Fish & Faces

"What would Haitians think of these faces?" wondered strollers through the Ainslie Galleries, Manhattan, last week. At them leered, from canvas, black faces--the faces of Negro Frenchmen, Negro Britishers, Negro Jews. The faces--explained a leaflet signed by famed Explorer William Beebe--were part of an artistic haul made by three painters who accompanied him to Haiti on the tenth expedition of the New York Zoological Society. "Never, I believe," wrote Explorer Beebe. "has any one country been so vividly presented in crayon, water color, and oil. . . ."

Substantiating this boast were able, painstaking, scientific sketches of fish, by Staff-Artist-of-the-Expedition Mrs. Helen Damrosch Tee-Van, niece of onetime Manhattan Symphony Conductor Walter Damrosch. Then there were land and seascapes by Frederick Church, likewise socially and artistically prominent. Also there were those faces.

The strollers, screwing up their eyes, appraised again the astonishingly mongrel collection of Haitian types done by the expedition's third artist. He, Vladimir ("Vovo") Perfielieff, onetime captain of Cossacks, had a story to tell about painting Haitians.

As he worked with brush and palette at Port-au-Prince, painting in the streets, his models picked from among passersby, Artist Perfielieff became conscious that his work aroused not merely interest but indignation. What Metropolitan critics Would see as dazzling, grotesque or smartly degenerate the Haitians saw as libels on themselves. Finally the editor of Le Novelliste (Port-au-Prince) thundered: "If there existed a leper settlement, or sanitarium for paralytics, it is certain that this painter would probably go there in search of Haitian specimens. We suspect him of being one of those floating timber revolutionists that Russia has scattered across the world. It is the duty of the government and of the police to prevent these paintings from getting out of the country. No government should tolerate on its soil for more than twenty-four hours an individual of this kind."

For Manhattan newsgatherers, pleasant Cossack Perfielieff had ready a suave explanation: "I did not consider the Le Novelliste article as an attack on me personally," he said, "but rather as a chance to attack the United States authorities and their government."