A Cuban Surrealist for LACMA

Agustín Cárdenas, Couple, 1956 (model) and 1972 (cast)

LACMA has acquired another significant work of global Surrealism. Cuban artist Agustín Cárdenas' Couple is the proof of a 1972 edition of 3 in bronze. Suzanne Deal Booth and the Ducommun and Gross Endowment supplied acquisition funds.

At the age of 19, Agustín Cárdenas (1927–2001) got a single-artist show at Havana's Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. He was already living in Paris, where he became the first Teen-Age Black Surrealist. Cárdenas wrote that "In Paris I discovered what a man is… what Black culture is… what a Black man is." André Breton said Cárdenas' artistic technique was "efficient as a dragonfly."

The model for Couple dates from that early Paris period. Two entwined chicken-people have echoes of Giacometti, Wilfredo Lam, and the imagery of Cuba's Santería faith. LACMA is showing Couple next to Lam's 1947 painting Tropic.

Cárdenas exhibited widely, and his work is held in museums of Cuba, Latin America, Europe, and Japan. So far, he is rarely seen in U.S. institutions. The Metropolitan Museum has a Cárdenas sculpture, also acquired recently, in 2022. 

Cárdenas' Couple and Wilfredo Lam's Tropic