Source: WTL photo© Wilfredo Lam exhibition in 2016 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Image: "Sol o Chino sentado con abanico en las manos [Sun or Chinese with a fan in his hands]" (1925). Oil on burlap canvas. (Madrid, private collection).
Comments: Lam went to Spain in 1923 with a scholarship to study art at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid. There he studied art from classical/traditional masterworks at the Prado Museum to more recent impressionism, cubism and the like (Picasso, Matisse, Miró, etc.). From the beginning, however, Lam sought his own vision, his own technique, his own artistic path. Perhaps, in this early work painted in his Madrid period, he sought to find some sense of his father's Chinese heritage, with perhaps, a touch of his mother's Afro-Cuban heritage. In any event, this is certainly not a Cubist work, but it is most exotic.
Humanities Question: What do you make of the double title--or alternate titles? In other words, how is the theme of the backgrounded sun relate--if it does--to the foregrounded Chinese man and his fan?