(b Croix des Bouquets, nr Port-au-Prince, 1899; d 1991). Haitian sculptor. He lived all his life in the dusty crossroads village where he was born. He was discovered in 1955 by the American watercolourist Dewitt Peters (1901–66) and Antonio Joseph, who had noticed some unusual forged iron crosses in the town cemetery. Inquiring about the maker of these unique crosses, they were directed to a local blacksmith’s shop. Liautaud had worked as a mechanic on the sugar railroad. He explained the crosses as belonging to the graves of Vodounists and offered to make some for his visitors. It was the beginning of a long personal career as well as an entire genre of cut and forged metal sculpture in Haiti. He began to include representational elements in his work, cutting forms out of old oil drums or scrap with a hand chisel or hacksaw, as in Crucifixion (1959; Washington, DC, A. Mus. Americas). The technique demanded physical force and produced a roughly contoured shape whose edges were then filed and smoothed. Liautaud also forged elements, heating and hammering the metal to the desired shape; some details were rounded by hammering over forms or bent so that they extended into space. He often took the loa (spirits) of Vodoun as his subjects, transforming them into personal metaphors suggesting the darker side of Vodoun. His figures have attenuated and often contorted limbs. Crosses symbolic of Legba (spirit guardian of the crossroads) or of Baron Samedi (lord of the cemetery and the realm of the dead) recur in his work. La Sirène, the mermaid, was his favourite subject, which he loved to adorn with trinkets to accent her sensuality.

• Liautaud, Georges
  • Haiti, §IV: Painting, sculpture and other arts