Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 187

Hyppolite is the only one of these painters who does not pursue the realism which is the goal of his
colleagues. His paintings are impressionistic and full of movement and, alongside the massive solidity of
his central figures, of a fluid and sinuous quality that the others lack. And they are, without for a moment
crossing the primitive borderline into sophistication, much more subtle in colour and treatment. Some
of them are pure decoration and design—rich proliferations of leaves and hibiscus and convolvulus, for
instance, twining round birds' nests that are arbitrarily tilted to display the little family of birds inside, or
the three white eggs, while colibris hover in the threshold of the pistilled trumpets. The ease and the bal-
ance of these sheaves and swags and panoplies of vegetation (painted in Nile green, perhaps, and russet,
maroon and slate grey) must surely derive from the Houngan's expertness in marshalling the complicated
and beautiful maize-flour emblems of the Lwas. A poetical discipline—the poetry of the idyll, the epic or
the Dies Irae —focuses the mood of dream or nightmare into visions of celestial and Hadean significance.
The decorative jungle withdraws to the edge of the picture to reveal the grave and monolithic gods in
conclave, their almond eyes gazing from the sable arcs of their eyebrows with the blank intensity of Byz-
antium and Ethiopia. A black lover stoops beneath a chevron of giant hibiscus towards a reclining Shu-
lamite; a lonely beauty, dusky and Gauguin-limbed, meditates under a pavilion of blossom. Leaf-winged
and tusked, the genii and the cacodæmons carry the implements of magic through the nocturnal sky; a
paladin in a bicorne shoulders his epauletted torso through a loophole of flowers and banners. Cocked-
hatted, too, and lance-bearing, Ogoun and Zaka gallop towards us into battle like the Gemini; and outside
his hut a Negro gesticulates, while from the twirling palm trees overhead, a great green coconut falls and
hangs embedded for a moment in the mysterious air.
As his paintings were inspired and their execution guided by the Lwas, Hyppolite's conviction of his
genius was free of the taint of ordinary vanity. Picture after picture by these Haitian artists was placed
before us in the Centre d'Art , and his soft voice from behind would aid our deliberations in tones of
detachment. Each time that one of his own pictures appeared, a thoughtful murmur would escape him,
' Ça, c'est bon; c'est twès bon ,' or ' Achetez plutôt ça, c'est un Hyppolite ….' Turning round, we would
encounter the features of Theodore Gumbril. The very faint smile hovering round the lips and behind the
gold-rimmed spectacles was only just detectable.
The art form of primitive painters is directly comparable to the genius for description and story-telling
that thrives among the illiterate peasants of Spain and Italy and Greece; a brilliance inherited from in-
numerable generations which dissipates itself at once when they learn to read and write. The virtue van-
ishes, and their conversation declines into chatter, or a tissue of clichés, or awkward silence. What, then,
is the future of the younger of these primitive painters? Adaptability is a dominant characteristic of the
Negro race, and the comparative prosperity secured for them by the recognition of their work brings them
into contact with more sophisticated trends. There must be some danger of their experimenting with the
pompier art forms that receive the approbation of the Haitian élite , and of being strangled into inertia or
tenth-rate painting by the pot-hooks and hangers, the copperplate and the copy-book maxims of academic
painting. But a much greater peril, because it is so much more akin to their own plastic feeling, lies in
the work of the great modern painters of Europe. What is to prevent them from imitating, say, Matisse, or
straggling into the rearguard of the vast armies spellbound in mimicry of the different periods of Picasso?
How can the fatal apple of knowledge be withheld? If their experimental curiosity or their mimetism
impel them to new departures, it would plainly be impossible and wrong to expect them to pass the rest
of their painting careers as stuffed naifs . Yet what should their future developments be? In their present
formula (which, within its limitations, is one of the most exciting discoveries of the century) they are