Also part of that movement were prominent figures in Haiti's intellectual, cultural and government circles, including Jean Price-Mars, Albert Mangones, Maurice Dartigue, Georges Remponeau and Gerald Bloncourt. Peters spent some of his own money ($2,000) for the opening of the Centre d'Art, but the Haitian government paid most of the salaries and running expenses, including the monthly rent. The letter head for the new organization proclaimed: "LE CENTRE D'ART, Sous le Haut Patronage du Departement de l'Instruction Publique et de l'Institut Haitiano-American."

Sometime in July 1944, Horace Ashton, Cultural Attache at the U.S. Embassy, sought to tie the Centre d'Art exclusively to the Haitian-American Institute, of which he was a Councilor. The Institute itself had been founded by Elie Lescot in 1942. Haitian critics claimed that it fared so poorly under Ashton's leadership that the Haitian government had to coerce its employees who had resided or studied at some point in the U.S. to enroll as members. In a letter of protest to Peters against Ashton's hegemonic ambitions, Albert Mangones, then General Secretary of the Centre's Administrative Committee, reaffirmed that the Centre d'Art was "a Haitian institution of artists, founded by the artists and for the artists." Peters, to his credit, sided with Mangones and the Haitian members of the administrative committee.

Everything then, from the flourishing of Haitian art in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to the artists' mastery over their craft, and to the influential role of Haitian official and cultural figures in the founding of the Centre d'Art, would tend to dispel the myths of "1944" as the moment of creation and of Peters as the "father" of Haitian art. But some myths have a peculiar life of their own.

http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/art/pre-1944.htm