L'Abbatoire No. III
Eldzier Cortor
(American, 1916–2015)
about 1967
Medium/TechniqueSoft ground etching, aquatint, and flat bite, printed from two shaped plates in black and red
DimensionsSheet: 53 x 77 cm (20 7/8 x 30 5/16 in.)
Credit LineGift of Eldzier Cortor in memory of Sophia Rose Cortor
Accession number2012.1477
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In 1949, Cortor won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study the African diaspora in Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti, and spent much of that year teaching at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. He later learned that a number of his colleagues in Haiti had been murdered by that country’s dictatorial regime. His response to this experience was a series of prints, begun in 1955, titled L’Abbatoire (a variant spelling of the French word l’abattoir or Slaughterhouse). Based on his memories of an actual slaughterhouse in Port-au-Prince, these visceral woodcuts and etchings use the metaphor of slaughter to comment on man’s inhumanity to man. Some contain references to hooks, chains, and furnaces, while others conceal ghoulish, skeletal figures in the margins. In style, they range from literal, if Expressionist, depictions of animal slaughter to near abstractions that merely hint at blood, tendons, and torn flesh.
InscriptionsIn graphite, below platemark: 15/100 "L'Abbatoire No. III" Eldzier CortorProvenance2012, year-end gift of the artist to MFA. (Accession date: February 27, 2013)Copyright© 2022 Eldzier Cortor / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
