(Re)discovering Haiti
Folkloric art forges connections between Haiti and Black America -- and between a local gallery and a major museum
Prefete Duffaut, “Ville Imaginaire” (Watergate Gallery)
FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, WATERGATE GALLERY HAS OFFERED annual showcases of Haitian paintings -- colorful and fanciful, made mostly for the tourist trade and yet spiritually genuine. This year, the gallery's dedication to the Caribbean country's folkloric artwork receives a vote of confidence from an unexpected and prestigious cohort: the National Gallery of Art, whose "Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti" presents 21 artworks recently donated or pledged to the museum.
The National Gallery exhibition features many older works, the earliest from 1938, and includes several by noted Black American artists who visited Haiti. The paintings in Watergate Gallery's "The Rhythms and Colors of Haiti" are not all brand new. A few have been exhibited there before, and many are by painters who are deceased, some for a decade or more. Two artists, Wilson Bigaud and Jasmin Joseph, are featured in both shows.
Patsy Delatour, "Transmutation of Colors I" (Watergate Gallery)
Generally painted in a realistic style, albeit with some fantastical elements, the gallery's selections depict subjects common in Haitian art. These include festivals and markets, teeming with industrious women, and jungles packed with large animals, often ones never actually encountered in the Caribbean. A lion and polar bear, for example, appear to dance under an apple tree in an exuberant Jasmin Joseph scene.
Other topics include flowers, notably in Patsy Delatour's vivid "Transmutation of Colors" series, and Black women, rendered loosely and luminously in Samdi Atisla's expressionist pictures. Atisla's disordered and rearranged faces suggest the influence of Cubism, but in Haitian painting Henri Rousseau is a more common model than Pablo Picasso. Both artists were influenced by the art and landscapes, authentic or imagined, of tropical countries. So for Haiti's Africa-rooted artists to emulate the Europeans's styles seems apt and just.
Another Old World predecessor suggested by one of these artists is M.C. Escher, whose precise but impossible architectural fantasies are echoed by Prefete Duffaut's ingenious paintings of multi-tiered villages, much lusher and greener than Escher's scenarios and cantilevered over placid azure seas. A different sort of surrealism animates Andre Blaise's charming pictures, cartoonish yet elegantly painted, of fish-human hybrids who ride actual fish underwater.
Anne-Isabelle Bonifassi, "Bawon Lakwa" (Watergate Gallery)
Least like the other entries is Anne-Isabelle Bonifassi's "Bawon Lakwa," a black-white-and-purple portrait of a skeleton-headed spirit-god of Haitian voudou. Rendered in a punkish style that seems more New York than Port-au-Prince, the mixed-media artwork is a reminder that Haitian art reflects a distinctive syncretic worldview. Even the most decorative of these paintings has a sensibility that's stranger than mere tourist-catering whimsy.
A VOUDOU SPIRIT-DEITY, THE BAT-WINGED GUEDE, is the subject of Myrlande Constant's beaded fabric piece, which portrays the most arcane creature in "Spirit & Strength." Many of the other works, mostly paintings and prints, are of a piece with those in the Watergate show. They depict large animals, lush foliage, and bustling marketplaces. There's more conflict, though: In Joseph's "The Fight," possibly an allegory of Haitian civil war, great cats battle rather than dance. There's also a silkscreen of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the successful rebellion that made Haiti the world's first post-colonial Black-led independent nation.
The print is by Jacob Lawrence, one of several Black American artists represented in the show. Among the others are Betye Saar, whose lithograph jumbles images related to various mystical traditions, and Lois Mailou Jones, whose silkscreen features elements specific to voudou. But Jones's other entry is a drawing-painting of a picturesque impoverished neighborhood that's not inherently Haitian. Neither is a boldly stylized rendering of a slaughterhouse by Eldzier Cortor, another Black American who, like Jones, visited Haiti. His color woodcut was made in 1949, while the rest of the works by American artists date from the 1980s or '90s.
The exhibition derives largely from gifts or promised gifts by two pairs of collectors, Kay and Roderick Heller and Beverly and John Fox Sullivan. It seems unlikely that the National Gallery, despite having built a large collection of 19th-century American naive paintings, would have assembled such an extensive array of folkloric Haitian pictures on its own. But the show's curator, Kanitra Fletcher, has made the best of the two couples's donations, organizing them into a compelling introduction to both Haitian art and the country that engendered it.
The Rhythms and Colors of Haiti
Through Jan. 31 at Watergate Gallery, 2552 Virginia Ave. NW. watergategalleryframedesign.com. 202-338-4488.
Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti
Through March 9 at the National Gallery of Art, Sixth St. and Constitution Ave. NW. www.nga.gov. 202-737-4215.