"What's in a Face?: Haitian Portraiture, Evolutionary Aesthetics, Black Modernity"

This presentation examines a suite of seemingly staid realist portraits by the Haitian painter Louis Rigaud exhibited during the 1884 World’s Cotton Centennial in New Orleans. These paintings portray Haitian heads of state from Toussaint Louverture to Lysius Salomon, who was president during the exposition. I am most interested in the eccentricities of Rigaud’s paintings, which I characterize as a proto-modernist form of Black internationalism. Among these seventeen canvases there are prominent stylistic and anatomical deformities: tropical chiaroscuro backgrounds at the edge of dissolution, architectonically stiff uniforms, clumsily rendered hands, eyes set askew on the face, and physiognomies that verge on caricature. I position these paintings within the discussion of evolutionary aesthetics to interrogate the value of deformity, as an errant articulation of subjecthood, for black peoples in the ongoing struggle for personhood. Rigaud’s paintings form a unique node within the evolutionary theory and racial anthropology that emerged with slavery’s abolition in the Atlantic World. First, they strike a key with a note from Darwin’s manuscript which intimates that “Deformity is required” in the aesthetic evaluation of beauty. Second, Rigaud’s portraits presage the work of Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin, who, drawing from Darwin, would affirm the humanity and the beauty of African diasporic individuals by asserting that “an esthetic evolution can be accomplished in a race under the empire of the imagination.” Distinct from both of these positions, Rigaud’s portraits divert the conventions of Western portraiture to represent a modern free black citizenry askew from eugenicist mobilizations of evolution.