Volume 13, Issue 1 (22 September 2011)

Conversations with the painters Mwenze Kibwanga and Pilipili Mulongoy

transcribed, translated, and annotated by

Johannes Fabian

University of Amsterdam

Introduction

Text One

Text Two

Text Three

Introduction

As announced in the introduction to the preceding volume, three conversations, originally recorded as part of a research project conducted by Ilona Szombati-Fabian, are presented here as historical documents and as valuable background information on relations between “academic” and popular genre painting. The texts are based on conversations with two prominent artists who began their career in Elisabethville/Lubumbashi at the“Académie d'Art Populaire d’Elisabethville,” known as “Le Hangar,” a private art school founded in 1946 by Pierre Romain-Desfossés (1887-1954): Mwenze Kibwanga (1925-1999) and Pilipili Mulongoy (1914-2007). Whenever it seemed useful I referred in the notes to information available on the Internet (all accessed between August 2010 and January 2011).

References cited:

Fabian, Johannes. 1996. Remembering the Present. Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tempels, Placide. 1945. La philosophie bantoue, Traduit du néerlandais par A. Rubbens. Préface de E. Possoz. Elisabethville: Ed. Lovania.

-- 1949. La philosophie bantoue, Traduit du néerlandais par A. Rubbens. (Texte revu par l'auteur, Introduction par Alioune Diop, 1947). Paris: Présence africaine.

Verbeek, Léon. 2010. Les art plastiques de l’Afrique contemporaine. 60 ans d’histoire à Lubumbashi (R-D Congo). Paris: L’Harmattan. See also: http://lubumarts.africamuseum.be/collection , especially the exentensive bibliography.

© Johannes Fabian
The URL of this page is: http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/aps/vol13/intro.html
Publication date: 22 September 2011