Another source of concern for COPAMI was the role of Western-style art education in the colony. It was feared it would lead not only to “inauthentic” and inferior crafts but also to inauthentic modern art, diverting Congolese students’ attention from their “true” heritage and identity. By the early to mid-1950s, however, a number of COPAMI and AAI members, such as museum director Jean Vanden Bossche (who succeeded his father Adrien as director of the MVI) and artist and scholar Jeanne Maquet-Tombu, became more open to the development of a modern or “living” art.36
The majority of the works considered modern were the products of students in one or more of the emerging art schools in the colony.37 These included the Academy of St. Luc in Leopoldville, led by Marc Wallenda, a brother of the congregation of Christian Schools, and the Academy of Popular Arts in Elisabethville, led by Pierre Romain-Desfossés. Wallenda encouraged the development of traditional craftsmanship, but many of his students ended up adopting an idealized realism.38 Romain-Desfossés, a French painter, was opposed to the teaching of Western art history and techniques to Congolese students, worried that it would impede their creativity and jeopardize the authenticity of their work.39 He founded his Workshop for Indigenous Arts, commonly referred to as “Le Hangar” (The Warehouse), as a space for crafts and more decorative arts. However, his students were not limited to the more traditional, artisanal sculptural work, and he ended up renaming the workshop the Academy of Popular Arts. This change in nomenclature reflected his widening understanding of traditional crafts, while demonstrating that he had not abandoned his interpretation of Congolese cultural authenticity.40
Upon Romain-Desfossés’s death, his workshop merged with the Academy of Fine Arts and Crafts in Elisabethville, founded by Laurent Moonens in 1951, an institution that admitted both black and white students.41 Moonens acknowledged the possibility of a contemporary art production but thought it useless and even damaging to teach Western art history to young Congolese students. His fear was that such instruction would be akin to “giving them a heavy artistic past that is not theirs and would distance them from their own inspiration.” Instead, they should “find an African style.”42 Moonens believed that the survival of artistic traditions depended on a rational organization of production under the guidance of colonial representatives or missionary congregations. This supervision would ensure that sales would not drive the “immediate needs” of producers and would thus prevent a deterioration of quality. For Moonens, these immediate needs were not rational economic needs, but a lack of impulse control and an irrational desire to obtain quick money on the part of the Congolese. As he put it, “We cannot lose sight of the fact that the black is a large child and needs help in order to make a decent living of his artistic production”43
Despite the hesitant acceptance of newer artistic forms of expression, most advocates for these developments argued that they must be guided by Western teachers and artists. Those same teachers, however, should refrain from teaching Western art history or techniques in order to prevent that knowledge from contaminating Congolese art. (Wallenda was regularly under fire for introducing his students to Western traditions and techniques.) This argument merely transferred the desire for authenticity in traditional artisanal techniques to a desire for a similar authenticity in modern works—untainted by the West and grounded in some form of “Africanness” inspired by “traditional” life and art. In short, the kind of modernity that was tolerated in art production combined Western stewardship with roots in African techniques, forms, and content.
On the other side of this debate was a sizable group of COPAMI members who steered clear of promoting anything but traditional artisanal production, convinced that it alone could reconnect the Congolese to their ancestral art. They emphasized restoring “traditional” cultural patronage—interpreted to be the village chiefs—although the latter were also succumbing to “cars instead of art.”44 The COPAMI member and painter Robert Verly believed that “reinstating, in the measure to which the colonial politics permits, the authority of traditional chiefs” would be the best way to preserve traditional art production. Verly argued it was in the regions where traditional authority persisted that a royal art still thrived.45 This remark—a clear reference to the Kuba region, where the Kuba king had been incorporated into the colonial system as an indirect ruler—highlights Verly’s belief in the power of the Congolese themselves, albeit only those communities under centralized rule, to reinvigorate and protect their cultures.
The longing for “traditional”—and, therefore, rural—societies in the face of the destabilizing forces of urbanization and change brought on by colonial modernities led to a deeply conservative and antimodern reaction from a considerable part of the colonial establishment. The attachment to the idea of “family” or “home” industries was one that projected on the colony the nostalgia in many European societies for preindustrial and rural life.46 To describe the fear of decline as mere nostalgia, however, would be to miss an important political motivator behind colonial cultural politics. A rerooting of Congolese population in a traditional form of rural life was seen as an antidote against Westernization and its supposed fellow traveler, political awakening.47 Many COPAMI and AAI members, however, saw themselves as a progressive response against the iconoclasm perpetrated against native cultures by missionaries in their zeal for conversion and the destructive side effects of colonial modernization.
After years of discussion, in 1954 COPAMI finally approved the politique esthétique. The document sidestepped the problem of defining indigenous art, since despite years of exhaustive discussions commission members could not arrive at a uniform definition. Although the document consistently used the term art, the practical guidelines reinforce the impression from the debates that the commission’s actual concern was artisanal production, or the minor arts.
The document acknowledged that forms of expression could change when inspiration changed, but it stipulated that guidance was necessary to ensure that traditional sources of inspiration were replaced by the right alternatives and that the “social and collective character of its production was maintained as much as possible.” This meant that artistic education should start with “negro-African classicism,” and that Western art history should be introduced only under teachers’ careful guidance. Conversely, it was important for the Western art teacher to immerse himself in the study of traditional indigenous art in order to “penetrate the black soul and aim to let it bloom freely.” With unique exceptions, pushing artists to create “great art” would prove unsuccessful. The commission, as a result, recommended a focus on a lower level of education, mirroring the educational policies of the colonial state at large.48
Jackson Lears, in his study of antimodernism in American culture, argued that it was more than mere nostalgia or escapism and often “coexisted with enthusiasm for material progress.”49 The same can be said of the conservationist agenda of COPAMI and AAI. The professed goal of Belgian colonialism was the modernization and civilization of the colony, but many in the colonial apparatus became uneasy about the impact of colonial modernity on the social and political fabric of traditional, rural life. The ambivalence inherent in this mission is clear in the political and social undertones of the conservationist agenda of COPAMI and AAI and the attempts by their members in the 1940s and ’50s to come to terms with change while containing it within a framework of “Africanness.” The tension between the identities of artisanal objects as commodities and as repositories of authentic traditions could only be resolved in the creation of an artisanal industry under the guidance of the colonial power, guarding the authenticity of the environment, artisans, and objects. This would not only create the industriousness