L’abbatoire is French for “slaughterhouse,” and in this work ropes, meat hooks, and chains sway against a vivid red backdrop while a brick furnace burns in the lower right. Abstract purple and blue forms suggest hanging slabs of meat, bulging veins, and screaming mouths, lending a disturbing atmosphere of fear and pain. Cortor based this unsettling scene on an open-air cattle slaughterhouse that he encountered while living in Haiti during a 1949 Guggenheim Fellowship.

The slaughterhouse would become a recurring motif in Cortor’s art, and it carried political significance. Living in New York City during the 1950s, he learned that several of his friends from his time in Haiti had been murdered by the forces of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the island’s dictatorial president from 1957 to 1971. In light of these atrocities, the artist’s stylized iconography of hopeless animals and dismembered bodies came to speak to the cruelty of Duvalier’s authoritarian government.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)