Haiti's Glorious Art: A Collector's Memoir

The following essay was written and generously shared with me, Myriam Nader Salomon, by Tim Lavelle, a longtime friend of the gallery whose connection to Haitian art began during a CARE posting in Port-au-Prince in 1977. I am honored to share his and his late wife Cristina's story here, with their kind permission

Haitian art is a vibrant tradition born from Taino heritage, African diaspora spirituality, and European academic technique. Centered around bold, luminous colors and rhythmic compositions, the movement exploded globally in the 1940s via Le Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince, which elevated self-taught masters like Hector Hyppolite, Philome Obin, metal sculptor Georges Liautaud, and a great many others.

Roots: From Taino Petroglyphs to European Academies

The long history of Haitian art began with Taino pre-Columbian roots, consisting of cave petroglyphs and ceremonial pottery. Following independence in 1804, leaders like Henry Christophe and Alexandre Petion established European-style art academies, where classically trained artists focused on historical portraiture and landscapes. Despite the violent rupture of independence, the cultural link to Europe remained.

The African cultural legacy runs just as deep. From ancient Dahomey on the west coast of Africa, Haiti received tall, powerful assotor drums, iron altars, sacred rattles, and pegged drums, all of which Haitians creatively transformed. From Congo came the tradition of minkisi, spiritualized medicine bundles wrapped in textiles and topped with feathers. In Haiti these became "pacquets congo," a fixture on vodou altars.

The Renaissance of the 1940s

The great leap forward for Haitian art began with the opening of Le Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince by American watercolorist DeWitt Peters in 1943, strongly supported by Haitian intellectuals including Maurice Borno, Albert Mangones, Geo Remponeau, Jean Chenet, and Gerald Bloncourt. Le Centre quickly created a commercial market for self-taught painters depicting everyday Caribbean life, lush landscapes, and Vodou spirituality with unparalleled spontaneity. It sparked the renowned Haitian naive art movement and launched the careers of artists like Hector Hyppolite and Rigaud Benoit.

DeWitt Peters had originally wanted to teach painting, drawing, and ceramics to a people he found strangely without a pictorial tradition. That changed when he traveled to Montrouis and discovered a houngan, or Vodou priest, who had painted furniture-enamel pictures with a chicken-feather brush and hung them on the door of his bar, which bore the prophetic name "Ici la Renaissance." That houngan was Hector Hyppolite, who in the three remaining years before his death produced hundreds of works inspired by Vodou cosmology and became the founding master of Haitian painting.

By 1947, buyers were streaming into Haiti to acquire art for museums and private collections, a surge accelerated by French Surrealist Andre Breton's 1945 visit and his own encounter with Hyppolite. Decades later, in December 1975, the French novelist and cultural theorist Andre Malraux visited the peasant artist commune of Saint-Soleil in Soissons-la-Montagne and devoted a chapter to the movement in his book L'Intemporel, giving Haitian peasant artists renewed international standing.

The Cathedral Murals: Haitian Art's Jewel in the Crown

Among Haitian art's most treasured achievements are the murals of the Episcopal Cathedral Sainte Trinite in downtown Port-au-Prince. Fourteen interior murals once depicted Black figures in biblical scenes, painted between 1950 and 1951 by Philome Obin, Castera Bazile, Rigaud Benoit, Gabriel Leveque, Adam Leontus, Wilson Bigaud, Jasmin Joseph, and Prefete Dufaut, under the guidance of DeWitt Peters and Selden Rodman. The cathedral was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake, with only three murals surviving. As of 2026, rebuilding efforts remain in the planning stage.

Haiti's Storied Galleries

Long before we arrived in Haiti with CARE in 1977, three galleries had already shaped the market for Haitian art. Galerie Nader, opened in 1966 by Georges S. Nader in Port-au-Prince's busy Marche de Fer, was where my wife Cristina and I learned so much from its gracious founder, who recognized Haitian artists as visual chroniclers of the country's revolutionary spirit, Vodou symbolism, and everyday resilience. His daughter, Myriam Nader Salomon, carries that vision forward today through her gallery in New York.

El-Saieh Gallery, founded by former big-band musician Issa El Saieh, became a second essential home for Haitian naive art. By the late 1960s, El Saieh had more than fifty artists working with him regularly, providing them the financial stability to focus on their craft. Galerie Monnin, opened downtown in 1956 by Swiss-born Roger Monnin, later expanded to Petionville and built a substantial collection of art naif alongside an art school.

Artists We Were Fortunate to Know

Over our years in Haiti, Cristina and I met remarkable artists in person. Laurent Casimir would arrive at our house with paintings in a canvas bag, more concerned with the frame we chose than the painting itself. We spent an afternoon with Lyonel Laurenceau at his nineteenth-century gingerbread house on Rue Lalue, and each came away with one of his vibrant works.

We also visited the immensely talented Jean-Rene Jerome at his studio in the Port-au-Prince neighborhood of Cite Soleil, where hundreds of canvases surrounded him, some set aside for months until he felt he had "gotten it right." And we came to know Andre Pierre, a celebrated Vodou houngan and painter, who greeted visitors bearing a bottle of Haitian rum by sprinkling a portion of it around his hut to honor the spirits before the visit began.

Vodou and the Haitian Spirit

Vodou, from the Fon word for "spirit" or "god," teaches the existence of a transcendent creator, Bondye, served through spirits called lwas who offer guidance and protection. There is no concept of an absolute devil or hell in Vodou; evil is understood as a force of anger or imbalance rather than a cosmic being. A well-known saying holds that Haiti's population is 85 percent Roman Catholic, 15 percent Protestant, and 100 percent Vodou, a reflection of how deeply the tradition threads through daily life.

Living in the Musseau neighborhood on the road toward Petionville from 1977 to 1979, Cristina and I would watch torch-lit processions and hear conga drums pace all-night ceremonies at a nearby temple, a memory that has stayed with us across the decades.

Afterword

Haitian art remains a complex and glorious mosaic, intermingling centuries of African roots with Indigenous, American, and European influence, capturing, as only art can, the profound vitality of a culture and its history. Despite the hardships Haiti faces today, it is worth remembering how the all-Black Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue legion helped save the American Patriot Army at the second siege of Savannah in 1779, and how the young Republic of Haiti sheltered and equipped Simon Bolivar during the Latin American wars of independence.

From so many perspectives, Haitian art remains a joy to behold, cherish, and learn from.

With gratitude to Tim Lavelle for sharing this story of himself and his late wife CristinaWith gratitude to Tim Lavelle for sharing this story of himself and his late wife Cristina