Did you know that a piece of Haitian art history resides in New Hampshire’s Upper Valley region? This was news to me, too, until a few years ago.
After my parents died, I became curious about a painting that had hung on their living room wall for 60 years. I knew they had bought it in Port-au-Prince in December 1956 (a decade-delayed honeymoon), and remembered my father saying it was a portrait of the artist’s wife, but I couldn’t spot the signature. Then, on the internet I stumbled across a sketch that had sold at a Florida auction in 2008: It was a study for “my” portrait. Once I knew the artist’s name – Roland Dorcély – I began piecing together the story of his life, never suspecting it would lead back to New Hampshire.
Dorcély was one of Haiti’s preeminent modernist artists of the last century. Like most Haitians, his parents descended from slaves. His father was a butcher at the city’s central market, where his mother sold vegetables. The family was poor but ambitious.
In 1937, thanks to a scholarship, Dorcély enrolled in the country’s most prestigious school, the Institut Saint Louis de Gonzague, established in 1890 by Catholic priests from France. Years later, when one of his paintings entered the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA), he wrote to the museum: “I rebelled against this puritanical, suffocating education. Of course, it would be silly to attribute everything I am doing today to the reactions I had as an adolescent, but there’s no doubt that every time I finish a painting, I feel a little bit freer.”
At 16, Dorcély started to attend classes at the “Centre d’Art” in downtown Port-au-Prince. The center was the 1944 brainchild of a Californian, watercolorist Dewitt Peters, who had arrived in Haiti the previous year to teach English under the U.S. government’s “Good Neighbor” program. Peters, however, quickly abandoned the classroom to devote himself to the development of Haitian art.
Peters and a sidekick, the American writer/photographer Selden Rodman, single-mindedly promoted Haiti’s naïve (or “primitive”) artists. They believed that the appeal of the primitives to American buyers depended at least in part on the artists’ isolation from formal training. Dorcély and other modernists were bitter about this determination to keep their colleagues untrained, and about Peters’s and Rodman’s energetic promotion of “primitive” artists at the expense of the “moderns.”
Still, Rodman heralded Dorcély’s talent, calling him “the Matisse of the earlier phase of Haitian formalism.” Flipping through Rodman’s 20th (and final) book, Geniuses & Other Eccentrics: Photographing my Friends (1997), I discovered that he had visited my mother, the poet Maxine Kumin, at her Warner home in 1987. He must have seen the Dorcély portrait there.
I don’t believe my parents ever learned that not long after they bought their painting, Dorcély had two solo shows in New Hampshire. In March 1958, the Carpenter Galleries at Dartmouth exhibited his work. A local paper called the exhibit “well-worth seeing, even to the extent of paddling through the porridge of slop and slush … on Hanover sidewalks.” Another reviewer said the paintings were “clean, bright and daring,” and that they caused “a stir of excitement” in New England. There was a second show in Hanover in February 1959. Some of the paintings from those exhibitions are now in Dartmouth’s Hood Museum, which holds more Dorcély works than any other museum worldwide.
Both Hanover shows were mounted by Keith and Edna Warner, art collectors who in 1951 had settled just across the river in Norwich, Vermont. There, they bought and subdivided a tract of land and built a cluster of mid-century modern houses that are now listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Warners were friends of well-known artists like Alexander Calder and Alfred Stieglitz, and their collection of abstract art included works by Picasso, Braque, Klee, Marin, Rouault, Weber, and others.
The Warners met Dorcély during trips to Haiti in 1956 and 1957. They became his patrons, sustaining the artist and his family for years. The Dorcély painting at the MoMA was given by the Warners, and more than 100 letters from Dorcély to Keith Warner are in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art.
In the letters, the artist dreams of coming to America. Would Dartmouth invite him as a visiting professor, he wonders, even though friends warn him that New Hampshire is cold and “there’s a lot of prejudice over there.” He never made it to Hanover, but one of his most delightful works, a vibrant 4-by-6 tableau of a seamstress bent over her worktable, decorated the office of Dartmouth’s president for many years, and now graces the dining room of an antique farmhouse in Norwich. That painting’s “twin” is on display at Kykuit, the Rockefeller estate in the Hudson Valley. Nelson Rockefeller, a Dartmouth alumnus, bought it at one of Dorcély’s Hanover shows.
I uncovered another Upper Valley connection when I spotted some Dorcély paintings offered for sale by a New Hampshire auction house. All had stickers on the back that read “Galérie 18.” That was the name of a Parisian gallery owned by one Jéré Lawrence Field. In 1959, Dorcély (then broke and living in Paris) signed an exclusive contract to supply Mrs. Field with hundreds of his paintings. Alas, she couldn’t sell them, and the two had a bitter falling out.
Cut to 1991, when the Freegrace Leavitt Tavern, a 200-year-old Georgian house in Hartford, Vermont, was sold. The buyer: Anthony Lawrence Field, son of Dorcély’s erstwhile Paris gallerist. Anthony (Dartmouth ’61) had lived for decades in France and Australia before returning to the Upper Valley with his wife, Thérèse, where they planned to operate the historic home as a bed-and-breakfast-cum-art gallery. Field brought along dozens of Dorcély paintings to sell, which explains why they keep turning up at New England auctions.
Other longtime Dorcély supporters dating from the Haitian artist’s time in Paris were the famous French gallery owner Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, and his stepdaughter and son-in-law Louise and Michel Leiris. Researching that relationship, I unearthed still another local connection: a great-niece of Kahnweiler’s lives in New Hampshire. Clearly, my Dorcély project bolstered my belief in “six degrees of separation,” the theory that any two people on the planet can be connected through a chain of no more than six acquaintances.
There’s a good deal more to Dorcély’s intriguing story, culminating in the painter’s death in New York City on April 27, 2017, virtually unnoticed in both the art world and in his native country. Two years later, his work was featured at the prestigious Frieze New York art fair. Dorcély had always longed for a New York show. How I wish he had lived to see it. And how I wish my parents had lived to learn about his surprising New Hampshire connections.
(Judith Kumin lives in Contoocook.)