The screen made by Pilipili Mulongoy, Bela and Raphael Kalela is a perfect example of the Congolese modern art second period of the 1950s. In the early 1940s, Pierre Romain-Desfossés, attached to the military office of the High Commission of French Equatorial Africa, leaves France, then joins Brazzaville to establish a protection status for indigenous art and crafts. He is interested in anthropology and paints seabed. Quickly, born in him the will to make live the local artistic creation, and he creates in 1946 a Native art workshop he calls the Hangar.
Lot 610 : Pilipili Mulongoy (1914 - 2007), Bela (1920 - 1968) and Raphaël Kalela
Untitled, 1952
Estimate : 150 000 / 200 000 €
He then recruits his "disciples" after having given them an entrance test. According to their qualities, he directs them towards easel painting, the most prestigious, or to decorative painting or advertising, also remunerative. Leaving them free to flourish and express their creative genius, Romain-Desfossés shows that there is in Africa an art other than statuary and masks which have inspired modern painters in the Occident. Works coming out of the Hangar go against the conformity and official History of art, heard and self-centered.
The goal of Desfossés is to guide his disciples without imposing principles of Occidental art. On the contrary, he encourages them during walks in the scrubland and visit of the Elisabethville zoo, to take inspiration from nature who surrounds them.
Although against conformism, the European artistic circles are interested in the achievements of the Hangar to the point of being presented in Belgium, Paris, Rome, London, MoMA New York and South Africa.
In the manner of La Fontaine’s Fable, on a continent where oral tradition prevails, the shutters of the screen realized with six hands tell rodents on ground, lush vegetation, flying birds, alternating seasons, life and then death.
