Luce Turnier: A Haitian Artist in the American Context

Luce Turnier (1924-1994) was an artist whose rejection of the idea that Haitian art was isolated and sui generis, which was developed by critics during her lifetime, is representative of the uneasy relationship artists in the Caribbean have had with the dominant narratives in published art histories. An examination of Turnier’s artworks supports the argument that her paintings relate both thematically and formally to work by other artists in the Caribbean and the Americas in the second half of the 20^th century, despite the fact that she spent much of her career working in France. As a Haitian artist, she had two paths open to her, that of the presumably bourgeois artist who engages with European sources and is maligned as derivative, and the “naïve” styles of self-taught artists favored by collectors and critics in her day. Choosing the former path, to train and move abroad, she nonetheless faced pressure from collectors who wanted to see Haitian subjects in her artworks. While her approach was influenced by the Indigenist movement in Haiti, which sought to valorize local culture as a way to resist neocolonialist international influence, her paintings drop the romanticized view of Haitianness that movement upheld in order to challenge Modernist representations of race, class, gender and nationalism in portraiture more generally. Her artwork is therefore best understood in the context of Indigenism in the larger Latin American region and as part of the international Black Arts movement.