Highland Park • Pittsburgh, PA 15206 • 1-412-661-1498
macondo@telerama.com

A gallery of Haitian Art
SINCE 1974

This is Room 59B Haitian Art by Andre Normil.

Andre Normil was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti on September 26, 1934. He joined the Centre d'Art in 1951. Besides being a technical genius, Normil is a sharp-eyed observer of the subtleties of Haitian culture. His paintings are often populated with likenesses of friends and are a delight to behold. Normil has been accused of being "commercial" and it is true that he does tend to repeat certain subjects, such as Carnival, Noahs Ark, Paradise and Weddings, because the demand for them is high. His monumental canvasses, however, depicting historical scenes or brothels or dechouke, are breathtaking. For decades now, he has worked in a small room on the ground floor of the Galerie Issa on the Rue du Chile in Port-au-Prince. Normil is married to the painter Francoise Elliassaint. He habitually puts three dots in a triangular pattern near his signature. The dots tell us that he is a freemason.

Andre Normil passed on May 2, 2014

#ANHabitation. Andre Normil.
36x 48" Oil on Canvas.
"At the Pool, Habitation LeClerc"
late 1970's $24,000
Sale! $10,000


 

In the late 1970's the Frenchman Olivier Coquelin opened his first resort in the Caribbean, The Habitation LeClerc in the Martissaint slum outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti in the refurbished ruins of the Palace of the Empress Josephine, Napoleons sister, who was married to General Charles LeClerc. Napoleon had sent LeClerc to Haiti to quell the revolution, but the general succumbed to yellow fever and left Haiti in a coffin.

The above painting was commissioned by Coquelin, who also ownedthe Hippopotamus discos in Paris and New York. His objective was to combine the exotic with the erotic. He was evidently an enormousely charming man and he attracted celebrities including Mick and Bianca Jagger to the hotel. There are a few dignitaries in the painting. That is Larry Peabody who designed the hotel in the white suit and Coqueline himself is standing on the bottom steps of the pool bar. The man with his arm extended near the diving board is Sir Kenneth Miller, Olivier's marketing consultant. In the enter of the pool, with dark hair, looks like Manno el Saieh, Isaa's son.