E 4 EZ EE the washington post.sunday, april 10 , 2022
Art
BY SEBASTIAN SMEENEW YORK — Pictures are a form
of knowledge, and knowledge,
they say, is power. We are used to
the idea that European master-
pieces hanging in the Louvre or
giant abstract paintings dis-
played in corporate lobbies radi-
ate cultural authority. But what if
the pictures in question are sim-
ple maps, diagrams or — as in the
remarkable oeuvre of Frédéric
Bruly Bouabré — rudimentary
approximations of things seen
and known, drawn in ballpoint
pen and colored pencil on index
cards or cheap cardboard?
“Frédéric Bruly Bouabré:
World Unbound,” at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art, sets
more than a thousand of these
small, colorful drawings, all in
white frames, across a run of
large galleries in a display unlike
any I have seen. Organized by
curator Ugochukwu-Smooth C.
Nzewi with Erica DiBenedetto,
the show is at once overwhelming
and refreshing — a spur to laugh-
ter, fascination and philosophical
reflection. And it’s only the sec-
ond show at MoMA of a Black
artist from Africa.
Bouabré (1923-2014) was born
in a Bété village near Daloa, the
major city in west-central Côte
d’Ivoire. He was one of the first
Ivoirians to be educated by the
French colonial government, and
he turned to art after experienc-
ing a vision in 1948. Forty years
later, he offered a definition of art
that rinses the mind like cool,
silken water drenching a heat-
flushed face. “Art is know-how,”
he said. “Art is searching, re-re-
searching, and discovering sub-
lime innocence.”
Bouabré’s drawings include
handwritten descriptions (in
French) that meander around the
rectilinear borders of each image.
He uses them, as he said, “to
explain what I’ve drawn,” in the
belief that “writing is what im-
mortalizes. Writing fights against
forgetting.”
Western culture often sets pic-
tures and words against one an-
other. But we know, from Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics and from early
Chinese writing, that they sprang
from the same source of wonder,
the same will to knowledge.
Bouabré’s career was devoted to
merging the two (he once said he
aspired to the “sacred pulpits” of
both Pablo Picasso and Victor
Hugo). In the process, he estab-
lished an art form that, in his own
words, “sharpens the love of life.”
I’ve known and loved
Bouabré’s work for a long time,
but I’ve never seen so many of his
drawings together. I was intro-
duced to his work by an Austral-
ian gallerist, Ray Hughes, who
was friends with André Magnin,
the curator who made Bouabré
famous. Magnin included
Bouabré in “Magiciens de la
Terre,” a groundbreaking 1989
exhibition in Paris, and Hughes
took me to meet the curator in his
Paris office in the early 2000s.
People are still debating the
merits of “Magiciens de la Terre,”
which placed 50 (mostly un-
trained) non-Western artists on
the same level as 50 (mostly
trained) Western artists. But such
debates can be frustratingly aca-
demic, underwritten as they usu-
ally are by ideologies about what
the world should look like — but
doesn’t. It is probably better to
acknowledge the show’s unargu-
able impact and to embrace the
specific visions and life stories of
the many wonderful artists it
uncovered.
Bouabré, immersed in the cus-
toms of his village, Zépréguhé,
learned about cultural taboos
from his mother and family el-
ders. He didn’t complete his pri-
mary education, but as his family
moved about, he attended differ-
ent schools and learned to read
and write in French. After serving
in the French West African navy
during World War II, he ended up
working in the French colonial
administration.
With his knowledge of French
and a budding interest in ethnog-
raphy (particularly the culture of
his own Bété people), Bouabré
worked as a translator, informant
and researcher for the Institut
Francais d’Afrique Noire during a
period, the 1950s, that saw
France’s eight West African colo-
nies preparing for independence.
A key encounter came when
Bouabré attended lectures in Da-
kar, Senegal, about the African
origins of Egyptian civilization.
The lectures were delivered by
the Senegalese scholar Cheikh
Anta Diop, who stressed the need
for Africans to develop modern
writing systems rooted in ancient
African culture, including Egyp-
tian hieroglyphics.
Bouabré was impressed. He
sought to apply Diop’s advice to a
famous collection of diversely
shaped and textured pebbles
from his own region. Known as
the Bekora stones, the pebbles are
thought to have supernatural
powers. Bouabré became con-
vinced they were the remains of
an ancient writing system, and he
wanted to use them as the basis
for a new alphabet, or syllabary.
By 1956, his focus had moved
away from the pebbles, but he
was working on a related project
— the development of a Bété
syllabary that methodically
transformed speech into simple
pictograms and then into text. Heturned this project, which he
called “Alphabet Bété,” into an
artwork in the early 1990s, and it
is this work, comprising no fewer
than 449 drawings, that opens
the MoMA show.
“Alphabet Bété” was Bouabré’s
attempt to preserve and extend
the knowledge of Bété culture.
The pictograms include birds, an-
imals, musical instruments, tools,
hand signals, people performing
various tasks and allusions to
proverbs and taboos. The draw-
ings are rudimentary (they’re of-
ten just shapes), and the allusions
are in most cases impossible for
an outsider to decipher. But that
doesn’t matter. The project as a
whole, in its ambition and under-
lying premise, is remarkable.
“Alphabet Bété” soon drew the
attention of the founder of the
Institut Francais d’Afrique Noire,
the French naturalist Théodore
Monod. Monod’s interest con-
ferred on Bouabré the credibility
he sought. (Bouabré later mar-
veled that, as someone who saw
himself as being “of the LOWEST
cultural level” and “having no
degree from the Sorbonne,” he
had never dreamed he would be
christened a “’scholar,’ that glori-
ous name that cradles in a heav-
enly way the soul of every person
it decorates.”)
Even as he worked on “Alpha-
bet Bété,” Bouabré was branching
out. He catalogued aspects of
neighboring cultures — not just
Bété. He founded a short-lived
religious sect, “the Order of the
Persecuted,” and spent 18 years
on a 325-page instruction guide
for the religion, complete with
illustrations.
His interest in combining lan-
guage and pictograms was en-
hanced when he learned, in the
early 1970s, about Akan gold
weights, a pre-colonial system of
cast bronze and copper objects
used for weighing gold dust.Combining geometric patterns
with stylized representations of
animals and humans, the weights
allude to Akan proverbs. Bouabré
delighted in the way they distilled
complex oral traditions and, in
1989-1990, made his own series of
42 drawings based on Akan gold
weights.
Bouabré went on to pursue
various taxonomic projects, and
these make up the rest of the
exhibition — the first ambitious
survey of his work in North Amer-
ica. The drawings that make up
these projects all have roughly
the same format as “Alphabet
Bété,” but they address increas-
ingly universal and ambitious
themes — from “Bété Civiliza-
tion” (27 drawings) to “Readings
From Signs Observed on Orang-
es” (86 drawings), “Museum of
the African Face” (162 drawings),
“Homage to the Women of the
World” (200 drawings) and “De-
mocracy Is the Science of Equali-
ty” (182 drawings).
The show, which was made
possible by a gift of African art
from the collector Jean Pigozzi
and by loans from Magnin, also
includes several manuscripts (in-
cluding the aforementioned
guide to Bouabré’s religion).
There’s something hypnotic
and incantatory about this exhi-
bition. What lingered in my mind
after seeing it was not just
Bouabré’s wide-ranging curiosity
and intelligence, his dedication,
his sly wit. It was his view of the
world, which combines open-
mindedness with an almost Pla-
tonic faith in the idea that differ-
ent manifestations of culture
might not be just fleeting and
arbitrary, but durable, sustaining
and joyous. A revelatory show.Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World
Unbound Through Aug. 13 at the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
moma.org.MoMA is finally paying attention to great African artists
Robert Gerhardt/Museum of Modern ArtThe “Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound” exhibition,
above, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, runs through
Aug. 13. Bouabré, below, is seen in 1993 at the Musée de
l’Homme in Paris. At bottom, two of the Ivoirian artist’s
works, rendered in colored pencil and ballpoint pen.Museum of Modern Art/The Jean
Pigozzi Collection of African Art/
Family of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré
MUSEUM of MODERN ART/The Jean
Pigozzi Collection of African Art/
Family of Frédéric Bruly BouabréMuseum of Modern Art2021/22 SEASONWelcome
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