The Potters and the Painters: Art by and About Women in Urban Africa

painting has been interpreted as representing older women. By contrast, the old man/young woman form a culturally synthetic unit. They are considered eligible to marry, for example. They form a complementary pair in the traditional milieu. Their substitute in the black velvet portraits of actual individuals is the monogamous couple. Upper-class women are depicted with their husbands at some significant milestones in their lives, for example, at their marriage ceremony or when they completed European schooling. The elite woman may also be portrayed at the birth of her first child, with the mother seated, holding the child in the foreground. Mother/child is also treated as a complementary unit in the fictive and traditionalistic portraits. Portraits of women made explicitly for sale to Europeans often present the nubile, barebreasted, frequently smiling image (see Figures 19-21 ). These portrayals, unlike the Latin American black velvets, are meant to be more sensuous and sensationalistic than erotic. A mother and child or a barebreasted girl in initiation headdress are highly characteristic of the fictive portraits. Figure 19, a charcoal drawing made by Lusengu from an old photograph, sold very well at his exposition. He was obliged to make several copies and expressed interest in learning to make prints in order to service a larger clientele with a single drawing. In the fictive portraits, the artist generally focuses dramaFigure 7 9 -Fictive portrait of a young woman, by Lusengu. tically on one or two subjects, even showing tears in their eyes for maximum emotional impact. For background, there is, at most, a stylized surface of leaves, or voluptuous curtains. The individual subject, whether real or imaginary, is the sole focus of attention. One artist of the black velvet genre stated that his goal was to make the painting "more beautiful" than life through its vibrant presentation. Such richness of realistic detail is confined to the velvet portrait genre alone. Kavolis (1967:76-91) links this style to a proletarian clientele and claims that it arises with urban industrial society. However, it is important to note that the very same male artists may paint in a contrasting genre intended for a different target audience. In the art moderne paintings, realism is replaced by the elongation of features and angular contours. This is a form of revitalism in art. Traditional notions of aesthetics are evoked within these art forms. Several of the painters mentioned Picasso's art as an inspiration, both for changes in representation and for universalizing personal experience through art. The fact that Picasso drew ideas both from traditional African sculpture and from his own Iberian traditions, though not explicitly mentioned by the painters, adds an overtone to this revitalization process. 8 The individuation of the black velvet realism is replaced by a modified form of representation, stressing the qualities of form and movement. This 122 STUDIES IN THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION sense of motion enhances the themes that the modern artists wish to portray. One of the major images, as illustrated above, is found in the modern paintings of the African peasant woman (see Figure 16, right). She is physically strong, carrying her baby and her work tools. The arm and leg muscles are exaggerated, and the head is small. The overall effect is an abstracted version of "socialist realism," elevating the hard work of the woman in the traditional milieu. Like many of the women in the black velvet portraits, the women are portrayed on canvas as mothers and epitomize the creative aspects of traditional concepts of womanhood. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ARTIST INFORMANTS AND THEIR IMAGES OF WOMEN Diouf Moussa is a Zairean painter who was trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Lubumbashi, Zaire. Among the artists whose studios are based in Lusaka's shanty areas, he has been exposed to an unusually high level of formal education. He became a professor of fine arts in Kinshasa and subsequent to that, he worked as a graphic artist for UNESCO. He had been sent by the Zairean government to do several expositions abroad in Rome, Paris, and Canada. His collection of personal art was extensive, including over 80 paintings. On several occasions when I interviewed him, Diouf was preparing for expositions. These paintings included several angular portraits of women and of settings like the marketplace in which women predominate. There were also portraits of raw peasant figures who stand in contrast with the elegant town women. Gradually, Diouf has established himself as the central figure in the circle of Lusaka painters. The others look to him for the introduction of outside techniques and the transmission and interpretation of conventional, more Western notions of art. The statements of Diouf and his colleagues below, therefore, contain an exceptional self-consciousness and an attempt to fit themselves to an international frameFigure 20 -Fictive portraits of an old warrior and a young woman, by Kayembe. work of contemporary art. Diouf contrasted his portrait entitled "Woman in the Field" (Figure 16, right) with another called "L 'EJegante" (Figures 12 and 13, right). L 'Eiegante is dressed in diaphanous evening wear and carries a parasol. In another portrait, an elegant woman is depicted preparing for an evening soiree. She is barebreasted and is combing her hair. While the peasant woman labors, /'e/egante has been transformed by urban life into a frivolous symbol of feminine beauty. She is to be appreciated and worshipped by men, but her contribution to the sustaining of daily life is small. In the portraits of l'e/egante, stylistic distortion and elongation are used to denote self-assurance, subtle arrogance, and grace. Another painter, Mutwale, also depicts freedom from the traditional way of I ife through this genre. He has manipulated certain painting conventions and ideals to create an air of mystery. The arms of his elegante are long and wiry (see Figure 22), conveying freedom of movement. Her face is merely a rude sketch. She appears as a generalized figure, not as an individual portrait. Her body is elongated and in a moving balance, with trunk angling left from the upright thighs, arms and head compensating to the right, both knees bent. Her feet are long and firmly planted. Her stance resembles the ideal of split-trunk body movement that appears in Central African dance and sculpture. However, unlike traditional sculpture, which is angled forward and back but remains upright, not leaning to left and right, Mutwale's figure angles along both axes, suggesting both movement and rest simultaneously. His elegante is both active in urban life and a fragile figure possessing merely ornamental properties. Santos is an older portrait and landscape painter located in Chawama, a shanty area some distance from the new figuratist circle in Kanyama. He makes portraits of women that might be referred to as "primitive," using traditional canons of portraiture that seem to be drawn from mask carving. His relative, Christophe, who works primarily in the idyllic landscape genre (Jules-Rosette 1977), also paints portraits in this masklike style, which was not seen elsewhere among the Figure 27 Charcoal drawing of a woman fishing, by Lusengu. ART BY AND ABOUT WOMEN IN URBAN AFRICA 123 Figure 22 -Portrait of a