Congolese watercolors, indigenous modernities, contact zone, Belgian Congo
Congolese watercolors have been regarded as an isolated phenomenon: artists, such as Albert Lubaki, Tshyela Ntendu, and Antoinette Mfumbi-Lubaki were handpicked by a colonial administrator, given materials to work with and commissioned artworks that were later dispatched to be exhibited in the galleries and museums of Europe. Portrayed as artists working in the brousse with nothing but candlelight illuminating their workspace, they were nevertheless characterized as individual artists in a “modern” sense, creating art and not ethnographic objects (Price 1993). Owing to this representation, in Europe, they have earned a reputation as the “precursors” of modern painting in Congo.
As early as 1929 the expression “art vivant” was used to describe contemporary Congolese artistic production. This term situated the Congolese and European artistic streams in a single space and time. Initially, this expression designated both a Belgian artistic movement unfolding between the 1910s-1930s and European anti-naturalist artistic production. The disconnection of Western discourses from the original context of creation highlights a hegemonic, linear, progressivist, and Eurocentric interpretation of the watercolors.
Despite, indeed, being one of the first artists working with Western mediums (watercolor paints, ink, and paper), and presenting the curio for the Western public who rarely saw artworks from the African continent signed by their artists, we argue that their work is deeply rooted in the already existing artistic practices of various Congolese visual cultures. Our contribution, focusing on the case of Albert Lubaki, aims to reveal “the continuity of African formation over the long term” (Bayart 1992, 60), unfolding the variety of temporal trajectories and entanglements (Mbembe 2001, 17) that constituted the socio-cultural and historical background of this artistic production.
To achieve that, it is necessary to focus on two aspects. Firstly, the deconstruction of the European framework of representation that surrounded these artworks for almost a century. This is done by virtue of a comparative analysis of the press of that time, to reconstruct how these watercolors were received, viewed, and discussed by Europeans. Specific vocabulary carefully chosen by the promoters of artists in Europe, as well as critics, and art amateurs, allows for witnessing the construction of Eurocentric interpretation of the works, detaching them further from the context of their creation.
The second objective is to ground these artworks in space and time by carefully tracing the social and historical context of the creation of these works, which have been presented as an ahistorical phenomenon. The artworks are situated in a “contact zone” -- a space of asymmetrical culture clash between the colonizer and the colonized (Pratt 1991). Then, their visual morphology, stylistic principles, and iconography is inscribed into the long history of art production in Congo, to show, paraphrasing Latour, that the Congolese have always been modern -- or, at least, what is considered “modernity” was already well present in the area before the introduction of Western materials. Lastly, by means of oral history, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research, we aim to reconstruct artists’ (social) biographies.
References
Bayart, Jean-François. 1992. “The Historicity of African Societies.” Journal of International Affairs 46 (1): 55–79.
Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise. 1991. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession: 33–40.
Price, Sally Hamlin. 1993. Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Selected bibliography
Ceuppens, Bambi. 2016. “Remembering Congolese Popular Painting and the Long History of Drawing in the Congo.” In Congo Art Works: Popular Painting, edited by Bambi Ceuppens and Sammy Baloji. Tervuren: RMCA – Tielt: Lannoo, 109–173.
Cornet, Joseph-Aurélien, Remi De Cnodder, et Ivan Dierickx. 1989. 60 Ans De Peinture Au Zaïre. Bruxelles: Editeurs d'art associés.
Harney, Elizabeth, and Ruth B. Phillips. 2019. Mapping Modernisms. Objects/Histories. Durham: Duke University Press.
Périer, Gaston Denys. 1936. « L’art vivant des noirs .» Artes Africanea: 3-13.
Strother, Zoe S. 2016. Humor and Violence. Seeing Europeans in Central African Art. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Thiry, Georges. 1982. A la recherche de la peinture nègre : les peintres naïfs congolais Lubaki et Djilatendo. Liège: Yellow Now.
Ophélie Laloy:
Graduated from ESA, Fine-Arts School (Tourcoing, France), MA in Museography and Expography (Artois University, France), Assistant Museographer for Congo Art Works: popular painting. PhD candidate in Art History at VUB (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), scientific researcher at KBR (Brussels, Belgium) working for the CONGOLINES project about watercolor painters active in the 1920s-30s in the Belgian Congo.
Link: www.linkedin.com/in/ophelie-laloy
Diana Salakheddin:
BA in History of Art (NRU HSE, Moscow, Russia), MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology (KU Leuven, Belgium). PhD candidate in African Studies at UGent, scientific researcher at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium) working for the CONGOLINES project about watercolor painters active in the 1920s-30s in the Belgian Congo.
Link: www.linkedin.com/in/diana-salakheddin
Repenser les dessins colorés congolais (1926-1939) : contextes et temporalités. À partir de l’étude d’un corpus de dessins colorés réalisés par des congolais-es (1926-1939) durant la colonisation belge, nous interrogeons, à la fois, les mots utilisés pour les décrire dans l’Europe de l’entre-deux-guerres et l’importance du contexte de création dans l’élaboration de ces dessins au Congo belge. Cette double approche permet, premièrement, de déconstruire les récits occidentaux en interrogeant le cadre conceptuel dans lequel ils s’élaborent, deuxièmement, de réinscrire ces dessins dans l’espace et dans le temps à partir d’une analyse fine du contexte social et historique vécut par les auteur-es.