Liautaud, Georges (Haitian, 1899 - 1991)

George Liautaud with sculpture
George Liautaud with sculpture

Georges LIAUTAUD was born in Croix des Bouquets in 1899. He studied in Port-au-Prince and then worked at the Haitian-American Sugar Company (HASCO) where he repaired the train tracks for the sugar industry.

In the 1940s, he opened his own forge where he fabricated mechanical parts as well as crosses for the cemetery. DeWitt Peters discovered him in 1953 and encouraged him to dedicate himself to sculpture. Thus, it was Georges Liautaud who gave birth to a new movement of metal sculpture. Honored by famous art critics such as André Malraux, Selden Rodman and Jean-Marie Drot, Georges Liautaud, an emblematic figure of Haitian art, died at the age of 92 in 1992.

He was a part of the famous exhibit “Les Magiciens de la terre (The Magicians of Earth)” and his works have been exhibited internationally in places such as the Grand Palais, the Centre Pompidou, the Abbaye de Daoulas, the Fowler Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Frost Museum, the Bass Museum, the Halle Saint-Pierre and the Musée de Montparnasse. His work is part of the permanent collections at the MoMA in New York, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Davenport Museum, the Waterloo Museum, the Huntington Museum of Art, the Figge Art Museum, the Fond national d’art contemporain de France, the Musée national d’art moderne de Paris, the Musée de l’OEA, Le Centre d’Art, the Musée d’Art Haïtien du Collège Saint-Pierre and the Musée de Panthéon National Haïtien.

 

La Sirene, n.d.
La Sirene, n.d.
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Papa Loco, n.d.
Papa Loco, n.d.
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Beasley Collection
Copper Bird, n.d.
Copper Bird, n.d.
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Beasley Collection
Dessalines, n.d.
Dessalines, n.d.
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Beasley Collection
Lwa, n.d.
Lwa, n.d.
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Gallery of Everything
Cat, n.d.
Cat, n.d.
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Le Centre dArt
Goat with Two Heads, 1961
Goat with Two Heads, 1961
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Museum of Modern Art