Crowded Market by Laurent Casimir
Circa 1965
12 inches x 24 inches, Oil on Masonite, Framed.
Condition: Excellent. The painting is as bright and fresh as the day it was completed. The top left corner of the masonite is lightly bumped, most likely before the painting was framed.
Several dozen people pack this busy market, rendered in Casimir's typical pallet of bright reds, oranges, yellows, and greens. Zoom in on the detail and observe how Casimir used "hash strokes" to define motion, posture, and the shape of people's clothing. This is a telling feature of works created by the master's hand; students and fakers imitate by using the typical colors and piling on hash strokes, but they fail to achieve that shaping quality. If it looks like anyone could have done it, that's probably who did it: Anyone but Laurent Casimir himself. Don't be fooled!
Provenance: James S. Huffman Collection
James S. Huffman had a distinguished 35 year career in the United States Foreign Service. A serious collector of primitive and naive art, he sought pieces local to the regions where he served. From 1963-1965, Huffman was posted to the Dominican Republic. From there, he often went to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, where he purchased more than 50 paintings, many of them from Le Centre d'Art and Galerie Issa.
Laurent Casimir (also listed as Casimir Laurent) was born May 8, 1928 into a family of peasants in Anse-a-Veau, Haiti. He moved to Port-au-Prince in the late 1940's and was introduced to the Centre d'Art in 1947 by his friend Dieudonne Cedor. In 1950 he defected to the Foyer des Artes Plastiques which had been recently founded by a group of intellectuals and modern artists, Cedor included. Casimir was the originator of a Haitian archetype, the market painting, done in his trademark colors of red, orange and yellow.
Visiting him at his house in Martissant in the mid-70's you were likely to find Casimir holding court and selling paintings in the front room, while in the back yard, a few apprentices were painting in the colors on canvases that the master had drawn, awaiting his signature. He has unfortunately been one of the most forged painters in history and this has worked to the detriment of his work, price-wise, as it is difficult to be sure which paintings that bear his name and style were actually painted by him.
Casimir died in 1990.
[Biographic notes from Galerie Macondo.]
Publications:
[na]. The Naive Tradition: Haiti. Milwaukee Art Center, 1974.
Fernandez Mendez, Eugenio. Le Primitivisme Haitien. 1972.
Material Culture. Direct From The Eye: The Jonathan Demme Collection of Self-Taught Art. Philadelphia, 2014.
Rodman, Selden. The Miracle of Haitian Art. New York, 1974.
-. Where Art is Joy. New York, 1988.
Stebich, Ute. Haitian Art. The Brooklin Museum, 1978.
-. A Haitian Celebration. Milwaukee Art Museum, 1992.
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