Jonathan Demme, the movie director was walking around
the West Side back in 1987 when music from the Haitian Corner,
an art gallery, caught his ear. Going inside, he browsed
but didn't buy any paintings. "They were a couple of hundred
dollars each," Mr. Demme recalled recently, "and I was a
flea market-junk store person. I'd buy art for $25 or $30."
But he was hooked. He returned to buy two works, which he
thought of as decoration for his apartment.
That was then. A few months ago Mr. Demme was sitting with
about 300 photographs of Haitian paintings, all his, trying
to decide which works would be part of an exhibit. "I made
two piles-'gotta' and 'don't have to,'" he said. "There are
no 'don't wants'. And 'gotta' was the much bigger pile."
The results of his winnowing, an exhibition of more than
100 paintings called "Island on Fire: Passionate Visions
of Haiti From the Collection of Jonathan Demme," will be
on view at the Equitable Gallery, 787 Seventh Avenue, at
51st Street, from Thursday through August 16. Mr. Demme,
the director of "Silence of the Lambs," "Married to the Mob" and "Philadelphia," among
others, owns one of the most comprehensive collections of
Haitian art in the United States.
In many ways, subtle and not, collecting the colorful, image-rich
works of Haiti's self-taught artists has change Mr. Demme's
life and his filmmaking. Haiti has become an abiding passion. "I
fell in love with it," he said. "I keep meeting new artists
and going back. You've got to go."
"The art sent me to Haiti," Mr. Demme continued, his hazel
eyes narrowing. "But when I arrived, I met the people and
saw the culture and the social situation firsthand." Several
months earlier, Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Haitian dictator
know as Baby Doc, had fled into exile after a popular uprising,
but the country had yet to approve a new constitution and
hold elections.
In February 1987, a few months after his first visit, Mr.
Demme returned with a camera crew to direct a documentary
called "Haiti: Dreams of Democracy." Since then, Mr. Demme,
who is 54, has produced several other documentaries about
the island's troubles. He turned activist, rallying others
in the movie industry to the cause of democracy and demonstrating
when he believed American policy to be wrong, such as when
Haitians fleeing the island's 1991 coup were classified as
economic rather than political refugees. Twice he was arrested,
once two blocks from the United Nations and once outside
the White House, on civil disobedience charges.
Mr. Demme, who is in the middle of pre-production work for "Beloved," the
Toni Morrison novel he is about to begin shooting in Philadelphia,
has pulled back from protest. "It was exhausting," he explained.
He has not stopped buying Haitian paintings, however. "I
am not an expert collector, but I am a passionate collector," he
said. "I've got closets full of them," mostly in his home
in Rockland County. He has even commissioned works, like "The
Boat People" by the artist Fritz Mistira. "Part of what's
great about Haitian painting is that it's really really affordable," he
said. "You can get wonderful paintings at great prices.
Mr. Demme said he has become friends with Haitian artists
and art dealers. And he has been influenced professionally. "On
an unconscious level, it has affected my work enormously," Mr.
Demme said. He cites "the moods that permeate off the images
and the combination of colors that send signals to your mind.
My eyes are so grateful when I turn them to this art." Movies,
he pointed out, must also please the eye.
As Mr. Demme revs up for "Beloved," which stars Oprah Winfrey
and Danny Glover, he said, "I've started moving pictures
to my production office." The movie, set after the Civil
War, tells the story of a young woman who flees slavery but
struggles against its legacy and such personal traumas as
cutting her own daughter's throat when she was 2 to keep
her from being raised as a slave.
One painting Mr. Demme has just moved portrays a mother
and child "with blazing eyes, and the unavoidable sense of
terminality," he said. It was painted by Christian Michel,
a Haitian living in Philadelphia.
Mr. Demme said he had always been drawn to self-taught artists,
through the value of their art is not universally accepted.
Through his wife, a painter named Joanne Howard who he said "paints
nature in a personal way," he has learned to appreciate academic
art. But a few American folk art pieces are the only other
works he has bought.
Pari Stave, the curator at the Equitable Gallery, has a
personal interest in Haitian art and had heard of Mr. Demme's
collection. She was intrigued partly because "he is an artist,
and this is also an exhibit about an artist's eye," she said.
Mr. Demme, meanwhile, had been nursing his own zeal. "I
longed to show these things even if people don't like them," he
said. He wants to give the artists exposure in the United
States, to exhibit the range of their work and to "show a
positive face of a country and a people I love so much and
that gets chronic bad press."
The exhibit will be accompanied by the publication of a 200-page
catalogue of his collection. In it, there will be several
oral histories of artists recorded by Mr. Demme on his
visits to Haiti. He has also produced a 15 minute video
on one artist, Edger Jean-Baptiste, called "The Grand Master
of Haiti." It is, Mr. Demme said, "the first time my filmmaking
and art have fused."
And he is flying in four artists from Haiti-Andre Pierre,
Prefete Duffaut, Jasmin Joseph and Ernst Prophete-for the
opening reception tomorrow night.
For all his enthusiasm, however, Mr. Demme has not turned
his film friends into Haitian art buyers. "I haven't infected
others," he conceded. "I'm circling Oprah. She is a serious
art appreciator, and I'm hoping she sees what I bring down.
And I'm going to go for it after we finish the movie."
