France, 1960s

This striking abstract painting is a rare oil on Masonite by Haitian artist and poet Roland Dorcély. This large composition captures the moody rhythmic lines of his work in the early 1960s.

Born into a modest family in Port-au-Prince in 1930, Dorcély joined the prestigious Centre d’Art in 1946, where he began winning painting awards, but left in 1950 to open Le Foyer des Arts Plastiques with a group of his peers who embraced a modernist aesthetic. Together with Luckner Lazard and Dieudonné Cédor he founded the Galerie Brochette in 1954.

In 1951 he attended the École des Métiers d’Art in Paris on scholarship. On and off, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, with help from patrons in the United States and France, Dorcély based himself in the French capital. There he moved among a circle of experimental writers and painters, publishing in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes and studying with Fernand Léger, André Masson, and Suzanne Roger.

Dorcély returned to Haiti in 1963, mostly withdrawing from the art world. Forty years later he relocated to New York City where he died in 2017.

His works have been exhibited internationally, most recently in 2019 as part of Frieze New York, and are held in both private and public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre National des Art Plastiques, Paris.

Dimensions given as framed; the painting itself is 32" W x 48" H.