gables, Florida, December 2026.

Provenance:
Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York;
Blanche Fabry Teze, New York;
Private collection, Geneva;
Private collection, Key Biscayne, FL.

Exhibited in Lam Paintings, Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York, NY, 1944, and illustrated in the accompanying
catalog on a non-numbered page.

Exhibited in Important Latin American Paintings,
Christies, New York, May 28 - 29, 1997, and illustrated
in the corresponding auction catalog, Lot no. 23.

Exhibited in Wifredo Lam: The Imagination at Work,
Pace Gallery,New York, Nov. 9 – Dec. 21, 2021,
and illustrated in the accompanying catalog,
pages 76 and 77.

Illustrated in Lam, by Michel Leiris, Fratelli Fabbri, Milano,
1970, n. 58.

Illustrated in Wifredo Lam, 1st edition, Max-Pol Fouchet,
Poligrafa-Cercle d’Art, Barcelona-Paris, 1976, as page 233, no. 385.
Also illustrated in Wifredo Lam, Max-Pol Fouchet, 2nd Ed., Editiones
Poligrafa, Barcelona, 1989, as page 253, no. 417.

Illustrated in Wifredo Lam: Catalogue Raisonné of the Painted Work,
Vol. I, (1923-1960), Lou Laurin-Lam & Eskil Lam, Acatos, Paris,
1996, page 348, no. 44.30.

Wifredo Lam’s sublime oil-on-paper composition, The Encounter,
reimagines the tradition of still-life painting as a collision
of European modernism and Afro-Cuban culture. Painted in 1944,
three years after the artist fled war-torn Paris for Cuba,
The Encounter channels the dissonance of exile into a cubist
tableau of fruits and wine, covered in tropical foliage and
populated by Lam’s bestiary of spectral figures: part human,
part animal, and part botanical. The work’s restrained yet
kaleidoscopic palette demonstrates the unique sophistication
of Lam’s best experimentations with color in the 1940s. While
the influence of his years in Europe is evident, Lam’s visual
language is unmistakably his own, charged with the symbols
of Caribbean myth.

The Encounter (1944) belongs to the same moment as La Jungla,
Lam’s masterpiece acquired by the New York MoMA that same year
and placed beside Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

NICO HOUGH

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