Port-au-Prince before the devastating earthquake.

The terrible devastation of the recent earthquake in Haiti has that island nation on all our minds. I found a 65-year-old article called “Haitian Painting” from Life magazine on Google Books. It tells the story of American DeWitt Peters encouraging an art scene to grow in Port-au-Prince. The piece has a strong whiff of condescension (art existed in Haiti long before the 1940s), but Peters sounds like he was a good soul. An excerpt:

“Haiti’s artistic boom started in 1943 when an enthusiastic American artist named DeWitt Peters took a U.S. government-supported job in Port-au-Prince as a teacher of English. Impressed by the talent with which Haitian Negroes decorated the walls of their palm-thatched huts and cafes, Peters wangled the use of an old residence in Port-au-Prince, christened it Centre d’Art and, under the sponsorship of the Haitian government and the U.S. State Department, started to hold public exhibitions of native art. The artists were almost all untrained and, at first, a little bit shy. Peters tactfully lured them into the Centre, bought their paintings for a few dollars, gave them paint and brushes and very little advice. By the time he was through, Haiti was the proud possessor of a school of native primitive painting and the paintings were bringing in as much as $350 each.”