Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [48]
“I mean paintings,” Miller answers, chuckling. “Paintings.”
“No, no no,” counters Basquiat. “Just, you know, typical prints you find in any home in America. Well, some homes in America. Nothing really special.”
If young Basquiat had had any Haitian primitives on his walls—paintings or otherwise—one of them may have been the Haitian painter and Vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, a spiritual forebear.
Legend has it that when Hector Hyppolite was a young man, a spirit came to him in his sleep and told him that one day he would become a famous artist. Born into a family of Vodou priests, Hyppolite was no stranger to the spirits nor they to him. While waiting for this prophecy to materialize, Hyppolite traveled to Cuba to work in the sugarcane fields, then went as far as Ethiopia on a freighter, and later, when he returned to Haiti, apprenticed himself to a shoemaker, painted Vodou temples, houses, and furniture, and sketched colorful postcards that he sold to occupying U.S. marines and then painted the barroom door that would eventually change his life.
In 1943, the American watercolorist Dewitt Peters was driving through the tourist-friendly village of Montrouis with his friend the Haitian novelist Philippe Thoby-Marcelin when they spotted the colorfully painted birds and flowers on the “Ici la Renaissance” saloon door. Peters was about to open an art school and gallery (Le Centre d’Art) in downtown Port-au-Prince and was on the lookout for such talent. Enter Hector Hyppolite, who was offered the opportunity to move to a middle-class neighborhood in Port-au-Prince to concentrate solely on his art, but instead chose to settle in a seaside slum called Trou de Cochon (Pig’s Hole), where he ran a Vodou temple and a boat-building business and in three years produced more than six hundred canvases.
Hyppolite’s early fans and collectors were legend. André Breton, the father of French Surrealism, declared that Hyppolite could revolutionize modern art. The Tony Award-winning dancer and choreographer Geoffrey Holder created a ballet inspired by Hyppolite’s life, which the Alvin Ailey Dance Company still performs. A young Truman Capote, in a December 1948 Harper’s Bazaar magazine article, lavished praise on Hyppolite’s work even while calling the artist ugly and “monkey-thin.”
Hyppolite’s looks fared a lot better with the American art collector Selden Rodman, who worked alongside Dewitt Peters and saw Hyppolite often at the Centre d’Art. Rodman could also have been describing young Basquiat when he wrote of Hyppolite, “His wiry hair parted in the middle and shaved around the ears, flared sidewise untrimmed with the effect of a dusty, magnetized crown. . . . [C]ould he be descended from one of those Arawak sand painters who inspired the vèvè?”
The vèvè is a ceremonial drawing, an outlined emblem that is meant to call forth spirits. It is often sketched on the ground, with cornmeal, before Vodou ceremonies. Each Vodou spirit or lwa—spelled loa in older texts—is identified with a particular vèvè. The vèvè of the goddess of love, Erzulie Freda, is usually a heart. The vèvè for Baron Samedi, the guardian of the cemetery, is a cross on top of a tombstone. Ogoun, the god of war, is represented by linked squares, which suggest a protective shield. Legba, master of the crossroads, is a crossroad with singularly embellished direction markers. The vèvè sketches are usually transient—they vanish underfoot at the ceremonies—except when sewn on sequined ceremonial flags that have stepped so far out of their ritual realm that they are now used on trendy designer purses and clothes. Like some of Hyppolite’s early work, a few of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s drawings and paintings bring to mind vèvès.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, twelve years after Hyppolite’s death, Basquiat’s childhood could not have been more different from Hyppolite’s. Hyppolite was born dirt poor in a rural section of Haiti. Basquiat was born into a middle-class immigrant family in urban America.