The Haitian Paintings Story
1971
A true story about how I got involved in selling Haitian Art
Written 3/2011 and rewritten 09/11/2015 unedited
Howard Yasgar
It was 1963 when I came to Miami Florida to help out my friend Lou Gladstein.
I had worked with Lou in Stamford Connecticut for about a year.
Working with Lou was always interesting, he was what you would call a professional wheeler dealer, and not everything he did was on the up and up.
I had just gotten married, in New Haven and Lou had been my best man at my wedding and his wife Gladys was our witness.
I didn’t know it at the time, but a few months back, Lou had leased a auto wrecking yard in Miami.
One day, a couple of weeks after my wedding, I was at Lou’s house in Bridgeport Connecticut and he told me all about it.
Lou said he leased the place six months prior, and he had hired a fellow to manage the business, but he now suspected that the guy was dishonest and stealing.
Lou suggested that I go to Miami and find out what was going on with the business.
His wife Gladys said I could make the trip to Miami, like it was a honeymoon.
To make it even better Lou said he had a nice 1969 Plymouth sedan that I could use to make the trip.
So that evening I told my wife I was taking her on a honeymoon to Florida.
Once I was in Miami, it didn’t take long to figure out what was going on with the business. The manager was stealing all the money, including 6 months of back rent he hadn’t paid.
He knew immediately why Lou had sent me, and he left, never to be seen again.
The business was so deep in debt that I suggested Lou close the place down, which he did.
Rather than return to Connecticut, my wife and I decided to stay in Miami.
I started dealing in used auto parts, and it wasn’t long before Lou returned to Miami, but this time it
was with a forty foot work boat.
Lou said he wanted to build a freezer in the boat, and eventually take it to Haiti to go into the lobster business.
In my spare time I helped Lou refrigerate the boat, and I kept my eye on it when Lou returned to
Connecticut.
One evening I went to check on the boat, and it was gone.
The boat slip owner said that Lou had shown up in a taxi loaded with provisions, he paid up his boat slip rent and took off, not saying where he was going.
Lou had never even said a word to me, so I assumed something really bad had happened to him in Connecticut.
I also was pretty sure Lou was headed to Haiti.
As time passed, I eventually went into the auto parts rebuilding business.
Miami was fast becoming the hub for exporting goods to Central and South America as well as the Caribbean, and we had customers from all the different countries coming to see us all the time.
However whenever customers came from Haiti, I never asked them if they knew Lou Gladstein, I was always afraid of what they would say.
However, all of that changed in 1967 when my old friend Lou called and asked me to fly to Haiti right away.
I couldn’t refuse him, so I went.
Once I was in Haiti, I found out that Lou had somehow managed to buy the Haitian railroad, and he needed me to help him dispose of it.
So for the next several years, I traveled back and forth to Port Au Prince Haiti while assisting Lou in the disassembly and sale of the railroad.
As a diversion, whenever I had some spare time, I would stop by and see some of my auto parts customers that I was still doing business with.
That’s how I got involved in the Haitian Art business.
One day in the summer of 1971, I was in down town Port Au Prince, with my good friend, Paul Sherlock.
Paul was one of my used parts suppliers in Miami and I thought it would be a good idea to introduce him to a few of my customers in Haiti so he could see where his parts ended up after we rebuilt them.
We were walking down the street, when I recognized one of my customer’s buildings.
The building had two large roll up doors that were open to the sidewalk, they allowed customers to walk in to a parts sales counter.
As we approached the open roll up doors, I could see a long parts counter inside, it was at least thirty feet long.
As Paul and I walked in the building, I immediately saw that there were several rows of colorful hand painted Haitian primitive art paintings of assorted sizes, they were leaning up in rows against the parts counter.
There were so many paintings that you could hardly walk into the building, there must have been over a hundred of them.
As soon as we entered the dimly lit building, my friend Alex, who was the owner saw us.
His office was on the second floor, and he came down stairs to shake hands with us.
I introduced Alex to my friend Paul.
I asked Alex, what in the world he was doing with all the paintings?
Alex smiled and said, “That’s an interesting story”.
As you probably have seen, here in Haiti we have a lot of itinerant street artists.
All of them trying to sell their paintings to the tourists.
Every week each artist paints at least one beautiful work of art, and tries to sell it.
If by Saturday, they don’t sell the painting, they know that I will give them two dollars for it.
So they all come to me, take the two dollars and with the money they buy a bottle of rum and some food.
They get drunk, and then when they wake up on Monday, they paint another picture.
I was fascinated with his story, so as Alex spoke, I opened my wallet and gave him a one hundred dollar bill and I said, Alex, please ship some of the pictures to me in Miami, I want to try and sell them.
It was about a week later when I got a call from Air Haiti.
They said there was a shipment from Haiti waiting to be picked up.
When I got there I found that not only had Alex send the paintings but he also sent forty hand carved picture frames with them.
I called Alex in Haiti, he said the frames cost him another two dollars each.
I was so excited, so I spent the entire day mounting all the pictures in the hand carved frames.
I soon found that I had run out of room in my building to display the pictures, I now had Haitian pictures hanging and leaning against every wall in the building.
Not all of the paintings were primitive Haitian art, there were giant colorful bowls of fruit and many paintings were just bright flowers.
I felt that they were certainly all interesting but I had no idea of what to do with them or where to sell them.
The next day, I poured through the yellow pages of the Miami phone book and I called anyone that had anything to do with art.
As soon as they heard the paintings were from Haiti, they laughed, and some of them actually stopped talking to me.
The bottom line was, not one person wanted to see them.
Some galleries said they were absolutely worthless.
I must have made about fifteen phone calls that day and the consensus of opinion from all the Miami art experts was that I was wasting my time.
As I sat there, I was thinking about what a big mistake I had made.
Then the wife of a friend came over, and right away she saw a big oil painting of flowers. She asked me, and I told her it came from Haiti.
I don’t think she knew where Haiti was.
She asked “How much is it? I said, twenty dollars, She said, “I want it”.
Next a very nasty city of Miami inspector came in, he said our company was in default regarding some kind of license, but he liked one of the Haiti paintings, he took it and the license was approved.
Within a month ninety percent of the paintings were finally gone, most I had ended up giving away, but at least I was out of the Haitian art business.
Many years later, in the 1990’s, I visited a Haitian Art gallery in Key West, there was a large primitive art painting on the wall and I recognized the artist’s name.
I had given away several of his paintings.
How much is that painting I asked, it was only $3500.00.
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