THE SCHOOL OF BEAUTY

The Art and Culture of Haiti

Haiti is a country born before its time, holding on to a glorious past but ill-equipped to deal with the present. Its people embody determination in the face of overwhelming poverty and despair. The secret of our national resiliency can be found in our culture and art. Our culture is our source of strength and our art has chronicled the beauty and the often-violent struggles of our people. After years of unspeakable misery and humiliation, our art sometimes seems like the only thing that we have left.

The world got its first glimpse of Haitian painters in the 1940s, when Dewitt Peters, an American artist and English teacher living in Haiti, along with others, founded the Centre d'Art. The Centre d'Art greatly contributed to the development of Haitian painting and is credited with establishing an international appreciation for Haitian art. Although Centre d'Art promoted both schooled and unschooled artists as well as a variety of styles, many would come to associate Haitian art with the naïve, self-taught artists whose works have amazed the art world since the 1940s.

Haitian art would acquire a hard-to-shake label of being little more than naïve or primitive paintings which mostly non-Haitian champions have made internationally famous. But Haitian art is as mesmerizing and colorful as its people, with cues taken from our rich heritage and expressed in a bold, contemporary language that is uniquely Haitian: magical, mystical, brash and impulsive. In 1804 Haiti became the world's first black republic. Three years later, King Henry Christophe, a hero of the revolution, was already preoccupied with the idea of creating a fine-art institute. By 1850 the emperor Soulouque had founded the Imperial Academy of Drawing and Painting. These efforts attempted to replicate French and European ways of life. The seeds of modern art were planted with the Indigenous movement in the 1920s, which sought to honor Haitian cultural values and African roots in defiance of the American occupation.

Of all the movements associated with Haitian modern art, the one initiated by Bernard Sejourne and Jean-Rene Jerome, often referred to as the School of Beauty, is one of the most significant. Certainly none is as intriguing or as controversial. In the French-English catalog "Double Resonance: Bernard Sejourne & Jean-Rene Jerome," art historian Michel Philippe Lerebours details the emergence of the School of Beauty: "The 1960s were rough for Haitian painting after the euphoria of the 50s. The mostly American tourist clientele...that supported the primitive movement without reservation had fled Haiti's shores frightened by the political situation." The repressive dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier had "forced [artists] to keep silent or simply to whisper discreet and colorless words." Painting was able to survive because a local "buying public originating mostly from the elite in power rather than the traditional aristocracy could neither accept the awkwardness of the primitives nor the rashness of contemporary painting." This new elite, a middle and upper class which had begun to assert its influence with the Indigenous movement and had grown in strength during the professed "black power" reign of Dumarsais Estime (1946-1950) and through that of the Duvaliers (1957-1986), "had to have a reassuring art, easy to read, that could embellish and brighten life and help forget the horrors of the moment." Out of this climate a number of artists from the 70s would unveil their new vision of beauty.