THE HISTORY, POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF HAITIAN ART: SOME REFLECTIONS

Anthony Bogues

A framing

I want to begin with the conventional framing of Haitian art. The conventional framing of Haitian art typically considers Haitian art as naïve; as a form of “primitivism” and folk art in a cultural anthropological sense. These framings are deployed no matter what the different schools of Haitian art are; and there are many – the historical school which emerges in the north; the school of beauty, or the school of Saint -Soleii. In spite of these schools many critics and art historians describe all Haitian art production without understanding what schools these artistic forms are affiliated with. This means that they miss the internal dynamics that produce these forms of art and art practices. However it is important as well to understand where this notion of “primitivism” comes from and how it emerges to frame Haitian art.

If we return to the early 20th century in Paris one would encounter a series of colonial markets. These were visited by many French artists but two in particular have significance for my remarks - Picasso and Henry Matisse. It has been reported that it was Matisse who encouraged Picasso to visit the markets. The story is often told of how Picasso was captivated by the Vili figure which Matisse showed him.1 In these colonial markets there were African masks and sculptures. Many of these objects had religious value but in these markets, they were extracted from their context and became objects to be used in whatever way one wanted. Some writers and critics have talked about how both Matisse and Picasso as well as other French artists at the time became engaged with some of these masks and sculptures. The critics have argued that this kind of adaptation was a form of Africanism and that this Africanism, they argue, then described as “primitivism” became a category with which to think about art. However there was a twist. The critics then further state that “primitivism” became a form of modernism undermining the French art establishment and, in the words of one, ‘an avant-garde gesture’. Others argued that the work of Picasso himself is that of expropriation–a sign of colonial extractive artistic practice. I was fortunate to see the exhibition, “ Picasso Primitif “ at the Quai Branly in 2017 in which there was a juxtaposition between his work, clearly influenced by African art and the original African art works themselves with the African artists now named. What was clear to many of us and to some reviewers was that there were ways in which one cannot think about certain pieces of the Picasso’s work without deep references to African art. Thus Picasso’s own statement when asked about how “Negro art “influenced his work and his quip “I don’t know it,“ is a troubling one.

There are of course two ways to read this particular moment and Picasso’s comment. One reading is where we say that for Picasso all art was art, therefore his quip was making it clear that he did not recognize art with any geographic appellation. Or we can read it as a form of disavowal in which he would not recognize the influence of African art upon his own work. What is critical though, for the purposes of these remarks is to grasp how quickly the discussion about “primitivism” moved from being a gesture of avant-garde often describing the work of artists’ collectives like the Cobra Group from Amsterdam, Brussels and Copenhagen, and instead became very popular in European thought as a form of cultural anthropological description of backwardness about the colonies and ex colonies.2 In this sense with regard to art “primitivism” no longer meant modernism but represented so-called states of “backwardness.” This was how the category came to be used to describe Haitian art.

Categorization and Haitian Art

One of the first books on Haitian art was published in 1948, Renaissance in Haitian Art; Popular Painters in the Black

Republic.3 Written by the American critic and writer Selden Rodman who also wrote extensively on Mexican art, the book created a stir. Rodman notes in the text that there was an absence of African sculptural forms in Haitian culture. He draws this observation from the work of the cultural anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s book, Life in a Haitian valley published in 1938. However the analysis of Herskovits about the so-called absence of African cultural forms in Haitian culture was a reflection of a specific set of ideas about African sculpture. It ignored the metal art in Haiti that was being pioneered at that moment.4 Rodman suggests in his discussion of Haitian art that there were two forms of Haitian art, what he calls “popular realism” and the other “religious art”. He notes that both popular realism and religious art belongs to the category of the “primitive.” In his discussion he spends time writing about the work of Hector Hyppolite, perhaps one of the most important Haitian artists in the 1940s. Hyppolite, he writes “is unlike any other of the Haitian primitives … (he) makes no effort to achieve a realistic effect in his pictures; if he ever went in for precise modelling details, he has abandoned it.”5 Rodman continues, “it would be unfair to say that his powers of observation are not good because his intentions so obviously are in the direction of expressionist fantasy.” 6

Rodman’s book begins a classificatory process which launches the conception of Haitian art as a form of primitivism7. This categorization of Afro Caribbean art in general continues for some time until influenced by the Black Power and anti-colonial movements of the 1960’s and early 70’s when there were attempts to begin to rethink this category. Thus in Jamaica the phrase “self-taught artist” and later on, “intuitive” emerges at that time to describe particular artists who did not have formal academic training and whose artwork were previously called naïve, folklore or indeed primitive.8

I want to now juxtapose to Rodman’s and others’ classifications, a different methodological way of seeing Haitian art. One which moves away from some of the formal categories of western art and attempts to grapple with the art and the practices of Haitian art itself from the inside out. In this regard the conventional art historical perspective which often constructs art into two distinct realms of the political and the aesthetic are porous in Haitian art. Jacques Ranciere notes that politics and aesthetics are ways of doing and making that “intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making and that these maintain forms and beings of modes of visibility.9

“It is not my view that artistic practices and political practices are homologous. However, I would suggest that the chasm which has been opened up between them in our general theoretical formulations about art and politics are not tenable in Haitian nor in Afro-Caribbean art in general. In all of this one pays attention to the power of the western episteme as a way of knowing which names things. Let’s take for example the idea that Haitian art is a genre of surrealism.

In 1945 André Breton the founder of surrealism visited Haiti and delivered a talk to what has been recorded as a fairly large audience of over 500 persons. During the course of the talk he noted that the work of Hippolyte and others taught him things and that Haitian art was beyond surrealism. What happens next in this process of naming, demonstrates the power of Western framing as writers begin to speak about Haitian Art as surrealist art. This matter becomes even more complex because Breton brings Hector Hyppolite’s works to the UNESCO international art exhibition in 1947 in Paris.

All of this points to how critical the historical discursive contexts are in any understanding of Haitian art. In the case of Haiti this discursive context is how the Imperial archive of the idea of Haiti becomes located within a colonial episteme.10 The Imperial archive of the idea of Haiti both represents and constructs Haiti primarily as a site of chaos, a site of never-ending catastrophic events from the slave revolution of 1791 to the more recent earthquake. It is a dominant Western archive which creates Haiti as a fixed sign, marked by a strange kind of otherness, a place where “ black magic” happens. In dismantling these frames we begin to understand Haitian art in the words of Edouard Glissant as a “vocation of refusal”. This refusal, in my view, shapes both the practices and the processes of contestation within the making of Haitian art itself while occurring on the terrain of the popular. Stuart Hall makes the point that the “popular should be understood as a tension between what belongs to the central dominant and the elite and the culture and practices of the periphery.”11 From within this framework

I want to think through Haitian art on its own terms by grappling with both another current of literature and different perspectives on Haitian culture in the 1930s and 40s. This line of thought allows us to begin to posit categories along with Haitian thinkers as to what categories might we think about Haitian art. The essay I will deploy for this purpose is a remarkable one by the Haitian medical doctor, writer and novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis.12

The Marvellous.

Jacques Stephen Alexis attended the 1956 Black Writers and Artists Conference in Paris. This was perhaps one of the most important intellectual cultural and political conferences of 20th Century black radical intellectual life. Held at the Sorbonne, the conference was attended by a plethora of black writers, all ? cultural and political figures. Amongst those in attendance were, George Lamming, Frantz Fanon, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Jean Price Mars and Richard Wright amongst many others. The conference remains a seminal event in the intellectual history of black critical thought and culture.13

At the conference Alexis delivered a speech on the “marvellous realism” of Haitian cultural practice. There he argues that “negro” art was fundamentally linked to life and that this link was a form of humanism which, “traverses history mysticism and naturalism.” He then goes on to argue that in Haitian art this realism “contains order beauty logic and control sensitivities which presents the real which is accompaniment of the strange and the fantastic of dreams and half-life of the mysterious… the marvellous in Haitian art seems to be looking for type.” He then poses the notion that he is deploying the word type in the Latin sense of the word actualis- “that which acts so actual that all particularised subjects can be found in it”.14 For Alexis, the imagination was critical to all aspects of Haitian culture but the work of this imagination was to grapple with the real.

In this formulation, Alexis is grappling with the ways in which Haitian art presents itself, the compositional form in which it presents and then represents itself. In defining Haitian art and culture as subsumed under the category of the marvellous, he is working within a tradition of Caribbean thought which attempts to posit a profound relationship between the marvellous and the conception of the real. This particular understanding of the marvellous is in deep conversation with Caribbean literature and particularly with the work of Alejo Carpentier, whose novel, The Kingdom of this World was published in 1949.15 What is critical about this novel for the purposes of these remarks is that its main character, an ex slave Ti Noel as well as the chief figure who understands the specific radicality of the Haitian revolution is not the revolutionary leadership of Toussaint L’Ouverture nor Jacques Dessalines, but the traditional medical healer/revolutionary, Macandal. The latter developed a political strategy and program of poisoning the planters in the colony of St Domingue. His political ambition was the establishment of a black republic. Macandal’s understanding of plants and herbs allowed him to remain on the plantation even when he had lost one of his hands in a slave work accident. The irony of his stay was that he sometimes healed as well as poisoned the planters. Both the healing and political practices of Macandal were outside the rationalities of Western knowledge. Carpentier’s novel foregrounds these. By deploying the term “marvellous realism” Alexis is positing that at the level of the symbolic order, the imaginary if you will, within Haitian art there is the practice of the real. Parenthetically, one of the fascinating things in the history of Caribbean and Latin American thought are the ways in which ideas and words travel. So that by the 1960’s marvellous realism becomes one basis for the emergence of magical realism in Latin America literature with the work of writers like Gabriel Marquez.

However, my point in these brief remarks is that there existed a Caribbean conversation around the conception of the marvellous. It is occurring in Paris where Alexis and other Caribbean figures are, including the Afro Cuban artist, Wilfredo Lam. But this is not a conversation confined to the colonial metropole alone, because it also occurs in Haiti as well within the French colony/ department of Martinique. In the latter, the key figure is Suzanne Cesaire.16 For Alexis, marvellous realism is the ground of Haitian culture but it is also historically specific to Haiti and the Caribbean, as he argues in the conference against Senghor’s universalism of a Black Culture. Alexis was also making an attempt to revise the conception of social realism. Thus, by the late 1950’s the marvellous emerges and becomes an aesthetic frame, a category for us to begin to think about Haitian art.

Other histories.

There is as well another history of Haitian art which we tend to forget and I wish to briefly explore this. Haiti was occupied by the USA. The American occupation occurred between 1915 to 1935 and created a political and historical context that obviously shaped Haitian society. Besides the occupation as a political context there was the emergence of a particular text by Jean Price Mars So spoke Uncle. A key argument of that text was that Haiti was an African society and that the enslaved population from the different African nations had created cultural practices which indigenized them within the Caribbean space. These cultural forms included the Afro–Caribbean religious practice of vodou and in the end were grounds on which cultural struggles could be waged against the American occupation. The Haitian art historian Michele Phlippe Lerebours has noted that Jean Price Mars’s work created the frame for a moment of cultural indigenous revolt.

One of the leading Haitian artists in the 1940’s Petion Savain in the moment of that revolt wrote a manifesto about Haitian art and established the journal, La Revue Indigene. In the journal he makes the point that art should engage “the most modern techniques and try to adapt them to the demands of Haitian Art.”17 Of course central to this indigenous revolt was vodou itself.18

This practice of vodou systematizes itself as a system of thought and practice and should not just be understood only as a series of religious practices. It is the ground of a symbolic order that was born out of the historical catastrophe of the African experience in the New World. It is rich with its panoply of gods, of spirits/ Lawas and alive with a sense of the marvellous. Thus many artists have drawn from this cosmological resource. It is at this point that I wish to draw your attention to the work of the Haitian artist André Pierre. The painting I draw your attention to is “ The Guinean spirits returning to Africa after the Haitian independence war. “ Now, there are many layer to this work and we could spend hours on it, but I just want to lightly touch on some of the things around this painting. One of the first things that I I want to draw your attention to is the dress of soldiers who are actually lawas/spirits within the Afro-Caribbean pantheon of vodou. That they are on a cloud which is really a ship tells us that this is a reimagining of the slave ship itself. Finally, they are on their way back to Africa. What is also noticeable is the deployment of the word Guine. In African diasporic imaginary, Guine is a placeholder for Continental Africa. So, for Andre Pierre, these Lawas are returning to Africa after winning Haitian independence. In other words, Haitian independence would not have been won in 1805 without the intervention of these Lawas.It should be noted as well that they are returning to Africa after playing a part in the Haitian Independence War, not the war against racial slavery. What this means is that for the artist, the key moment in Haitian history is independence. Of course the Haitian revolution is a dual one – against racial slavery and then for political independence. Both of these open a distinctive space in Haitian art but it is the moment of independence which dominates.

Other categories

One of the difficulties in discussions about the categories of Haitian art is that many critics think that Haitian art is dominated by vodou cosmology,so I want to bring your attention to a work which is perhaps one of the most significant art pieces in Haitian art history. Recall the American occupation. This occupation was resisted by many and there was a group of guerrillas called Cacos led by Charleamagne Prelate who began an armed struggle against the occupation. Prelate was an inspirational leader so, what did the marines do? After capturing him they murdered him. They then took photographs of his corpse and dropped these images from helicopters all over Haiti. One such picture was then used by the Haitian artist Philome Obin who was neither a vodou practitioner nor a priest and was actually a Baptist by religious faith. From one of these photographs, Obin makes a painting called the “Crucifixion of Prelate.” It is a remarkable painting and is considered to be a seminal piece of historical art in Haitian art history. We should note as well that Obin wrote in various letters that he wanted to paint a history of Haiti.The point I’m making here, is that the questions of history emerges very forcefully in Haitian art and that if there is an aesthetic within the category of marvellous realism it circles around issues of what one might call “living history.19” Part of these aesthetic practices allow us to think through the

Edouard Duval-Carrie

Memoire sans Histoire, 2009 mixed media on aluminium, 94 x 208 in. Collection of Serge and Johanna Coles meaning of the historical. This preoccupation of the historical both as thematic and aesthetic leads us to the discussion of the third artist – Edouard Duvall Carrie. This is an artist with whom I have worked with for some time and I want to briefly discuss this piece Memories without History.

In this particular artwork,there are six sections all stitched together in panels of aluminium. The artist is telling the story of Haiti. The figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture is central to the work. For the artist, given what he understands to be the history of Haiti, of occupation and authoritarian rule, he is invoking the return of Toussaint as a kind of saviour. In the work, Toussaint is on his horse trying to rescue Haiti. It is the recall of a memory to intervene in the present. In my view one of the things the artist wants to make clear is that there are all these memories of independence but within these are the Generals and the elite who have driven the ordinary Haitian to the wall. So he has juxtaposed memory to history, asking us to think or perhapsto recall the history of the revolution, not just its memories. He is asking us to live in history. In other words, for the artist, history becomes a form of critique not just the telling of a narrative tale.

In trying to think through this question of history itself. All three artists are attempting to establish a different archive of Haiti, about the idea of Haiti itself, as a new sign. This means we need to pay attention to how the historical functions in these works, because it is also linked to the issue of politics. The formal question of politics in Haiti is a complex one from the dual revolution to the divisions between the Haitian state and the Haitian nation, the ways in which the late Haitian intellectual Michel Rolph Trouillot argue that the state and the nation were launched into different directions.20 Thus formal politics in Haiti operates at many levels- there’s the operation of the state with a history of authoritarianism and then there are attempts to define certain popular subjectivities via elements of the population. What I want to argue here is that there’s a politics which also resides in the popular forms of art and that this politics circles around history.

I end here by saying that the matter of “living history” and its relationship to the marvellous real reframes Haitian art. The question of aesthetics of the marvellous realism in Haitian art does not circle around beauty in ways that we may conventionally understand aesthetics particularly through its Kantian formulation. Rather aesthetics may also be found in the making of the object; it is to be found in its relationship to the lived experiences of Haiti both his history and politics. In the end Haitian art (at least many of its currents) attempts to wrestle with both an understanding of living history as well as politics. This kind of aesthetic regime does not negate beauty but as I have said, it locates it elsewhere. Both Haitian and Afro-Caribbean art are distinctive grammars which require a rethinking of the conventional history and categories of art.

Endnotes

1 There is of course great deal of literature on how African masks shaped the composition of Picasso’s. Les Demoiselles D’ Avigon.

2 The Cobra Group came to attention with the 1949 exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

3 Selden Rodman, Renaissance in Haiti: Popular Painters in the Black Republic (New York; 1948)

4 Of course by the late 1940’s and 50’s metal work artists like Georges Liautaud had emerged as a major figure.

5 Renaissance in Haiti, pp 68-69

6 Ibid

7 Important to note that there have attempts by Haitian writers to revised this category of the primitive and give a more complex art history of Haiti. See in particular, Gerald Alexis, Peintres Haitians (Paris: 2000) and of course there isthe two volume work of Michel–Philippe Lerebours, Haiti Et SES Peintres 1804-1980 (Port–Au Prince, 1989)

8 There continues today the categorization of some Haitian art as self taught see for example the recent catalogue Direct From The Eye: The Jonathan Demme Collection of Self Taught Art (Philadelphia: 2014)

9 Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of the Aesthetics (London; 2004) p. 13.

10 The European colonial project was not only one of territorial conquest and a political economy of extraction it was also a project in which colonial power made vigorous attempts to create a “native.” At the core of that creation was not only violence and death but a series of knowledge regimes and common sense configurations in which ideological, political frame works, common sense as well imaginaries were created. The underlying episteme of these configurations was the colonial episteme. At the core of this episteme was a human classification system in which blackness signified being non human. The historical processes of racial slavery and colonialism, as Aime Ceasire makes clear is one which creates for the Black Native a state of “thingfication”

11 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular” in John Storey (ed) Cultural Theory & Popular Culture: A Reader (New York 1998) p. 448.

12 Jacques Stephen Alexis was a Haitian novelist of note and a radical political figure. His most influential novel was General Sun My Brother. He was tortured by the Duvalier regime placed on a boat and never seen again.

13 For a discussion of this conference see Anthony Bogues, Caribbean Thought: Politics, History and Archive (Kingston: 2024)

14 Jacques Stephen Alexis, “Of the Marvelous Realism of the Haitians” in Presence Africanaine, Cultural Journal of the Negro World. No 8.9 10 June-November 1956. pp 249.

15 For a very good discussion about the marvellous and Caribbean literature see, Margaret Heady, MarvellousMarvelous Journeys: Routes of Identity in the Caribbean Novel (New York: 2008)

16 For a discussion of Suzanne Cesaire’s work see, The Great Camouflage Writings of Dissent (1941-1945) Suzanne Cesaire (ed) Daniel Maximin (Middletown: 2012) Trans Keith Walker.

17 Ibid, p. 716

18 There was also in the literary field the writing of novels which reflected the spirit of indigenism. Perhaps the best known of these is Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew

19 For a discussion of this idea of living history in Haitian art see, Anthony Bogues, “Making History and the Work of Memory in the Art of Edouard Duval Carrie” in Decolonizing Refinement: Contemporary Pursuits In the Art of Edouard Duval Carrie (eds)

P. Neil, M Carrasco & L. Wolff (Gainesville: 2018)

20 Michel–Rolph Trouillot, State Against Nation (New York: 1990)