During his sixty-year career (1923-1982) Lam was to pave the way for contemporary artists of African, Asian, Pacific, and Native American descent in the international art world. But the road was not always easy or straightforward. His arrival in Paris effectively precipitated the first crisis of modernism by introducing the "primitive" into "primitivism." He confronted European modernists with a real human entity both conversant in his traditional culture and trained in modernist conventions. As an African, Chinese Cuban, however, he was quickly subsumed under those same romantic characterizations of the "primitive," marginalized to an extent as an "authentic" specimen. Descriptions of his work are inevitably modified with signifiers such as "magician," "master of the fantastic," "avatar of the jungle," and "shaman." His situation as both insider and outsider is clearly illustrated in the diagram of the modern art "tree" published by painter Ad Reinhardt in P.M. magazine in 1946. Reinhardt grouped artists of different modernist tendencies on branches off the trunk of modern art. Lam's name can be found near the names of artists whose work manifests a magical, surreal quality—Yves Tanguy, Pavel Tchelitchew, Kurt Seligmann, and Louis O. Guglielmi, who appear as leaves bunched together on the branch. But, tellingly, Lam is literally a leaf out on the same branch by himself.

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