1951–1960s: (The Cathedral Walls and Beyond: The Primitives vs.

1951–1960s: (The Cathedral Walls and Beyond: The Primitives vs. the Advanced, Judas the Only White Man, Liataud’s Metal Art, Jasmin Joseph’s Etruscan Figures, and André Pierre the Oungan Iconographer): The work on the walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral began in fall 1951, developing new rivalries between the trained artists upstairs and the primitives downstairs at the Centre d’Art. A tryout on the Centre’s walls had already produced a bitter contest — on the Centre d’Art privy appeared a derisive pencil scrawl in a primitive hand declaring that the artists upstairs who called themselves advanced were not even preliminary primitives. At the cathedral, one communicant, on seeing Toussaint Auguste’s Adam and Eve, remarked that surely the Creator could have done better than that in the beginning; tourists wondered why the only white man in Philomé Obin’s Last Supper was Judas Iscariot; Préfète Duffaut’s inclusion of a luscious Mètrès Ezili shocked the faithful; and one night vandals — some say disgruntled rivals — streaked three partly finished murals with pitch. Bishop Voegeli never wavered, replying to complaints about varying conceptions of Christ that after all they had four versions of the Gospel. Haitian artistic talent surfaced in many forms beyond painting — Haiti’s mahogany begged to be carved rather than consumed in charcoal fires, and to coffee tables and salad bowls were added the vibrant peopled landscapes of Odilon Perrier and the driftwood sea monsters of André Dimanche. A Croix-des-Bouquets blacksmith, Georges Liautaud, who for years had added Vodou flourishes to his cemetery crosses, went on to produce weird and wonderful two-dimensional figures and founded a new school of metal art. The American sculptor Jason Seley discovered Jasmin Joseph, then a shy twelve-year-old, whose delicate yet apocalyptic figures seemed strangely Etruscan — Joseph molded the ventilating grilles inset with figurines that replaced windows in the cathedral and in the Théâtre de Verdure, the latter the work of architect Albert Mangonès. Among later names, André Pierre — an oungan iconographer who for years had depicted the lwa on ounfò throughout the Cul-de-Sac — was persuaded in 1961 to sell his work, mostly kwi, through the Episcopal cathedral’s gift shop; had he not had an earlier misunderstanding with the Centre d’Art, he would almost certainly have been one of the muralists. The Haitian art movement — from the primitives’ triumphant privy-wall manifesto through Obin’s Judas casting as the sole white figure at the Last Supper to Liautaud’s transformation of cemetery ironwork into sculpture — constituted a sustained act of cultural self-determination in which every aesthetic choice was simultaneously a political statement: to paint the Gospel in Haitian colors was to claim ownership of a universal narrative, to make Judas white was to invert the racial hierarchy that had governed Haitian consciousness since 1804, and to transform Vodou cemetery crosses into internationally recognized art was to accomplish at the level of aesthetics what Bois Caïman had accomplished at the level of politics — the transmutation of an African spiritual tradition into an instrument of liberation.