It's easy to make comparisons between Lam and a household name like Pablo Picasso. The most obvious is between Lam's The Jungle (1943) and Picasso's Guernica (1937). Yet a more analytical and critical eye would see the former's female horses becoming centaurs under the latter's brush, as well as their shared use of grisaille, a painting technique using only shades of grey. Because Lam had barely any academic art training and a completely different background, his influences of various African, Cuban and voodoo cultures were far outside the norm – which is exactly what Picasso admired and appropriated. "Good artists copy, great artists steal," the artist famously quipped. "When you think about Picasso and [Georges] Braque, you wonder who influenced who, but it is clear Braque was first. I feel the same way with Lam," says Rastorfer.
Rastorfer calls Lam "a diamond in the rough" despite the artist having done some 100 exhibitions by the time of his death, including a joint exhibition with Picasso in New York in 1939. The dealer puts it bluntly: "He's not as famous as Picasso. In the '40s, he joined other greats in museums, but never held the same position in the art market. If you look at famous figures in early 20th-century art, they are mostly Europeans; Americans came in in the '60s." Being non-European and without active representation, Lam lost work and market presence upon his death. In Cuba, however, it's a different story. Havana's Wifredo Lam Centre, in a two-storey 18th-century mansion, is one of the primary locations for contemporary art and plays a key role in the city's biennale.
