Intermittent Lightning

For centuries, Haiti has been all but barren of art, but today it burgeons with earnest and wonderfully original painters. Their greatest accomplishment: the embellishing of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral at Port-au-Prince with murals, some of which are reproduced on the opposite page.

The murals are painted in the artists' own terms--those of a Negro people with a hungry, vine-choked, voodoo-ridden way of life. Their work is not purely religious because no art ever is. The radiance of God and the saints can be pictured only through the dark windows of human experience.

Highbrow tourists have praised the murals to the skies; many local churchgoers are bewildered by them. Some of the artists say they are satisfied with their work; a troubled few say, "C'e pas faute moin [It's not my fault]."

Sugary Chromos. Resident Bishop Alfred Voegeli picked the subjects to be painted. Two American directors of Haiti's Centre d'Art, DeWitt Peters and Selden Rodman, assigned and supervised the work. The artists were bound to be influenced by the sugary religious chromos imported from Europe and tacked up in thousands of Haitian homes. Rodman kept insisting that they also incorporate Haitian scenes of the sort they generally paint. The result is an arresting but badly integrated mixture of "pious" and "native" art, made vital by rich colors and the intermittent lightning of individual inspiration.

Rigaud Benoit made the Christ child in his Nativity a mulatto out of deference to Rodman, though his personal opinion is that "God is white, and the Devil is black, or else dark red, like Damballa [a voodoo deity]." Philome Obin prayed every day before going to work on the center panel above the altar, stuck a chromo cliche "Eye of God" in one corner and painted a strangely feminine, death-rigid Christ crucified in a Haitian street. Castera Bazile, the only one of the Haitian muralists with a monumental sense of figure composition, used a similar street scene for his Ascension, made his angels look like flower petals in a whirlwind.

Living Roots. Some critics call Prefet DuFaut's Temptation unconsciously Byzantine; others can see no sign of Christian elements in it. Wilson Bigaud, who attends voodoo rites more often than church, made his Wedding at Cana a lively Haitian party dominated by a Christ with a weak, drained face and a mighty hand ("He is praying that the miracle will be a success," Bigaud says). Leontus' Annunciation, boldly composed to fill a difficult, wedge-shaped corner, has a full measure of the urgency that marks the cathedral's best murals.

Religious art, like religion itself, has its roots in urgency and its blossoms in serenity. Small serenity may be found in these murals, but the living roots are there. Considering the sorry state of modern religious art, that is a good deal.

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