Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
Bertina Lopes: (Counter)Modernist in Arms
Nancy Dantas
Abstract
In his landmark text “Portrait of the African as a Modern Artist”, Sylvester Ogbechie inscribes Nigerian painter Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994) as a modern artist by reading his studio retroactively as a signifier.1 The purpose of my text is to further Ogbechie’s corrective optic and offer a gendered account of African modernisms, taking Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes (Lourenço Marques, 1924–Rome, 2012) and her specific presence and occupation of the quintessential androcentric modernist site of artistic production–the artist’s studio–as my focus. If Ogbechie intended to invert the canonical white Western narrative of modern art by inscribing Enwonwu as a modern peer, I wish to take Ogbechie’s work a step further and investigate the implications of looking at Bertina Lopes’s practice (by way of this specific locus) as located at the intersection of subject and history, as a biracial woman and modernist, living and labouring under the double stigma of race and gender, who developed and perfected her art by affirming her African identity and Blackness at the height of colourism in Mozambique, and later in Rome. A modern woman and visual artist from the so-called third world, Lopes dissolved received boundaries and distinctions at every level, unsettling, enfolding, trafficking, and hatching2 that middle space between the tangible and the intangible, between figuration and abstraction throughout her lengthy career, with works like Raiz Antiga (1964) and the range of canvases and bronzes she presented under her umbrella title, Totem.3 Like Ogbechie, I adopt a canonical portrait of the artist in her studio, that “magical space where art is pondered and brought into being,”4 as a mediator to bring this about.5
1
Ogbechie analyses a photograph published in the West African Review of Enwonwu in his Hampstead studio. The artist is shown standing next to an easel with a framed painting of a West African market scene sitting on it. He is dressed in a white lab coat and a tie. Enwonwu “wields a rectangular palette in his left hand and a brush in his right hand. The camera records the scene from high elevation and the artist stares directly at the viewer. The light spills over onto a table cluttered with papers, paint brushes, a beret, a telephone, a bottle of milk, and a tray containing a half-eaten loaf of bread.” The telling details provided continue. See Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Portrait of the Artist in the Shadow of Discourse: Narrating Modern African Art in 20th Century Art History,” Critical Interventions 1 no. 1 (2007): pp. 14–15.
2
This is a poetic adoption and inflection of the term as it is used in weaving. This technique lets two colours run into each other, and is often used with lighter and darker tones of the same colour to create shading.
3
Given the restrictions of the current text, I am unable to include images of these works. Readers should consult the online archive www.archiviobertinalopes.net for these and other visuals.
4
Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art Is Made and Where Art Is Displayed (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Centre, 2007), p. 6.
5
This research has been hampered by COVID and the sequence of travel bans we have all endured. In many instances, I find myself speculatively effabulating, to employ Hartman’s term, the artists’ portraits and oeuvres, and employing processes of inference.
Ogbechie analyses a photograph published in the West African Review of Enwonwu in his Hampstead studio. The artist is shown standing next to an easel with a framed painting of a West African market scene sitting on it. He is dressed in a white lab coat and a tie. Enwonwu “wields a rectangular palette in his left hand and a brush in his right hand. The camera records the scene from high elevation and the artist stares directly at the viewer. The light spills over onto a table cluttered with papers, paint brushes, a beret, a telephone, a bottle of milk, and a tray containing a half-eaten loaf of bread.” The telling details provided continue. See Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Portrait of the Artist in the Shadow of Discourse: Narrating Modern African Art in 20th Century Art History,” Critical Interventions 1 no. 1 (2007): pp. 14–15.
2
This is a poetic adoption and inflection of the term as it is used in weaving. This technique lets two colours run into each other, and is often used with lighter and darker tones of the same colour to create shading.
3
Given the restrictions of the current text, I am unable to include images of these works. Readers should consult the online archive www.archiviobertinalopes.net for these and other visuals.
4
Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the Relationship Between Where Art Is Made and Where Art Is Displayed (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Centre, 2007), p. 6.
5
This research has been hampered by COVID and the sequence of travel bans we have all endured. In many instances, I find myself speculatively effabulating, to employ Hartman’s term, the artists’ portraits and oeuvres, and employing processes of inference.
