Biography, Full Text
Born in Port-au-Prince in 1944 to a well-known Haitian family surname, Paul Claude Gardère was the eldest of two sons and raised in accordance with French-speaking, Catholic customs, typical for the mulatto class in Haitian society. In 1949, Paul’s father, photographer Pierre Camille Gardère, died an early death at age 31, leaving their mother, Marcelle, with two young boys to raise on her own.
In 1957, needing to better support her sons, Marcelle accepted a position in New York City with the historic American engineering and architectural firm Tippetts, Abbott, McCarthy and Stratton which had been on location in Haiti for a dam project that failed to come to fruition. Marcelle left her boys temporarily in the care of female family elders in Haiti while she established herself in the United States.
Two years later, in 1959 - as François Duvalier’s noiriste regime was becoming increasingly violent and hostile toward the mulatto class - the boys were sent for and were happily reunited with their mother. The little family lived in a basic 1-bedroom apartment in Queens, and faced the racial discrimination, xenophobia, and linguistic challenges typical for Haitian immigrants in the segregated United States pre-Civil Rights legislation. Their new American social status stood in sharp contrast to the family’s position of esteem in Haitian society – a paradox that would heavily inform Gardère’s lifelong inquiry into social, economic, and racial dynamics of power, as well as profound questions of racial and cultural identity.
Academic merit earned Paul a full tuition scholarship to the Lycée Français de New York for high school, and his daily movements around Manhattan introduced him to the city's art economy. He was enthralled by the art in gallery windows of Madison Avenue and frequently found comfort in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art. In 1960, he enrolled at The Art Students League, where he studied under Charles Alston, the famed Harlem Renaissance painter and mentor to iconic African American artist Jacob Lawrence.
Encouraged by his mother to pursue his artistic interest, Paul attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1963, an education made possible by school’s then-radical tradition of racial inclusivity and free tuition. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1967, having studied under social-realist artist Robert Gwathmey, figurative painter Nicholas Marsicano, and interdisciplinary artist and sculptor, Reuben Kadish. Gardère continued his formal education with a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in 1972, under the tutelage of artists Robert Morris, John McCracken, and briefly, Mark Rothko.
In 1970, Gardère married Marcia Green, a Jewish art student of Eastern-European descent, raised in Paterson, NJ, whom he met during his residency at the Yale Norfolk School of Art in the summer of 1966. Their first child, Nicolas, was born in 1973 and the young family lived on modest means on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue while Paul worked as a house painter and Marcia earned her Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education. The death of Paul’s beloved mother prompted him to revisit memories of Haiti and heed the call to return.
In early 1978, feeling uninspired by the prevailing trends of minimalism and pop-art in 1970's New York City, Paul and family left New York City for Port-au-Prince, and moved into the house built by Paul's grandfather. It was the home where Paul had been raised as a child and over the ensuing 6 years he would dedicate himself to painting, self-study of Haitian art, and an exploration of the rich artistic traditions of his homeland.
In Haiti, Paul’s work was embraced by Le Centre d’Art, the nation’s premier artistic institution which nurtured masterful Haitian artists from Hector Hyppolite and Georges Liautaud to then-rising contemporaries Edouard Duval-Carrié and Antonio Joseph, with whom he exhibited and befriended. His output during these years was prolific. Finely painted in acrylic on masonite board, a typical material of the region, these “early works” blended socially and magically realist depictions of Haitian life in conversation with the country’s revolutionary history and spiritual traditions. Beloved by their owners and passed down through generations, these works remain popular among collectors who frequently inquire after them. However, in 1984 the family, which now included young daughter Catherine, returned to Brooklyn to escape the violent climate of the 2nd Duvalier dictatorship and its hostility toward the established Haitian class and American expatriates.
According to Gardère, his return to Haiti had revealed his artistic purpose: to marry in his work the Haitian and Western traditions that informed his experience and visually express the tensions therein. The legacy of French colonialism and pride in the Haitian Revolution that birthed the world's first free Black republic are central to Haitian identity and nationalism. And yet, as a member of the Francophile Haitian bourgeoisie assimilating to American values, formally trained in art practice and Eurocentric art history, Gardère was forced to internalize antithetical values and narratives that challenged his sense of self. Accordingly, his lived experiences of these racial, social, and economic contradictions became allegorical fodder for his art.
Back in New York, Gardère pivoted away from the more "traditionally Haitian" pictorial aesthetic to expand further into the contemporary field. He began to explore the conceptual framework behind Haitian spirituality and culture, confronting and disassembling its symbols, using diptychs and juxtaposition to explore relational aesthetics, and over the years employing a wide variety of mundane materials and mixed media such as plaster, wire lathe, sisal rope, wood and earth itself in tandem with his skilled brushwork.
His painterly style itself expanded to include expressionist, abstract-expressionist, surrealist and impressionist techniques and he employed these various modes deliberately at times as methodological representations of his changing conceptual focus, as signifiers in their own right, and reflections of his own multitudinous cultural allegiances. In content, material, and form, Gardère's work reflects the juxtapositions of the multiple worlds he inhabited. His mixed media paintings are a daring stylistic departure from his early work, but they exhibit a thematic continuity that sought to both broaden the relevance of Haitian themes in Western contemporary art and to expand the lineage of Haitian painting beyond touristic nostalgia and paternalist attitudes that dominated the world's perceptions of and attitudes towards Haitian Art.
To Gardère, the Western art world’s prevailing views of Haitian Art as exclusively “primitive" and “naive” were steeped in the patronizing exoticism of colonialist attitudes toward non-white cultures. Similarly, the West's grossly skewed and maligned portrayals of Vodou failed to recognize the conceptual power of Haitian traditions, in practice and in aesthetic discourse. Vodou's usage of symbols (vévé), in particular, reflect an elaborate visual language that functions spiritually, culturally, and creatively, making it a unique framework that Gardère and ethnographic scholars knew deserved more discerning and respectful consideration. In other words, both the history of fine art in Haiti and Vodou's active employ of aesthetics earned Haitian Art a place within the canons of global art history which the dominant art discourse was denying. This omission of Haitian cultural significance from the art history books is of course in keeping with the erasure of the historical significance of Haitian Revolution itself -- both are byproducts of white-supremacist, colonialist paradigms which exert insidious cultural influence long after colonial rule ends.
Armed with a mission to explore these ideas in his work, Gardère completed residencies at The Studio Museum in Harlem ('89-'90), the Jamaica Arts Center, Long Island University, and Fondation Claude Monet (’93) in Giverny, France - a coveted opportunity that brought his work into direct confrontation with Haiti’s historical colonizer and classic French art traditions. He received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for The Arts and The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting in 1998. Gardère had solo shows at Le Centre d’Art and Le Musee d'Art Haitien, the Figge Art Museum, the Jersey City Museum, Lehigh University, and Skoto Gallery among others and exhibited extensively in group shows in the US and Haiti.
Works of his reside in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art Library, The Brooklyn Museum Library, Le Centre d’Art, Figge Art Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NY, and numerous university art collections among others.
In 2000, Paul and Marcia relocated to Massachusetts’ southern coast, following a professional opportunity for Marcia. After a lifetime spent in urban centers, Paul appreciated the quiet connection to nature and a return to life near the ocean. He enjoyed the “special quality of light” at the coast and the works produced during these years took on a spatial dynamic that is undoubtedly tied to place. The coastal environment had visibly influenced his work and sparked a re-incorporation of pastoral elements. In late 2006, the couple returned to life in Brooklyn, but retained a foothold in Massachusetts intended for “golden years" that never came.
The January 20210 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands took a great mental toll on Paul and the Gardère family, both in Haiti and the diaspora. The intergenerational home built by Paul’s grandfather collapsed, and the grief and sense of impotence was excruciating. Paul’s final series, “Goudou Goudou”, still in-process at the time of his death, reflects the pain and darkness of this time.
On September 2nd, 2011, Paul died unexpectedly in New York City, just weeks after the passing of Marcia, his partner of 42 years. He was survived by his two children, Nicolas François Gardère (1973-2016) and Catherine Anne Gardère (b. 1981). Catherine serves as director of Paul Gardère Studio to steward her father's legacy into a new era of the art world and continue his work of enhancing the visibility of Haitian art, history and culture in the global discourse of fine art.
Though Paul spent the majority of his life in the United States and was naturalized as a US citizen in 1991, Haitian history and culture remained the lens through which he explored the crushing effects of Western imperialism, social resistance, racial and cultural syncretism, class conflict, and pluralistic identity in and beyond the Haitian diaspora. Yet his work speaks broadly to viewers of all backgrounds in our multi-racial and multi-cultural world as we continue to witness the profoundly devastating effects of colonialist practices and mindset.
Text by Catherine Gardère
To reproduce in whole or in part, contact [email protected]
© 2021-2023 All Rights Reserved
In 1957, needing to better support her sons, Marcelle accepted a position in New York City with the historic American engineering and architectural firm Tippetts, Abbott, McCarthy and Stratton which had been on location in Haiti for a dam project that failed to come to fruition. Marcelle left her boys temporarily in the care of female family elders in Haiti while she established herself in the United States.
Two years later, in 1959 - as François Duvalier’s noiriste regime was becoming increasingly violent and hostile toward the mulatto class - the boys were sent for and were happily reunited with their mother. The little family lived in a basic 1-bedroom apartment in Queens, and faced the racial discrimination, xenophobia, and linguistic challenges typical for Haitian immigrants in the segregated United States pre-Civil Rights legislation. Their new American social status stood in sharp contrast to the family’s position of esteem in Haitian society – a paradox that would heavily inform Gardère’s lifelong inquiry into social, economic, and racial dynamics of power, as well as profound questions of racial and cultural identity.
Academic merit earned Paul a full tuition scholarship to the Lycée Français de New York for high school, and his daily movements around Manhattan introduced him to the city's art economy. He was enthralled by the art in gallery windows of Madison Avenue and frequently found comfort in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art. In 1960, he enrolled at The Art Students League, where he studied under Charles Alston, the famed Harlem Renaissance painter and mentor to iconic African American artist Jacob Lawrence.
Encouraged by his mother to pursue his artistic interest, Paul attended The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1963, an education made possible by school’s then-radical tradition of racial inclusivity and free tuition. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting in 1967, having studied under social-realist artist Robert Gwathmey, figurative painter Nicholas Marsicano, and interdisciplinary artist and sculptor, Reuben Kadish. Gardère continued his formal education with a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in 1972, under the tutelage of artists Robert Morris, John McCracken, and briefly, Mark Rothko.
In 1970, Gardère married Marcia Green, a Jewish art student of Eastern-European descent, raised in Paterson, NJ, whom he met during his residency at the Yale Norfolk School of Art in the summer of 1966. Their first child, Nicolas, was born in 1973 and the young family lived on modest means on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue while Paul worked as a house painter and Marcia earned her Master’s degree in Early Childhood Education. The death of Paul’s beloved mother prompted him to revisit memories of Haiti and heed the call to return.
In early 1978, feeling uninspired by the prevailing trends of minimalism and pop-art in 1970's New York City, Paul and family left New York City for Port-au-Prince, and moved into the house built by Paul's grandfather. It was the home where Paul had been raised as a child and over the ensuing 6 years he would dedicate himself to painting, self-study of Haitian art, and an exploration of the rich artistic traditions of his homeland.
In Haiti, Paul’s work was embraced by Le Centre d’Art, the nation’s premier artistic institution which nurtured masterful Haitian artists from Hector Hyppolite and Georges Liautaud to then-rising contemporaries Edouard Duval-Carrié and Antonio Joseph, with whom he exhibited and befriended. His output during these years was prolific. Finely painted in acrylic on masonite board, a typical material of the region, these “early works” blended socially and magically realist depictions of Haitian life in conversation with the country’s revolutionary history and spiritual traditions. Beloved by their owners and passed down through generations, these works remain popular among collectors who frequently inquire after them. However, in 1984 the family, which now included young daughter Catherine, returned to Brooklyn to escape the violent climate of the 2nd Duvalier dictatorship and its hostility toward the established Haitian class and American expatriates.
According to Gardère, his return to Haiti had revealed his artistic purpose: to marry in his work the Haitian and Western traditions that informed his experience and visually express the tensions therein. The legacy of French colonialism and pride in the Haitian Revolution that birthed the world's first free Black republic are central to Haitian identity and nationalism. And yet, as a member of the Francophile Haitian bourgeoisie assimilating to American values, formally trained in art practice and Eurocentric art history, Gardère was forced to internalize antithetical values and narratives that challenged his sense of self. Accordingly, his lived experiences of these racial, social, and economic contradictions became allegorical fodder for his art.
Back in New York, Gardère pivoted away from the more "traditionally Haitian" pictorial aesthetic to expand further into the contemporary field. He began to explore the conceptual framework behind Haitian spirituality and culture, confronting and disassembling its symbols, using diptychs and juxtaposition to explore relational aesthetics, and over the years employing a wide variety of mundane materials and mixed media such as plaster, wire lathe, sisal rope, wood and earth itself in tandem with his skilled brushwork.
His painterly style itself expanded to include expressionist, abstract-expressionist, surrealist and impressionist techniques and he employed these various modes deliberately at times as methodological representations of his changing conceptual focus, as signifiers in their own right, and reflections of his own multitudinous cultural allegiances. In content, material, and form, Gardère's work reflects the juxtapositions of the multiple worlds he inhabited. His mixed media paintings are a daring stylistic departure from his early work, but they exhibit a thematic continuity that sought to both broaden the relevance of Haitian themes in Western contemporary art and to expand the lineage of Haitian painting beyond touristic nostalgia and paternalist attitudes that dominated the world's perceptions of and attitudes towards Haitian Art.
To Gardère, the Western art world’s prevailing views of Haitian Art as exclusively “primitive" and “naive” were steeped in the patronizing exoticism of colonialist attitudes toward non-white cultures. Similarly, the West's grossly skewed and maligned portrayals of Vodou failed to recognize the conceptual power of Haitian traditions, in practice and in aesthetic discourse. Vodou's usage of symbols (vévé), in particular, reflect an elaborate visual language that functions spiritually, culturally, and creatively, making it a unique framework that Gardère and ethnographic scholars knew deserved more discerning and respectful consideration. In other words, both the history of fine art in Haiti and Vodou's active employ of aesthetics earned Haitian Art a place within the canons of global art history which the dominant art discourse was denying. This omission of Haitian cultural significance from the art history books is of course in keeping with the erasure of the historical significance of Haitian Revolution itself -- both are byproducts of white-supremacist, colonialist paradigms which exert insidious cultural influence long after colonial rule ends.
Armed with a mission to explore these ideas in his work, Gardère completed residencies at The Studio Museum in Harlem ('89-'90), the Jamaica Arts Center, Long Island University, and Fondation Claude Monet (’93) in Giverny, France - a coveted opportunity that brought his work into direct confrontation with Haiti’s historical colonizer and classic French art traditions. He received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for The Arts and The Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting in 1998. Gardère had solo shows at Le Centre d’Art and Le Musee d'Art Haitien, the Figge Art Museum, the Jersey City Museum, Lehigh University, and Skoto Gallery among others and exhibited extensively in group shows in the US and Haiti.
Works of his reside in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art Library, The Brooklyn Museum Library, Le Centre d’Art, Figge Art Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in NY, and numerous university art collections among others.
In 2000, Paul and Marcia relocated to Massachusetts’ southern coast, following a professional opportunity for Marcia. After a lifetime spent in urban centers, Paul appreciated the quiet connection to nature and a return to life near the ocean. He enjoyed the “special quality of light” at the coast and the works produced during these years took on a spatial dynamic that is undoubtedly tied to place. The coastal environment had visibly influenced his work and sparked a re-incorporation of pastoral elements. In late 2006, the couple returned to life in Brooklyn, but retained a foothold in Massachusetts intended for “golden years" that never came.
The January 20210 earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince and killed hundreds of thousands took a great mental toll on Paul and the Gardère family, both in Haiti and the diaspora. The intergenerational home built by Paul’s grandfather collapsed, and the grief and sense of impotence was excruciating. Paul’s final series, “Goudou Goudou”, still in-process at the time of his death, reflects the pain and darkness of this time.
On September 2nd, 2011, Paul died unexpectedly in New York City, just weeks after the passing of Marcia, his partner of 42 years. He was survived by his two children, Nicolas François Gardère (1973-2016) and Catherine Anne Gardère (b. 1981). Catherine serves as director of Paul Gardère Studio to steward her father's legacy into a new era of the art world and continue his work of enhancing the visibility of Haitian art, history and culture in the global discourse of fine art.
Though Paul spent the majority of his life in the United States and was naturalized as a US citizen in 1991, Haitian history and culture remained the lens through which he explored the crushing effects of Western imperialism, social resistance, racial and cultural syncretism, class conflict, and pluralistic identity in and beyond the Haitian diaspora. Yet his work speaks broadly to viewers of all backgrounds in our multi-racial and multi-cultural world as we continue to witness the profoundly devastating effects of colonialist practices and mindset.
Text by Catherine Gardère
To reproduce in whole or in part, contact [email protected]
© 2021-2023 All Rights Reserved