More than Haitian art in Jonathan Demme collection

I watched as Jonathan Demme, in royal blue sneakers and looking a little thinner and a little grayer than I expected, walked breezily up to a man staring at a painting by Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite.

Demme is one of Hollywood’s most famous directors (“Silence of the Lambs,” “Philadelphia”), but you wouldn’t know it as he unpretentiously approached the man after talking to a couple who had patiently waited their turn to speak to him during a pre-auction exhibition of works from his Haitian and folk-art collection.

For the auction, he had consigned 900 pieces of artwork, each of which, he said later, had been displayed in his home at one time or another. And so, plenty of folks turned out at Material Culture in Philadelphia to partake of a Caribbean buffet or munch on pretzels and rum-spiked punch, and see the handiwork of artists from a culture that is routinely painted as poor and needy.

That is not the case of the artwork of Haiti with its rich color and abundant energy. The paintings were as vibrant as I supposed the island to be, as artist Lois Mailou Jones had painted the people of her husband’s native land decades ago.

Demme allowed us into a culture of art that he said spoke to him “spiritually” and in other ways. Walking through the exhibit was like walking through a museum – there was so much to see. I recognized the dark-toned paintings of Jacques Gourgue and the metalwork of Georges Liautaud, and I was introduced to so many other artists, such as Peterson Laurent and Andre Normil.

On this night, Demme didn’t just wait for folks to come up to him. He was there before they knew he was by their side, apparently wanting to share the connection that he felt when he saw his first Haitian work at a store near his apartment in New York.

“I experienced a transformative moment,” he said in a statement accompanying the auction. “I fell madly in love with Haitian art, and I started collecting it, a little at a time. But soon I couldn’t stand it any longer and I jumped on a plane (this was 1986) and flew down to Port-au-Prince Haiti to check out the source. I got gobbled up, literally consumed, by the planet Haitian art.”

As I stood talking to Demme about a group of Haitian artworks that I had bought at auction, he also wanted to make sure I had seen some of the works by other self-taught artists in the exhibit.

The auction was titled “Direct From the Eye: The Jonathan Demme Collection of Self-Taught Art,” thereby expanding its content beyond just the art of Haiti. Demme has a “mad devotion” to self-taught art, he said in the auction statement, in particular art from Haiti, America, Jamaica and Brazil.

I asked him about artist Purvis Young, whose works I had purchased at an auction at Material Culture last year. The exhibit included at least seven paintings by Purvis, including two that resembled mine. He knew Young in Miami, Demme, 70, said.

Young began drawing while still a child growing up in the Liberty City neighborhood of Miami. He soon tired of it, later found himself in prison, got out and then moved to the neighborhood of Overton. He began painting on plywood boards and attaching them to abandoned storefronts in an area called Good Bread Alley. Soon tourists started buying them for $20, the head of the Miami Museum of Art heard about him and became his patron, and he was on his way. His works are in the collections of major museums. Young died in 2010.

Demme asked if I had seen the works by Daniel Pressley. In fact, I had. I was especially taken with his wood carvings, the most interesting of which was a church in bas relief on beautiful striated wood. It was titled “Brooklyn Landmark at Flatbush and Church Avenue (circa 1960-1969).”

Pressley was an unfamiliar name to me. He was born in South Carolina in 1918 and lived in New York during the 1960s. He produced paintings and carved wood sculptures pertaining to black life in Harlem. He apparently was pretty well known around Harlem, and spent much time on his carvings. He also kept a journal that included a sketchbook, diary, autobiography and more. Pressley died in 1971.

Demme first came across one of his pieces in New York, he said. Unfortunately, the artist had died by the time the director discovered him, but Demme co-wrote a book about Pressley (a copy of which he promised to send to me). It is titled “By Hand By Dan: The Art of Daniel Pressley,” published in 1999.

Then he excitedly told me about an artist named Roger Rice – who’s serving a life sentence in prison in Mississippi. Many of Rice’s works center on religion. I had seen several small works on a wall, but I had not lingered at his drawings. They did not speak to me the way that Pressley’s had.

Demme’s pieces by Rice were tamer than some of the ones I found online. A Pennsylvania gallery that sells his drawings noted that a “foreboding mood pervades Rice’s dark, ominous, erotic paintings. Other religiously inspired works are executed in a softer, lighter palette.”

Rice was born in Mississippi in 1958 and is an ordained fundamentalist preacher. He got a masters of fine arts degree from the University of Mississippi in 1991. He also seemed to have lived in Oklahoma for awhile.

At the auction, held over two days, none of Pressley’s artwork sold. Most of Rice’s pieces did, selling from $100 to $475. Young’s sold for $100 to $600. Liautaud’s sculptures sold for up to $10,000. Two Hyppolites sold for $15,000 and $35,000. Two Laurents went for $6,000 and $11,000 (others did not sell). A Gourgue that I liked –”Before the Tempest (mid-1960s)” – sold for $3,250.