Luce Turnier was a pioneer Haitian modernist painter, printmaker, and collage artist. Her vivid still-lifes, landscape paintings and drawings created in Haiti, New York and Paris captured the rich range of colours and material forms of Haiti. In contrast, her monochromatic, muted-toned portraits and drawings of working- and middle-class Haitians reflect an interest in Abstract Expressionism and modernism, depicting similar artistic characteristics illustrated in the work of African-American artists such as James A. Porter (1905-1970), Eldzier Cortor (1916-2015), and Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998).

L. Turnier was born in 1924, in the southern coastal town of Jacmel, Haiti. She began drawing and taking art lessons as early as 1937 when her family moved to Port-au-Prince from Jacmel. She joined the then recently established Centre in 1945 and became one of its youngest members, and one of the few women. At the Centre, she studied composition, design and drawing with painter and illustrator Dewitt Peters (1902-1966), painter Georges Remponeau (1916-2012) and artist-architect Albert Mangonès (1917-2002). She excelled in oil painting through the tutelage of Russian-born, Haiti-based painter Tamara Baussan (1909-1999). L. Turnier was among the few academically trained artists working at the Centre during the mid-1940s. In 1946 one of her oil paintings Sarcleur (n.d.) was included in an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

L. Turnier’s softly rendered charcoal and pastels of market women places her as a forerunner among Caribbean female artists who were depicting the image of Black women without the overtly sexualised and “voodoo” themes and images that are often associated with Haitian art. L. Turnier’s portraits and genre depictions were distinct from the Vodou-inspired and themed paintings and metal works that many of the self-taught artists, such as Hector Hyppolite (1894-1948), Philomé Obin (1892-1986), Rigaud Benoit (1911-1986), Préfète Duffaut (1923-2012), and André Pierre (1914-2005), were producing at the Centre during this time. One of the Centre’s founding principles in 1944 was to promote the work of self-taught artists, which became distinctly legible as Haitian aesthetics. Consequently, modernist-inspired works such as those of L. Turnier’s did not fit what was becoming canonized, both nationally and internationally, as Haitian art.

After her studies at the Centre, L. Turnier trained at the Art Students League of New York in 1948, thanks to a scholarship sponsored by the French and Haitian governments. There she took classes with painters Morris Kantor (1896-1974) and Harry Sternberg (1904-2001). She continued her studies in Paris, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière from 1951 to 1953 through a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. At both institutions, she immersed herself in model drawing and painting workshops and began familiarizing herself with portraiture and Abstract Expressionism. In July and August of 1953, she had two solo exhibitions, one at Hamburger Künstlerclub die Insel, Germany and the other at the Altbau der Kunsthalle, which travelled to Düsseldorf and Munich, Germany.

She returned to Haiti in 1972. Between 1945 and 1990 she exhibited continually in Paris, the United States and Haiti. Her many Atlantic crossings were central to her modernist artistic formation, a cultural mixing of Haitian Creole – formed in the Afrodiasporic communities of Haiti, Paris and New York. Recently, more scholarly attention and critical discussion has been devoted to her oeuvre and its importance in Caribbean art history, modern Haitian art and Black modernist art of the African diaspora. She died in Paris on April 22, 1994.