Istwa Nou

Work began on the walls of Holy Trinity in the autumn of 1951, and it set the trained artists upstairs at the Centre d'Art against the self taught painters downstairs. Somebody scrawled a line on the Centre's privy wall telling the advanced men above that they had not yet reached the level of a preliminary primitive. In the cathedral a parishioner looked at Toussaint Auguste's Adam and Eve and said the Creator had done better the first time. Tourists asked why the only white face in Philome Obin's Last Supper belonged to Judas. Prefete Duffaut put a voluptuous Ezili into a church and the faithful objected. One night three unfinished murals were streaked with pitch. Bishop Voegeli answered every complaint about conflicting images of Christ by pointing out that there were already four gospels. The same energy went into iron. Georges Liautaud, a blacksmith at Croix-des-Bouquets who had been decorating cemetery crosses for years, cut flat figures out of oil drums and founded Haitian metal sculpture.

Work on the walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral began in the autumn of 1951 and immediately opened a rivalry at the Centre d'Art between the trained painters upstairs and the self taught painters downstairs. Philomé Obin, Castera Bazile, Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud and others covered the walls with a biblical cycle set entirely in Haiti: a black Christ, a Haitian Nativity, a Last Supper in which the only white figure in the room is Judas. Alongside it Liautaud was cutting sculpture out of oil drums, Jasmin Joseph was making figures that look Etruscan, and André Pierre was painting as an oungan rather than about one. The murals were destroyed in the 2010 earthquake and three fragments were saved. Everything in that paragraph is one argument stated in paint: the sacred is local, the artist need not be trained abroad, and the betrayer is the one who came from outside.