Source: The National Museum of Cuba. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1978, fig. 116.
Image: "The Third World" (1965). Oil on canvas. In the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana.
Comments: From 1944 to 1950 he was married to Helena Holzer. In 1945, Lam and Helena went to Haiti for several months. The trip to Haiti and the culture and art he found there mark a significant change in his style, as, perhaps, can be seen in progression from the following painting, "Huracán," from 1945-1946, to the 1965 painting above.
From 1952 onward his principal residence was in Paris, but in 1966 he painted "The Third World" for Fidel Castro's presidential palace in Havana. Hence, this is one of the few paintings of Lam's that are displayed in Havana's national art museum.
Humanities Question: Note that the forms in this painting are distributed in a kind of choreography. Knowing that Fidel Castro sought to make communist Cuba a leader of the so-called Third World, and that Lam, a leftist but never overly political, was revered as Cuba's most prominent artist, in what way does this painting seem to you to illustrate a notion of the Third World; that is, the mostly poor or developing countries that were not directly aligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union in the 1960s?
