Istwa Nou

DeWitt Peters, an American teacher, opened the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince to give trained artists somewhere to meet, since they got almost no encouragement anywhere else. He had not understood that self taught masters were already standing around him. Rigaud Benoit drove his car. Castera Bazile worked in his yard, and Bazile's Baptism of Christ became one of the celebrated murals in Holy Trinity Cathedral. Hector Hyppolite, an oungan from Saint-Marc who said the lwa had told him fame was coming, first caught Peters's eye through the birds and flowers he had painted on the wall of a roadside cafe called Ici la Renaissance. Hyppolite took a one man show in Paris in 1947 and died the following year, which some in Haiti attributed to his neglect of the spirits that had made him. Philome Obin, a Baptist in Cap-Haitien who had been painting the history passing in front of him for decades, sent in his picture of Roosevelt's 1934 visit and went on salary at once. He had never been paid more than a dollar for a painting.

Selden Rodman was codirector of the Centre d'Art in 1949 and he watched the best Haitian canvases leave the country almost before they dried. His proposal was that Haitian painters cover the walls of the buildings going up for the bicentennial. Almost nobody took him up on it, which turned out to be lucky, since most of those buildings are gone. The Episcopal bishop of Haiti, C. Alfred Voegeli, said yes. Money had to be found, the cathedral roof repaired, and a paint chosen that would survive tropical damp. What went onto the walls of Holy Trinity was the New Testament told in the visual language of Haitian country life. Wilson Bigaud painted the wedding at Cana with the wine flowing. The Nativity was set in a Haitian village. The saints wore the clothes of market women and cane cutters. A European religion had arrived in the colony as an instrument of control, and the painters handed it back with Haitian faces on every figure in it.