The "African Giotto" : Kalifala Sidibé

June 16, 2023

The "African Giotto" : Kalifala Sidibé

It was a pamphlet of a few pages, without date or publisher. He was lying around among newspapers and leaflets from the 1930s, in the cellar of a pavilion whose name I don't remember...

On the cover, a poor reproduction of an “exotic” photograph of an African family in front of canvases. On the first page, an article by Roland Dorgelès entitled “Kalifala Sidibé, Sudanese painter” began with this terrible formulation: “I love negroes”. Two other contributors participated in this surprising little exhibition catalogue, Georges Huisman and Le Corbusier. This strange meeting of an African painter, a novelist, an art critic and an architect did not suggest a major work. However, 15 years after Apollinaire and others affirmed the aesthetic power of Negro Art, a new artistic revolution, compared to the Italian Renaissance, was taking place in these few pages. Nicknamed the African Giotto, Kalifala Sidibé would unleash passions and hatred across intellectual and media Europe before disappearing “seized by debauchery” without knowing that he had just shaken an ideological bastion of the West: its supremacy artistic.

First edition of a notable rarity from the catalog of the Georges Bernheim gallery dedicated to the exhibition of Kalifala Sidibé, Malian painter, considered the first African painter on canvas, precursor of modern African Art. Texts by Roland Dorgelès, Le Corbusier and Georges Huisman, cover illustrated with a photograph of the painter in his village. This catalog of Kalifala Sidibé's first exhibition which will then tour Europe was until today considered to have disappeared and among the fifty paintings produced only two are currently listed and preserved at the Le Corbusier Foundation and in the collection of Michael Graham-Stewart.

The exhibition of this young African painter from September 15 to October 3, 1929 at the Galerie Georges Bernheim had a considerable impact in the world of art and beyond in Parisian society. Kalifala Sidibé's works were then exhibited in several renowned galleries including Alfred Flechtheim in Berlin, the Neue Galerie in Vienna and the Gummesons Konsthall in Stockholm. About ten years earlier, Apollinaire and Paul Guillaume had already shaken up the way we looked at “Negro art” which had until then been confined to a more or less aesthetic ethnographic manifestation. The elevation of African statuary to the rank of work of art upset the European ethnocentric conception. However, these tribal sculptures retained a special status in the eyes of the viewer: they did not arise from an artistic will. If in 1929, Europe recognized the existence of African art, it remained an art without an artist, as was Romanesque art before Giotto.

From the first lines, Roland Dorgelès qualifies Kalifala Sidibé as an “authentic” African painter, in opposition to these “blacks in jackets”, whose recognized artistic talent comes, according to the mentality of the time, from their Westernization. Among them, the African-Americans Henry O. Tanner and Palmer Hayden, or the Nigerian Aina Onabolu are respected painters, “evolved people with ebony skin” who “if [Dorgelès] called them negroes (…) would consider themselves offended.” Kalifala Sidibé “on the contrary is the pure Sudanese, the unadulterated Negro who feeds on yams, reveres crocodiles and dries meat on the roof of his hut.” His work does not result from borrowing from the West but from his own apprehension of the world and his instinctive desire to “copy nature”. Implicitly comparing African tribal arts with European medieval art, Dorgelès elevates Kalifala to the status of an African Giotto, the first artist of an art which is no longer primitive.

This announced African Renaissance is based in France on this only artist who remained in his village on the banks of the Niger. Visitors to the exhibition will only see photographs of him representing the painter sitting cross-legged in front of his canvas, surrounded by almost naked children and a woman carrying her baby on her back while a previous canvas dries on the roof of the straw from the hut. This exoticism worthy of the photos of the Trocadéro ethnographic museum will also cause more ink to flow than the paintings themselves. Because, as in 1916 during the exhibition of Negro sculptures alongside the works of Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani, what is at stake with Sidibé's exhibition is less the discovery of an exceptional painter than the affirmation sulphurous of the universality of Art and, even more, of its immanence: “six centuries apart and under other skies, it is the marvelous story of Giotto which is renewed. »The political and ethical consequence of this observation is a questioning of the racial hierarchy and the paternalistic colonial system.

A similar artistic adventure was carried out the same year in Belgium with the Congolese artist Albert Lubaki discovered by Georges Thiry and exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-arts in Brussels in September-October 1929. However, the European remained at the origin of the production artistic since it was Georges Thiry, a young Belgian colonial administrator and curator of the exhibition who, discovering Lubaki's frescoes on boxes in 1926, encouraged him to work on paper and guide in his new creations (as evidenced by their long correspondence before the exhibition). Paradoxically, this white intervention, although strongly criticized, ensured the good reception of black work in colonialist Europe: Lubaki's work serving as a demonstration of the "emancipatory benefits" of Belgian colonization. With the help of Gaston-Denys Périer, Thiry renewed his experience in 1931 with the works of two other hut painters, Djilatendo and Antoinette Lubaki. Habiles, Périer and Thiry, thus promote a “living Negro art” under colonial control by praising: “the potential of the natives evolving under our administration”. The “authenticity” put forward by Lubaki then becomes a simple commercial argument assuming its part of exotic construction: “With your approval, Lubaki will be a Negro from Africa, one hundred percent Negro, as they say today” ( Carlo Rim, Lubaki, Negro painter, in Jazz n°11)

The Kalifala Sidibé exhibition which is taking place concurrently in Paris does not lend itself to this recovery. Here, the “purity” of the artist’s Africanness is an essential element of his presentation, as evidenced by the countless press articles: “This Senegalese painter is a true Senegalese” (Paris-Midi, Tuesday October 15, 1929 ), “He is a Negro, an authentic Negro” (Comœdia, Thursday October 24, 1929), “authentic Negro, who lives on the banks of the Niger” (Le Quotidien, Oct. 16, 1929), “an authentic and primitive Negro” (Vu, n 84, Oct. 23, 1929),

In this regard, the story (or perhaps the legend) of the “instinctive” discovery of his art by Kalifala Sidibé in a cotton factory, thanks to the pieces of cotton and the paints used for numbering the bags – discreet concession to the Collateral “benefits” of colonization – contributes to constructing a founding myth of an “autonomous” Renaissance of African art. Furthermore, this artistic independence is part of the avant-garde movement of Western art, as a journalist from La Revue Weekly notes acerbically: "If we press Kalifala Sidibé to make her say where her work comes from, talent, he apparently responds: “It’s the Devil who does things like that…” Less realistic than surrealist, this Negro believes in the magic of art. He agrees with many "advanced" critics. » A barely veiled reference to the subversive clique led by André Breton.

Kalifala Sidibé not only opens Africa to Art - in its modern sense - but to its most contemporary expression. In the midst of the emergence of Naïve Art, Surrealism and soon Art Brut, this Giotto of the Banks of the Niger innocently affirms the independence of the black man in the face of the highest expression of the human spirit. Exciting the imagination, this “natural” birth of an artistic vocation within the African bush partly explains the media agitation around this unknown artist.

From the Annales Coloniales to Paris-Soir, the exhibition is relayed by almost all the daily newspapers and a number of journalists pretend to be art critics to pour out their resentments towards modern art on this scapegoat ideal, Le douanier -Rousseau in the lead, and the so-called negrophilia of the artistic elites. “Kalifala is a sort of Negro Rousseau, with this difference that the customs officer dreamed of imitating the paintings in the Louvre, while he only thinks of imitating nature. This seems to me to be a quality. Alas! I'm afraid we'll lose it soon! we have already spoiled in this way a fried potato seller, a laborer and a cleaning lady whose works make the merchants' fortune. » René-Jean's article in the journal Comœdia of October 24, 1929 is undoubtedly the most emblematic of the terrible stakes of this extra-Western modern painting:

“If we exalt this Negro, it is because it is difficult to take his painting to the pinnacle. Painting... the word may be excessive in the sense that we generally give it. Kalifala Sidibé’s paintings are large colored images (…) without flexibility or nuances. Certain Abyssinian manuscripts show us friezes quite similar with their characters following one another to those of Kalifala Sidibé. »

Despite this observation which he wants to be definitive, René-Jean, an esteemed art critic, devotes no less than seven columns to this exhibition of an artist whom he judges so harshly. And it is with the help of classical and modern French artists that he tries to push back the idea of African art. Delacroix, Puvis de Chavannes, Poussin, Watteau, Corot, Daumier, Baudelaire, Rabelais, La Fontaine, Voltaire, Racine, Mozart, Renoir, Courbet, Cézanne, Vlaminck, Matisse, Houdon, are all invoked in this single article to stifle in the egg the inconceivable pretension of the African continent. And René-Jean refuses Africa even the representation of itself: “[The 18th century] did not ignore the Black Race. If he did not look for masters to glorify from her, he borrowed from her certain types whom he took as models. At both ends, Watteau like Houdon (…) created more spiritual types than those of Mr. Kalifala. Dare we say they are any less true? This would not be flattering for dark-skinned men. » The violence of the remarks is matched only by the earthquake caused by this exhibition which calls into question the self-proclaimed supremacy of the white race.

If several critics attest with Le Corbusier to the incredible talent of Sidibé, it is with the temptation to deprive him of this “authenticity” which is so problematic: “Well! even this one knows too much! It is not the ingenuity of its colorful designs that charms us. Its striped fabrics are reminiscent of Matisse's collections. And then, he has what Western painters worked for centuries before acquiring: the feeling of what Berenson calls tactile values. Kalifala Sidibé (…) draws with abandon, with the casualness of “genius”. (In The Weekly Review) This indisputable talent is then attributed to the Persians of whom “one can even wonder if in some corner of his hut Kalifala Sidibé does not keep [a few] images. » But once again it is the philosophical and ethical implications rather than the painter which are violently denied here: “Is it really “the need to copy nature” which torments him? And was this need, moreover, at the origin of humanity's first artistic manifestations? ". (In The weekly review, November 9, 1929).

This interpretation is not the result of the ethnic animosity of a journalist. The violent charge of The Weekly Review is in fact only the rewriting of a laudatory article from the journal of political and literary debates published 10 days earlier: “Kalifala Sidibé’s paintings are extremely seductive and not only charm with their awkwardness, their naivety. We would almost be tempted to add: On the contrary! There is a freedom of writing in this art that is surprising in a man who, it seems, has never seen European painting. Certain striped fabrics are reminiscent of Matisse's backgrounds. And the Negro, on the first try, succeeds in “turning” an arm, for example, while Western designers took centuries to discover what Mr. Berenson calls “tactile values”. (…) Was he not inspired by oriental, Asian folklore, more than by nature itself? » The insistence on Sidibé's oriental inspiration is based on a distortion of Le Corbusier's text which in fact supposes, in our catalog, an oriental genealogy to Kalifala's ethnicity. This supposed Indo-Asian origin: “This Negro gives me the impression of belonging to races which had contact with Persians and Hindus” is simply reinterpreted” by journalists in the conviction of an imitation of the Orient.

Whether complacent or virulent, the numerous articles sparked by this exhibition almost all revolve around the artist's negritude and, thus, the so-called "in vogue" negrophilia. They do not avoid the artistic question in this way, they unconsciously emphasize that the real issue of this exhibition is more political than aesthetic. “The weather is dark,” quips Gabriel Joseph Gros at the opening of his article in Paris-Midi. The very preface that Dorgelès devotes to this exhibition opens with “I love negroes” and is only structured around this theme, ostensibly evading the question of artistic quality: “The name of this unknown Will he become famous? My love of Negroes compels me to wish it.”

Only Le Corbusier and Michel Leiris take the measure of the intrinsic power of Kalifala Sidibé's painting and reveal, beneath the political implications, the metaphysical question posed by this resurgent art. Le Corbusier first of all, proposes in the exhibition catalog a reading grid which will find no echo, and for good reason, in the press of the time: he compares Kalifala's painting to writing, "signs clearly drawn which can be read and can provoke, through their arrangement, relationships full of interest and meaning. (…) creating signs represents a power of synthesis and clear views. (…) What interests us in this uncultured black? He writes pictorially. (…) and he achieves something fixed, something definitive: these are paintings and they are neither modern nor ancient. ". By this refusal to place Sidibé's work in the continuity of tribal art, Le Corbusier does not measure the artist in terms of his negritude, but of the universal concept of Art.

A conception shared by the young Michel Leiris who stigmatizes in Documents n°6 “the arbitrary scale of value” established by “the white race” and the “purity of style which obfuscates so many minds”. A year before his trip to Africa, Kalifala Sidibé's exhibition inspired the future author of Phantom Africa to reflect which "would influence his ethnological research which refused the old interpretation or the schematic and simple stylization of African arts" (Yanagisawa Fumiaki , The birth of the painting in black Africa: Kalifala Sidibé and “negro art”)

Despite the criticism, this first exhibition was a success and will be followed by several others in Germany, then in Stockholm, without knowing exactly how many works will be presented and sold. A year later, as a new exhibition of his paintings opened at the Gerbo gallery in Paris, Kalifala Sidibé, barely thirty years old, died, allegedly "seized by the debauchery" resulting from European success (Comœdia, 23 November 1930). His talent was then recognized by all and his works acquired by collectors throughout Europe. But his premature death puts an end to this very first African adventure in modern art. The exhibition catalog of the Bernheim gallery, a fragile brochure bringing together three large pens, was until now considered lost, like the vast majority of his works produced and attested by European exhibition catalogues. Only two known paintings remain today: in the London gallery Michael Graham-Stewart and at the Le Corbusier Foundation. Of the other paintings, all signed in Arabic, we only have a few contemporary black and white documents.

We can reasonably question the astonishing obscuration of the history of art of this artist who enjoyed the honors of the most prestigious modern art galleries of the early 20th century, centers of the artistic avant-garde: The Georges Bernheim gallery in Paris where Bonnard, Vuillard, Cézanne, Seurat, van Dongen, Matisse, le Douanier Rousseau, Dufy, Vlaminck, Modigliani and Utrillo were exhibited in particular; the Alfred Flechtheim gallery in Berlin which showcased Picasso, Braque and Derain, the Gummesons Konsthall in Stockholm which very early on exhibited Kandinsky, Klee, Munch and later Andy Warhol or the Neue Galerie in Vienna. Immortalized by a photograph by Brassaï, a hunting scene acquired by Le Corbusier sat above his desk for a long time. This painting is today exhibited at the Le Corbusier Foundation.

The long study devoted to it by Yanagisawa Fumiaki, doctor of letters at the University of Tokyo, specialist in African arts in Europe and modernism in sub-Saharan African culture, highlights “the inextricable situation internal to the reception of black cultures in France at the end of the 1920s" which, with the too brief career of Kalifala Sidibé and the disappearance of her paintings, partly explains the progressive erasure of the first modern painter from the History of Art African!