Hector Hyppolite

(1894-1948)

André Breton, French poet, critic and leading founder of the Surrealist movement, said of Hector Hyppolite's paintings that they had a way of suggesting their creator's wish to reveal an important message, and that he was in possession of a secret.

Hyppolite was called an oungan (Vodou priest), a cobbler, painter of doors, decorator of temples and religious objects, a housepainter, prophet, genius, a womanizer, a homosexual, an eccentric, a visionary, and a healer. An artist who saw in a dream that he would be discovered, and that his fame would reach foreign lands, Hyppolite began his career painting with brushes made of chicken feathers and went on to become the most celebrated of Haiti's naïf painters. He was discovered in 1945 by American artist Dewitt Peters, who founded the famed Centre d'Art (Art Center) in Port-au-Prince. In a short time the legendary artist created 250-300 paintings and was the subject of a one-man exhibition in New York before his untimely death just three years later at age 54. With his dreamlike and poetic subject matters of mystical worlds real and imagined, of Haiti's mystères, and his personal relationship to the lwas, Hyppolite is considered by many to be the most important of Haiti's untrained painters.