Le Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti – Part 1

Le Centre d’Art is among the oldest surviving cultural organizations in the Caribbean and serves as a gallery and museum, an art school, a site for art events and a meeting place for Haitian artists. It was established in 1944 by the American watercolourist DeWitt Peters, who served as its first director, and a group of Haitian intellectuals and artists that included the indigenist writer Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and the architect and artist Albert Mangonès (who created the famous statue of The Unknown Maroon, 1967, in Port-au-Prince). Le Centre d’Art was, in 1947, recognized as an “institution of public utility” by the Haitian state and the artists who have been associated with the centre over the years include such well-known Haitian artists as Hector Hyppolite, Philomé Obin, Jasmin Joseph, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud, Préfète Duffaut, and, more recently, Edouard Duval-Carrié, Lionel St Eloi, Mario Benjamin, and Tessa Mars.

In its early years, Le Centre d’Art was a cosmopolitan meeting ground for artists, critics, curators, and collectors from Haiti and elsewhere in the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, and served as a place where seminal ideas about modernism, popular culture, and Caribbean art were being explored and articulated. It is important to recognize this, since modernism is often misrepresented as an artistic movement with which places like the Caribbean had only a secondary, derivative relationship, while the region played a far more active role.

The Cuban art critic and curator José Gomez Sicre, who later became the director of the OAS’ Art Museum of the Americas, visited in 1945. The French Surrealist André Breton and Cuban painter Wifredo Lam also came to Haiti during that year and Lam had an exhibition at Le Centre d’Art in 1946. Le Centre d’Art also had an active working relationship with Alfred Barr and René d’Harnoncourt, the early directors of the Museum of Modern Art who were also advised by Gomez Sicre, and from 1944 onwards, several major Haitian works were acquired through Le Centre d’Art for the MoMA collection (whose early acquisition programme also include work from Mexico, Cuba, and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America).

DeWitt Peters and the American critic, poet, and collector Selden Rodman, who became involved in the late 1940s, very enthusiastically engaged in talent-scouting, especially of popular, self-taught artists. They were, however, as some of the critics have argued, perhaps too actively coached to pursue a particular aesthetic and subject matter, as could be seen in the murals of the Holy Trinity Cathedral, which was a project instigated by Le Centre d’Art. Peters and Rodman have been credited with the “discovery” of artists such as Hyppolite and Obin, and there is no doubt that they were instrumental in placing these artists on the international art world map, but several of their “discoveries” were already active before they joined Le Centre d’Art.

Seldon Rodman’s widely circulated 1948 book Renaissance in Haiti: Popular Painters in the Black Republic not only supported the international breakthrough of the so-called Haitian School but promoted the idea that this school was a cultural miracle, a sudden spark that somehow emerged spontaneously from the substrata of popular creativity, fuelled by Vodou culture. Even more problematically, it introduced the notion that the only true and legitimate Haitian art was the so-called primitive or naïve art, which was a stereotypical representation of Black Caribbean art with which many in the Haitian art world and intelligentsia were deeply uncomfortable, more so because it was championed by two White American expatriates. The history of Haitian art is a much longer and more complex story which should at least go back to the Haitian Revolution, and arguably earlier, and which includes popular as well as academic expressions. It was inevitable that this reductive narrative would be challenged.

The first major challenge came in 1950, when a group of mainstream artists who felt side-lined by the focus on the popular, self-taught artists, left Le Centre d’Art in 1950 to establish Le Foyer des Art Plastiques. The narrative that was created by Peters and, especially Rodman, and the notion that Le Centre d’Art was the “cradle” of Haitian art continues to hold sway today, as does the critical debate that surrounds it. The Haitian anthropologist and cultural critic Michel-Rolph Trouillot, for instance, rightly argued that: “[t]he story that Haitians had to wait for Mr Peters to discover their hidden talent is just one more story of arrogance.” There is no doubt, however, that Le Centre d’Art has had a significant impact on the development and the international visibility of Haitian art and has helped to produce and promote extraordinary works of art such as the murals of the Holy Trinity Cathedral and the paintings Hector Hyppolite produced between his “discovery” and his untimely death in 1948. It has also helped to provide a local and international market and a much-needed source of income for many artists. Not recognizing the immense worth of what was achieved in the early years of Le Centre d’Art would amount to “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

By the time I first visited, sometime in the mid-1990s, Le Centre d’Art was a somewhat sleepy place, with none of the energy that characterized its early years, but it was a place of recognized art-historical importance and a must-stop for any visitor to Haiti who wanted to buy a piece of Haitian art. Disaster struck on 12 January 2010, however, when the gingerbread mansion that had housed Le Centre d’Art was damaged beyond repair in the Port-au-Prince earthquake. Francine Murat, who had been the Centre d’Art director since 1965, died shortly after. There was also significant damage to the art collection and other art holdings (which comprises more than 5,000 works of art, or more than twice the size of the National Gallery of Jamaica collection, as well as significant archival holdings), and all programmes had to be suspended. The earthquake, in addition to the unimaginable human losses and widespread damage to buildings and infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, had a devastating effect on the Haitian art sector, with significant damage to the Holy Trinity Cathedral and its murals, to the collection of the Musée d’Art Haitien (which had been established at the College de St Pierre in Port-au-Prince, in association with Le Centre d’Art), and to various commercial galleries and private collections in the city. As often happens, however, what started out as a disaster became an unexpected catalyst for new developments and Le Centre d’Art has since re-emerged as a reinvigorated, reimagined and aesthetically inclusive artistic centre, that plays an active role in the critical debates about the representation of Haitian art.

Next week, in part 2, we will look at the revival of Le Centre d’Art since the 2010 earthquake, the conservation of its collections, its exhibitions and other programmes (which now includes Caribbean-focused programming), and its planned relocation to another, to-be-restored gingerbread mansion.

Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.