Pictures are a form of knowledge, and knowledge, they say, is power. We are used to the idea that European masterpieces hanging in the Louvre or giant abstract paintings displayed in corporate lobbies radiate cultural authority. But what if the pictures in question are simple 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 laughter, fascination and philosophical reflection. And it’s only the second 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 experiencing 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-researching, and discovering sublime 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 immortalizes. Writing fights against forgetting.”
