Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese
Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release
From dusty bondage into luminous air.
O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,
When first the shaft into his vision shone
Of light anatomized! Euclid alone
Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they
Who, though once only and then but far away,
Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare, Edna St. Vincent Millay
Via Moma,
“While Hyppolite did paint religious fantasies, these were not his only subjects. The respected Haitian critic Gérald Alexis, in gently debunking Breton’s mythmaking, signals the importance of nature and female eroticism in the artist’s work, and of the decorative aspects in his paintings on the facades of buildings. Similarly, the eminent Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant paid attention to the expressive and decorative surface of the canvas and the aesthetic intelligence of the artist. His approach to Haitian painting stressed its hieroglyphic capacity to directly express the real. Haitian painting was for Glissant “a schematic version of reality; the beginning of all pictography.” He concentrated on the backgrounds of Hyppolite’s paintings, the angels, flowers, and birds that are repeated in ever multiplying movements. Ironically, it was this very profusion that overwhelmed Breton in the first place.
La Reine Congo (The Congo Queen), while not saturated with the profuse and repetitive patterns discussed by Glissant, nevertheless displays the hallmarks of Hyppolite’s work. Once more, a regal female figure dominates the canvas. The word “Congo” in the title is most likely a reference to her Haitian identity, since the Haitian people popularly call themselves “neg congo.” Hyppolite again draws on Catholic iconography: the infant the woman cradles makes her some version of the mater dolorosa, and she is accompanied by angels on either side. As Alexis and Glissant have argued, we should look at the background and at Hyppolite’s evocation of nature, which hovers between repetition and abstraction. The colors suggest that the figures are emanations of nature, and the flora seem to extend the contours of the central figures. Rather than acting as the founding father of naive Haitian art, Hyppolite employs an aesthetic that mobilizes uncertainty by juxtaposing the secular and the sacred, the magical and the everyday.
Originally published in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, ed. Darby English and Charlotte Barat (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
J. Michael Dash, independent scholar
… “intimation of what is to come.” (Zadie Smith, On Beauty)
