Papa Lauco by Hyppolite in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, January 2022

Hector Hyppolite (Saint-Marc, Haiti 1894–1948
Port-au-Prince)
Papa Lauco, 1945
Oil on Masonite
The Museum of Everything, London

Hyppolite was a third-generation vodou priest and
self-taught artist who came to work at the Centre d’art,
a Port-au-Prince art center founded by American artist
DeWitt Peters and several prominent Haitians. His
paintings, like this image of the Iwa (spirit) Papa
Lauco, engaged with religious practices of the African
diaspora. André Breton eventually acquired five
paintings by Hyppolite. The artist’s work fueled
Breton’s subsequent notions of ritual and syncretic
symbolism as a new route for political liberation; this
canvas appeared as the first plate in the catalogue for
the international exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947.

In Haiti, Surrealism was received in the 1940s by
many poets, including Clément Magloire-Saint-
Aude, who made it their own. It was likewise
familiar at the Centre d’art, founded in 1944 by
American artist DeWitt Peters and Haitian
intellectuals as an art studio and gallery.
Surrealism’s revolutionary potential was witnessed
in 1945 when André Breton arrived for a lecture
series. It was a tumultuous period marked by
student protests, and his comments on freedom as
“continuous rebellion” served as fuel for ongoing
racial justice struggles and the overthrow of the
repressive leader Elie Lescot

Text from the Metropolitan Museum of Art label.