Haiti's Best

When is art "primitive"? A gallerygoer might answer, "Half the time." Roughly half the contemporary shows in U.S. galleries seem to prove that the exhibiting artists had no formal training at all. Reason: moderns of many schools conceal all trace of academic tradition in their work, as if it were sissy. Last week Manhattan saw an exhibition of less fortunate primitives--men lacking art training and cut off from the art of the ages. It beat the self-made, big-city primitives hollow.

The show, at Gallery "G," was somewhat grandiloquently billed as "Twenty Masterpieces of Haitian Painting." It included few, if any, masterpieces. Yet Haiti's primitives have come a long, long way in the eleven years since the founding of Port-au-Prince's Centre d'Art, which supplies untrained local artists with painting material and a tourist market (TIME, June 7). The two most impressive painters in the exhibition have in fact achieved a high degree of skill and sophistication while keeping their roots deep in Haiti's voodoo-impregnated soil.

Wilson Bigaud's Mambo (see cut) is a complex scene--showing the ceremonial feeding of a sacrificial cock--composed with brilliant simplicity. Only 22, and hungry for further knowledge of art, Bigaud leads the field in Haiti. He borrowed his not-at-all-primitive stipple technique ready-made from a book of Van Gogh reproductions that U.S. Critic Selden Rodman gave him last summer.

Haiti's Enguerrand Gourgue specializes in pictures of black magic, painted in a silk-smooth, sharply detailed manner. His Marine Landscape is a nightmare spread of swimming things with animal and human heads. In a highly authoritative book on Haiti out last week (Haiti: the Black Republic; Devin-Adair; $5), Critic Rodman rightly says that Gourgue, like Bigaud, "can be called a primitive only in terms of his origins and lack of formal training. If, as he now tells clients, Gourgue was tormented by demons until he painted them, he has a good and very convincing memory."

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