1964 Louverture Poisson Voodoo Oil Painting - Listed Haitian Artist

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Oil on canvas painting by reknowned Haitian artist, Louverture Poisson (1914-1985). Excellent condition. However, a nail is sticking through the frame from the back to the front. Painting itself is in great shape. Canvas measures approx. 18" x 26". Frame is 23" x 30 3/4". Looks like a voodoo ceremony with sacrificial animal and drumming. Very colorful. Born in Les Cayes on September 14,1924. He moved to Port-Au-Prince in 1942 where he enlisted in the air force. Three years later, he joined the "Centre d'art" where he worked with other great masters under Dewitt Peters. In 1955 he had a one-man show at the Centre d'Art. His work is included in major collections worldwide. Poisson's paintings of this vintage and quality are rare. Louverture Poisson died in 1984. Here's his bio: I acquired this fine oil on canvas painting at the estate of the late Willetta Stellmacher of Dallas Texas. See partial bio: "She was born in Lewisville, and she and her mother moved to an apartment on Fitzhugh at Gaston when she was 2, after her parents divorced. When she was a student at David Crockett School, a friend was taking dance lessons at Ruth Laird’s Texas Rockets studio. Stellmacher couldn’t afford them. “So she said, ‘I will teach you everything I know,’ ” Stellmacher says. “She taught me every step and every routine.” She and the friend, Mita Norman, started working at the El Tivoli nightclub in Oak Cliff, the Baker Hotel Downtown and the Baghdad club in Arlington. Willetta Stellmacher, left, and another dancer pose with Lawrence Welk. Ruth Laird eventually took the talented young dancer under her wing, offering Stellmacher lessons if she would teach the little kids at the studio. Through her vaudeville connections, Stellmacher later got a job with Dorothy Durbin at the Edgewater Hotel in Chicago. She worked as a chorus girl there for eight years. She also danced on Jackie Gleason’s stage show in New York, and she was accepted as an early member of the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall, even though she was 2 inches too short. She quit after two performances because “they treated you like dirt, and I had wonderful respect at the Edgewater.” For 16 years, she dated Joe Piscetti, who was a close friend of Frank Sinatra, a nephew of Al Capone and a guy who was, ahem, well-connected in Chicago. She remembers sitting in Piscetti’s room at the Waldorf in New York one day. He was having a card party, and she was crocheting a bedspread, “if you can believe that,” she says. And someone mentioned that Walter Winchell had written in his column that Stellmacher was in town, and that she was going to take a Hollywood screen test. Stellmacher was pictured in the first four-color process edition of the Chicago Tribune. She didn’t want to take the test because she thought movies were “silly.” But Piscetti wanted her to take the test, so she did. It was one of the first screen tests in Technicolor. She tested so well that MGM offered her a seven-year contract, but by then, Piscetti had a change of heart and told her not to sign it, so she didn’t. “He said, ‘Well, now you can say you turned it down.’ ” After her dancing career, Stellmacher was a model, which she says paid better than dancing. She was the Cook’s champagne girl of 1940. And her full-page picture appeared in the first four-color process edition of the Chicago Tribune in 1944." Please feel free to ask questions. Shipping includes insurance. Thanks for looking! Posted with eBay Mobile read more

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