As a Cock Crows

In the basement room of a Third Avenue gallery last week hung the second Manhattan exhibition of contemporary Haitian art. Done by houseboys, chauffeurs and voodoo drummers in their spare time, the paintings were as uninhibited as they were crude. Their bright automobile-enamel colors and outlandish but occasionally forceful draftsmanship looked good to many a critic, for they made a pleasant and refreshing contrast with the alfalfa-dry fare ground out by most professional moderns. "These fellows," said one enthusiastic gallerygoer, "paint as a cock crows."

That essential freshness had been carefully guarded by an American painter named DeWitt Peters, who went to Haiti six years ago to teach English and remained to open the first and only art center in Port-au-Prince. To Peters' surprise, Haitians flocked to the new Centre d'Art with pictures for his approval. Even more surprising was the fact that half the pictures they showed him were interesting. Peters supplied his proteges with painting materials, judiciously refrained from criticizing their work. Eventually he teamed up with American Poet Selden Rodman, whose Renaissance in Haiti, published last year, helped trumpet the new primitives abroad.

The Haitian primitives had some extraordinary subject matter to draw on--tropical market places, voodoo rites and deities, scenes from the black nation's bloody history. But the most effective pictures in last week's show were those that made no effort to be beautiful and that sacrificed the esoteric for the immediate. Prefete Dufaut's childlike Harbor at Jacmel was as flat, bright and familiar as any postcard, and Wilson Bigaud's self-portrait behind bars had the harshness of a flashbulb photo. Even these, standouts though they were, lacked most of the qualities that critics associate with good painting. Yet, as Poet Rodman suggested in his book, the qualities they did possess were the ones most lacking in modern art and most essential to its future: "Harmony, simplicity, spontaneity."

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