cuzco ii

It was either a dream come true, or a prank [grap]: 

a man living in São Paulo with no previous relationship with Metropolitan Museum of Art... 

cold-called the New York institution one day in 2017, and said he wanted to donate some of his paintings. And not just any paintings, but Spanish colonial works, a category that the Met publicly said it wanted to build up. 

It was not a prank! And in early March, the museum will unveil the gift from James Kung Wei Li — ten 17th and 18th century works from Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, in a gallery in the American Wing called Art of the Colonial Andes.

“These are outstanding examples of colonial-era Andean painting, and this gift is truly a turning point in our efforts to expand our holdings of Latin American art,” the museum’s director Max Hollein said in a statement. 

The Met previously owned only one painting from colonial South America: Our Lady of Guápulo by an unknown 18th-century Cuzco painter, which was given to the museum in 1964.

[bron]