Artist Eldzier Cortor (American, 1916–2015)
Title Slaughterhouse, No. VI (L'Abbatoire, No. VI)
Date 1980
Medium Color intaglio on paper
Dimensions Image (irregular): 35 1/4 x 23 1/2 in. (89.5 x 59.7 cm)
Plate: 35 1/4 x 23 1/2 in. (89.5 x 59.7 cm)
Sheet: 40 1/2 x 29 in. (102.9 x 73.7 cm)
Credit Line Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eldzier Cortor and Corrine Jennings and Joe Overstreet, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2007.7
About this Work
The Africa American artist Eldzier Cortor received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1949-50 to study African Diaspora cultures in the Caribbean, including Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). He spent most of the year in Haiti, where he taught at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. Upon his return, Cortor learned that a number of his former colleagues had been killed by the dictatorial Haitian regime of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his brutal henchmen, the Tonton Macoutes.
This abstracted image of hooks, bone, blood, and torn tendons not only recalls meat displays seen in Haitian butcher shops, but also serves as a metaphor for the horrors experienced under Duvalier’s reign of terror. Printed in the red and black of Duvalier’s flag, distorted faces seem to emerge from the background, perhaps representing the tortured souls of victims whose corpses had been strung up as public warnings to dissenters. The idea of conflating human suffering with the slaughterhouse became a recurrent theme in Cortor’s work for almost thirty years.
