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Philippe Dodard
Lucien Price (1915-1963)
Max Pinchinat (1925-1985),
Jean Claude Garoute-Tiga (1935)
Philippe Dodard, Detail,Mapping Memory, The Crossing, 2009, Inks on Paper mounted on canvas, 28 x 18 x 24 inches. To learn more about the work, click on the images above . Each 18 x 24 artwork is sold separately. Price upon request.
Haitian Art -by Gérald Alexis
Preconceptions about Haitian art have led to hasty conclusions that, in turn, have nourished misinterpretations of the production of our artists, both trained and the so-called "primitive". Among other things, these preconceptions have sustained long debates on the African component of Haitian culture. In these debates it has generally been asserted that only Haitian popular artists, the "primitives" as they are often referred to, have carried on African traditional forms and that artists and intellectuals of the social and economic elites, have instinctively rejected all things African because of their possible association with the primitive, the tribal or the simple[1].The exhibition Racines: The Idea of Modernity in Contemporary Haitian Art , seems to be as an excellent opportunity to dispute this idea.
Let us begin by establishing an important premise: Haitian popular artists were not and have never been concerned with identity issues. This is not the case for those from the elite and the middle classes who felt the need to define themselves culturally in the context of the American occupation of Haiti[2]. Their quest for identity is at first evidenced in these artists’preference for tropical landscape, often palm trees silhouetted against sunset skies. Such a choice of subject was in conformity with Normil Sylvain’s suggestion that artists and poets seek out inspiration in the natural environment in order to praise the beauty of the land[3].
Around the same time, and again in the context of defining a Haitian identity, Dr. Jean Price-Mars, an influential intellectual, asked that his peers consider the values preserved by the peasantry for, as he put it, "they are what represent the true Haitian culture". Such a statement, although not really explicit, inferred that the Haitian peasant was an African transposed in the Americas, perpetrating ancestral traits from generations to generations[4]. Abiding to Price Mars’ request, some artists, associated with poets and novelists of the indigenist movement, ventured into candid renderings of the daily activities of men and women from rural areas. Influenced by their education, their social background and the dominant ideas of the time, these artists painted from the heart, giving form to the dignity of these rural populations, hence exalting a feeling of national pride. Their art is seen today as superficial, giving priority to elements of style rather that content. Yet, considered in their context, the stylistic choices of these artists are justified, on the one hand, by the taste of the Haitian art buying public for European traditional styles and, on the other, by the example set by an American artist, William E.Scott [5], who visited and worked in Haiti in the early 1930’s. Scott’s work showed the undeniable influence of his artistic training in France beneath the bold colours that came out of his Haitian experience. Scott’s work was at the time strongly criticized by his fellow African Americans. They commented that he lacked personal orientation[6] insinuating that "he was not black enough".. Shortly after the Centre d’Art of Port-au-Prince revealed what came to be known as the "primitive art" of Haiti, the same criticism came to these indigenists who, as a mean of expressing their
identity, were paying tribute to the land and its people.
The fact of the matter is that the presence of American troops during the occupation of Haiti had brought to the U.S. certain images of the Haitian population, focussing mainly on its practice of voodoo. Because of that, and because the population is basically of African descent, most Americans were inclined to believe that Haitian culture was essentially African, except for a small elite that prided itself of its European ancestry. Thus, all other possible influences were discarded, that of the indigenous Indian populations among others. This idea was still dominant when the Centre d’
Art opened in Port-au-Prince in 1944, at the initiative of an American artist named Dewitt Peters. The idea prevailed even though it was noted that, Haitian artists emerging from the lower social classes, and that came to the Centre were essentially painters and not sculptors, as one would expect. Indeed, sculptors were scarce among Haitians in general[7].Such a discrepancy was overlooked however, since these artists were adepts
of a religion whose fundamental principles are rooted in regions of West Africa. In spite of this association with the black continent, the paintings by Haitian "primitives" did not seem to carry an African character, not even in works intended as images of voodoo deities.
It is important to understand that because voodoo practices were ostracized since colonial times, voodooists came to adopt iconographic forms of Catholicism, forms that were widely available since the 1860 concordat with Rome. In this process, images of saints came to generate new symbols and thus became prototypes of voodoo iconography. At first, to reproduce these images, the self-taught artists used a simple method dominated by a
subjective style of drawing. Contrarily to the rigor required in tracing the emblematic drawings known as vèvè, the rendering of figures eluded such strict rules and gradually moved toward a reinforced naturalism. With their acquired skills, some artists abandoned the prototype to create personal symbols, figures often disconcerting for the uninitiated. Such was the case of painters like Hector Hyppolite and Lafortune Felix.
In 1942 was created in Port-au-Prince the Bureau of Ethnology. Its founder and first director was Jacques Romain a Haitian graduate from the Sorbonne in Paris and from Colombia University in New York. The Bureau was the first national institution to develop an interest in ancient Caribbean cultures and in voodoo. In its collection comprised mainly of ancient Indian artefacts, there were voodoo ritual objects rescued from the destruction of temples during the anti-superstition campaigns of the1930’s and 40’s. These anonymous rough iron pieces called assein[8] suggested that some tradition of sculpture existed in Haiti but developed only in a religious context. A sculptor like Georges Liautaud was obviously pursuing that tradition[9]. Also in the collection of the Bureau were a number of African statuettes and masks that the Cuban painter Carlos Henriquez sketched in formal studies[10] during one of his stays in Port-au-Prince. He also did a series of drawings suggesting rituals, drawings in which African statuettes were represented. It is interesting to compare one of these with a charcoal drawing of Lucien Price of the same period.
Although different, these two works show a common inspiration: that of traditional African sculptures and their reference to its magical and legendary value.
The Cuban vanguard artists who, in 1945, visited Haiti and exhibited there,had contact with European artists of the early 20th century. Some, like Wifredo Lam were close to intellectuals of the Negritude movement like the poet Aimé Césaire from Martinique. As a result of this, they came to re-evaluate African sculptures as elements of their ancestry. These could be associated with the salve trade in which masks and statuettes crossed silently the ocean in the memory of those men and women who came to toil in the plantations of the New World. Such an art form has since been regarded as a major African component of, an important source of inspirationn for what was developing as "the culture of the Caribbean[11]".
Lucien Price(1915-1963) was a Haitian artist who made a living as a coffee expert. To carry out his profession, he travelled throughout the countryside and was able to confirm the indigenist premise that the Haitian peasant had preserved many African traditions[12]. The idea of a Haitian culture impressed with an African heritage was thus very present in the mind of Lucien Price, in spite of his upbringing in an aristocratic family, nurtured by European fashions. Price’s work had a strong social content, and his commentaries were conveyed by the attitude of the characters he sketched during his travels.
Yet, his portraits and genre scenes, much like those of his contemporaries of the indigenist movement, were too documentary and did not truly provide the necessary terms that would allow him to express an African heritage. He thus ridded himself of his academic training, and free from all aesthetic doubts, he produced a series of studies, at first, using the mask as a formal element rooted Africa, and that his art could stem from. Because of the immediate association of the mask with the face and thus with one’s personality, Prince was able to transform in non-narrative works some of
the physical and spiritual misery he witnessed in his rapport with the proletariat.
In deed, in this charcoal drawing, one can appreciate de angularity of the forms, the muted expression of the mask and highlights obtained by the technique of scraping commonly used by Max Ernst. In a work like this one was accomplished the indigenist ideal according to which Haitian artists should represent Haitian realities using the most advanced techniques. In further studies, Price dealt with the mask, as Wifredo Lam would have done, that is in compositions where planes come close and cut across each other.Later, as Price was moving toward abstraction, facial details became more and more stylized. At the end of the 1940’s, when he irreversibly adopted the abstract expression, Price created his series: Symphonies and Rhythm: Song of Africa, telling of his complex personality, his double heritage as a Haitian mulatto. In these drawings, he expressed pictorially what the Haitian poet, Leon Laleau once wrote:" …do you feel the supreme suffering and despair of having to reclaim with words from France this heart that came to me from Senegal[13]".
In his series Rhythm: songs of Africa, Price moved away from a realistic representation of the drum, which would be that of his "primitive" contemporaries. Instead, he translated into lines the rhythm of the drum, this ritual instrument that has passed, practically unchanged, through centuries, from Africa to Haiti.
Lucien Price had many students in his art classes at the Centre d’art of Port-au-Prince but he had few followers. One of them, Max Pinchinat (1925-1985), early on in his carer, had come to the conclusion that the academic tradition was unsuitable for the expression of the Haitian temperament. In his opinion, this was so simply because of this African
heritage that precludes him from having what he called "la raison raisonnante" meaning the Cartesian, the western way of thinking. It is interesting to see how, through the work of Picasso, Pinchinat grasped the African aesthetic to express the substance of his personality: a profound romantic nature. In doing so, he had gone in a direction opposite to those artists that Andre Breton called the "devourers of the primitive arts of
Africa"[14].
Much younger than Pinchinat is Jean Claude Garoute (1935) better known as Tiga. Tiga and his companion Maude Rombart had waged war against Haitian art interested in modernism. They argued that, complying too often with trends brought in from the outside, their contemporaries seemed hesitant and lacked confidence in their own values. They were therefore turning away from what could give authenticity to their art. Tiga’s participation in the Negro Arts Festival of Dakar (Senegal) in 1966 was determinant in outlining a new orientation. While there, he most certainly realized the
efforts sustained by President Leopold Sedar Senghor to bring about a generation of Senegalese artists who would draw their inspiration from the concept of the Negritude, defined as the comprehensive cultural values of Negro communities around the world. Tiga surely witnessed the changes, the dynamics, the research undertaken to come up with new aesthetic references aimed at liberating the Senegalese creativity from European trends. Upon his return to Haiti, he joined forces with another young artist, Patrick Vilaire, to create a cultural centre to which they gave the name Poto-mitan [15]. Their objective was to take their contemporaries, and most importantly future generations, into a profound and systematic exploration of the cultural values of voodoo and an application of its philosophical principles. The mask, as an object earlier considered by Lucien Price, reappeared in Tiga’s paintings.
Natural forms, feathers, are assembled in something that, in spite of some abstract elements, is clearly anthropomorphic. As such, and based on previous experiences, we see it as a mask. Comparing it with Lucien Price’s first masks, we realize that Tiga’s use of the object implies no other intention than that of its representation. It is a pure artistic motif. In
another painting, inspired by a boa mask of the Congo region, one can sense an interesting combination of traditional African earth tone with touches of the exuberant colours of the Haitian "primitives". The colour is applied here in a way that not only suggests scarification but also contributes to convey the carved aspect of the object.
Although Tiga abandoned the representations of mask, per se, he did maintain the use of facial features in his paintings and later in his "soleil brulés[16]" in a way that suggest a state of transition and change, as if we, the viewers, were witnessing a metamorphosis.
Poto-Mitan never reached the point of an environment with an organized structure, like that of the surrealist movement for example. It had little impact on its adherents, unlike Tiga himself, who will be very influential in the art of a younger member of the group: Philippe Dodard. Philippe Dodard was very young when he began visiting the artists working at Poto-Mitan. He would stop there every afternoon, on his way home from school. At first, he was impressed by ink drawings that were executed there. Ink was relatively inexpensive and could be used very expressively As a matter of fact, it did become one of Dodard’s favourite mediums when he came to define his own style. Before that, as do most young artists exposed to various influences, he experimented, exploiting the creative possibilities offered by acrylic paint. Blending colours, he created strange atmospheres in places indefinable in time and space. During that same period, curves lines, elegant forms, became very trendy through the work of artists wrongfully grouped under the label "School of Beauty". These artists painted often still and silent images. Dodard adopted their mannerist style and, for a while, filled his canvases with movement and dynamic forms set in immeasurable spaces. This art in essence decorative had a huge commercial success. In 1981, Philippe Dodard had a solo exhibition at Galerie Marassa in Petionville. The show was sold out one hour after its opening.
It’s a known fact that success brings confidence to artists. On the other hand, it can push him into a total submission to the public’s taste. The artist then looses control and falls in the trap of making art for entertainment only. Whether or not Philippe Dodard felt the danger coming, the fact is that his style changed completely. The stylistic change may have been brought about by a long sojourn in the peace and tranquility of a hermitage in mountains outside of Port-au-Prince. His hours of meditation, submitted to the discipline of his guru had given him a different view on life and allowed him to better understand the rapport between mind and body.
There also was the death of his father and increasing responsibilities toward his younger siblings. And so with maturity came growing interest in human conditions. He soon realised that such emotional issues were incompatible with an iconographic program aimed at fashionable circles.
At this point it is necessary to emphasize that Philippe Dodard assumed a multifaceted career as a poet, a painter, a graphic artists, as a sculptor. And because these art all interwoven and related disciplines, his works have
since shown a strong sense of unity.
At first, his liberating shift came about in the silence of his ink drawings: vigorous and daunting black lines contrasting on a pure white background. In this process, man made a triumphant entrance in the work of Philippe Dodard. Later followed the anthropomorphic details such as facemasks and totems, underscored in a 1992 exhibition presented in Miami
and in Pétionville. These visual sources most probably came from his association with Tiga who continuously recommended making reference to ancestral traditions.
The facemask, as a visual symbol has principles established by conventions within a society, in a given time and place. In Dodard’s art, the interpretation of the African mask, at the representational level, is strictly that given by its anthropomorphic features. He thus chooses to give a different meaning to these signs that are conventional in an African
context and that convey social, religious, and moral values. In other words, he uses this traditional style, often depicting ancestors, spirits, mythological beings… to portray contemporary men and women. It’s easy for us to make such an assessment because it results from an objective observation of Dodard’s work. Although it is much more difficult to
determine precisely the motives that led him to make such choices, we can consider some objective facts pertaining to the artist and his oeuvre in an attempt to understand his appropriation of such forms.
One can easily sense that the paintings, drawings and poetry of Philippe Dodard emerge from the same sensitivity. His yoga training had brought him to imagine a world where man lives harmoniously with nature and with each other. If we assume that the artist wanted to create images embodying an unattainable moral and physical ideal by means other than those prescribed by Greek cannons, African art could very well provide him with such means, considering that it traditionally treats the human form as an idealized image. On a few instances, the image painted by Philippe Dodard makes
reference to a particular person. In those rare cases, the idealisation prevails, as in the depiction of ideas that he personifies. There again, an appropriation of African forms could be and was worthwhile. Further, he appreciated the great diversity of these masks and statues, enabling him to find a wide variety of expressions.
We can assume that Dodard sought idealized forms, different figures those of Bernard Séjourné and Jean-René Jérôme who were leading personnalities on the market, at the time. Wanting to set himself apart he may have chosen to
abandon the elegance associated with the work of these two artists to adopt forms that are simpler, rougher. Of course, we can also assume that, much like European artists of the early 20th century, Dodard’s choice of a primitive style was only an out of reach fantasy, a mean to evade what he experienced on a daily basis: an ever degrading social economic and
humanitarian situation.
Such an assumption can be challenge arguing that Dodard needed not going back so far in time and space since Haitian art is known to elude reality. In the 1940’s and 50’s this characteristic was coined "miraculous (or
magical realism" by authors like the Cuban Alejo Carpentier and the Haitian Jacques Stephen Alexis. In the 1970s, this concept was expressed once again visually through the virtuosity of so-called "neo-primitive" artists who created works of graceful appearance contrasting with the straightforward works of their "primitive" predecessors. If such sophisticated images were once part of Dodard’s repertory, as we have seen, they had ceased to be.
Undeniably, Philippe Dodard’s approach of African sculpture was basically aesthetic. Much like European artists of the early 20th century, he was interested in the expressive strength of this art form. Over the years, he became a passionate collector of African art, which in turn gave him the possibility of getting the information first hand. The shape of the figures in Dodard’s art is rarely organic. Instead, he replicates the interplay of flat, convex, and angular forms of the masks and statuettes. Lines are of a foremost importance and are sometimes incised in the thickness of the paint. His colors are applied much like the traditional painted patterns used to complement the design. His images of masks are often so close to the original that one would have no difficulty in placing the original model geographically. The representation of the mask, however, is not an end in itself, like it is in the work of contemporary African American artists. The mask is a face used to express something. If indeed Philippe Dodard tells us of his phantasm, at times sexual, out of many of his works emanates a sense of melancholy.
In a text presenting Philippe Dodard[17], Tiga considered him as an element of the avant-garde. He argues that Dodard dared to make choices, refusing the idea of the "man-machine" enslaved by the consumer society. But more than that, by reconciling contemporary trends with a "profoundly romantic nature" that develops out of a century old memory, Dodard deserves to be considered as part a tradition of great Haitian artists, like Lucien Price, Max Pinchinat and Tiga.
And since the century old memory they all share is also that of people all over the world, his art, much like that of his predecessors, knows no boundaries and can therefore attain the universal, in spite of its particularities.
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliography:
>[1] - Von Sertima Ivan – The voodoo gallery: African presence in ritual
>and art of Haiti, Journal of African Civilisations, November 1981, p. 88.
>[2] - Haiti was occupied by the U.S. from 1914 to 1935.
>[3] - Sylvain, Normil – "Un rêve de George Sylvain", La Revue Indigène,
>july 1927, re-edited by the Fondation Haïtienne de la Santé et de l’
>Éducation, Impression Magique, Port-au-Prince, 1982, p. : 3
>[4] - It has been said, by Senghor among others, that Price Mars was
>influential in the development of the concept of "negritude".
>[5] - Most of the works by the artists found in public collections in the
>U.S. were created during his sojourn in Haiti. Some can still be found in
>Haitian private collections.
>[6] - Locke, Alan Leroy – The New Negro, Albert and Charles Boni, New
>York,
>1925 refered to by various sources.
>[7] - At the time the Centre d’Art opened in Port-au-Prince, only two
>Haitian sculptors were known: Edmond Laforestrie and Normil Charles.
>They
>both had academic training in France. Later came André Dimanche and
>Georges
>Liautaud who had no formal artistic training. .
>
>[8] - They have been compared to iron altar standards (ases) from Dahomey
>by Robert Farris Thompson in The Flash of the Spirit: Haiti’s africanising
>vodun art, Haitian Art, Brooklyn Museum catalogue, Harry N, Abrams, Inc,
>New
>York, 1978, p.30
>[9] - .Although the talent of a Georges Liautaud remains undeniable, an
>explanation to the hustle and bustle around his discovery in the early
>1950’
>s must take into account the scarcity of Haitian sculptors at the time.
>Georges Liautaud was in deed the first blacksmith to be raised to the
>status
>of artist. He did produce metal figurines representing voodoo divinities
>yet, he is mostly known for his rough iron crosses like the one that he had
>done for the cemetery of his home town, Croix de Bouquets, and that
>impressed by talent scouts from the Centre d’art.
>[10] - These drawings are today in the collection of the University of
>Havana and were exhibited in June 1995 as part of a series of cultural
>events that took place in Havana celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
>first visit to Haiti of Cuban vanguard artists during the exhibition of
>their works at the Centre d’Art.
>[11]- see Wood Yolanda - Resignificación plástica de un legado africano:
>la máscara. Catauro. Revista cubana de Antropología. Fundación Fernando
>Ortiz. La Habana. Año 2: No: 3. 2001 pp.: 171-182.
>[12] - this idea was first expressed by Dr. Jean Price-Mars in his
>conferences compiled in Ainsi parla l’oncle
>[13] - Laleau, Leon – Hérédité, from an unpublished poem, in Raphaël
>Berrou and Pradel Pompilus’, Histoire de la Littérature Haïtienne, Vol. 2,
>Editions Caraïbes, Port-au-Prince, 1975, p. 496.
>
>[14] - Breton, André – quoted by Pierre Gaudibert in La planète toute
>entière, Magiciens de la Terre, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, 1989, p. 19,
>note 4.
>[15] - Poto-mitan is the central pole in voodoo temples said to be the
>way
>by which would descend the spirits called upon during ceremonies.
>
>[16] - A technique developed by Tiga in the early 1980’s, by which he
>creates images where the colour, predominantly brown, is treated in order
>to
>create camaiëu effects
>
>[17] - Garoute Jean-Claude Foreword - Philippe Dodard – Soir d’encrier ,
>Collection Galerie Marassa, Pétionville, 1993, p. : 6
>
>Gérald Alexis
>510-1520 boulevard de l'Entente
>Québec, Qc G1S 4Z7
>Canada
>(418) 683-3754
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