New discoveries

Lam's work featured as part of the Kabinett series at Art Basel in Hong Kong in March. The concept of Kabinett is for selected galleries to have curated or themed exhibitions worthy of museums or, in the case of Lam at Gmurzynska, a one-man gallery show. Rastorfer explains his international appeal: "In this context, he is the prime example of an artist of global impact with a multicultural background – he had a Chinese father and carried his name, an African mother, he studied in Spain, and lived in France and Italy. In the 1940s, his most famous work, The Jungle, was bought by MoMA [New York's Museum of Modern Art] after being shown by a French gallery in New York. Lam was against all odds. He was a man of colour with a communist passport from Cuba, yet he travelled actively around the world despite needing a visa for most countries. He was invited to every cocktail party, and feted and supported by many museums. But being a man of colour, he wasn't allowed into restaurants. His support from the cultural and intellectual elite, led by MoMA and his dealer, Pierre Matisse, showed that even very early on, art was quite separate from the rest of the country."

Rastorfer recalls a conversation he had in the 1980s with Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was working in the basement of the New York gallery of Annina Nosei. He asked the young artist who his influences were and Basquiat mentioned Lam. Both were men of colour, outsiders in the rarified art world and had island influences in their work – Cuba for Lam, and Haiti and Puerto Rico for Basquiat. And although racial segregation in the US no longer officially existed at the time of Basquiat's fame, he still complained that, as a black man, no taxi would stop for him at night.