Haiti and the Art of Paul-Henri Bourguignon

Abstract

n the spring of 1947, the Belgian artist Paul-Henri Bourguignon (1906-88) arrived in Haiti for a brief stay. He remained for fi fteen months. What he found there af- fected his work deeply, and did so for the rest of his life. He had traveled widely before the war, exploring, beyond his own region, what were then far away and exotic places: Spain, Corsica, Yugoslavia, North Africa. He had felt deprived of the freedom to wander—among other freedoms—during the time of the German occupation. Now he craved the skies and the colors of the South, and the pleasure of depaysement that he had found in alien lands. When the invitation to visit Haiti had come, he had been eager to accept. Given postwar conditions, it took a year or more to fi nd transport, in this case a French luxury liner, converted into a hospital ship, and not yet returned to its previous glory. As told by the narrator of Bourguignon's posthumous novel, The Greener Grass, this is how it had happened: (I)t was Richard who had urged me to come here. Blue skies, green mountains, no threat of war, he said. it's a French-speaking country. You'll fi nd plenty to write about. And to paint, too. He did not tell me about the squalor and the misery. (3) In the present age of a globalized and shrinking world, it is diffi cult to remember how large the world was more than fi fty years ago. Even though he had gotten to know Richard in the 1930s, living in Belgium, Bourguignon had learned little about Haiti. And in spite of the long involvement of the United States with Haiti, in this country too, few people knew much about what seemed to be a very faraway place, indeed. When I came to Columbus from Haiti, where I had spent the year of 1947-48 to teach anthropology at the Ohio State University, some people thought I had been to Tahiti.