CELEBRATED ART OF HAITI IS BURIED UNDER RUBBLE
Outside the Musee Galerie d’Art Nader, perched on a hillside overlooking Port-au-Prince, Haiti a sign greeted visitors. “On top of the town, top in the arts,” it boasted. Inside, the walls were plastered with thousands of paintings recording nearly a century of Haitian history. Now the three-story art gallery is gone, reports Tom Phillips for The Guardian, and reduced to a dusty heap of rubble and torn canvases. Broken picture frames from irreplaceable local masterpieces poke from the gallery’s ruins.
“My dad has about 12,000 paintings here and we are trying to save what is left,” said Georges Nader, the son of Haiti’s best-known art collector and the owner of the gallery, as he scanned the debris. “We have only been able to save about 2,000 of them.”
The human cost of Haiti’s worst earthquake in more than 200 years––at least 150,000 lives lost––has been well documented. But the disaster also struck a knockout blow to the heart of Haiti’s vibrant arts community. Several galleries were destroyed and thousands of paintings lost under the rubble of flattened government buildings and art museums.
The Cathédrale Sainte-Trinité, built in the early 1920s, was almost completely destroyed, taking with it a series of celebrated 1950s murals depicting scenes from the life of Christ. A painting by Guillaume Guillon Lethière, the eighteenth-century French neoclassical painter, is thought to have been destroyed when the presidential palace collapsed.
“There are paintings from 1905 that have been lost,” said Cedoir Sainterne, an artist from the city’s Pétionville district. “It’s terrible. We are going to have to start all over again.”
Nowhere was the destruction greater than at the Musee Galerie d’Art Nader, Haiti’s largest private collection of Haitian and Caribbean art. “When it [the earthquake] started I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ And I ran out,” said Nader, whose father, also called Georges, was one of the biggest patrons of the local art scene. “The next day when I came here and I went downtown I saw everything. I don’t think there is any word to explain that [what happened] to the world … You have to be here to see what is going on.” Nader’s parents, both seventy-nine, survived. When the quake struck they were sleeping in the only room of the museum that emerged unscathed.
