Painting
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Object Details
- Bela, born 1920, Republic of Chad
- Sara artist
- Label Text
- This small painting is by Bela Sara, one of the members of the Lubumbashi painting atelier which was a key modernist movement in central Africa. Established by amateur artist-patron Pierre Romain-Desfossés in the late 1940s, the atelier was variously known as "Le Hangar," the "Elisabethville Indigenous Art Studio" and the Académie des beaux arts and produced a significant body of successful decorative works. Desfossés, like a number of colleagues such as Frank McEwen in Rhodesia and Pierre Lods in Brazzaville, expounded a laissez-faire approach to teaching while simultaneously providing his students with certain palettes and "native" inspirations to pursue their work.
- A dynamic composition in blues, greens and ochres, the painting depicts a hunter, acompanied by two dogs, slaughtering a rabbit. The work obtains its lively manner from the application of hundreds of finger-painted dots--a technique common in Bela's paintings, which often depict a wide variety of flora and fauna scenes endowed with a great sense of color and movement.
- Description
- Oil on paper painting in blues, greens and ochres depicting a man holding an axe, acompanied by two dogs, and slaughtering a rabbit. Flowering or fruiting trees flank the man and animals.
- Provenance
- Laurance S. Rockefeller, New York, 1949 to 2002
- [traveled to the Congo in 1949; then safari to East Africa May 9 -27, 1953]
- Exhibition History
- Recent Acquisitions and Promised Gifts, National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., October 18, 2002-January 5, 2003
- Credit Line
- Anonymous gift
- ca. 1940s-1950s
- Object number
- 2002-11-1
- Restrictions & Rights
- Usage conditions apply
- Type
- Painting
- Medium
- Oil on paper
- Dimensions
- H x W: 24.5 x 29.5 cm (9 5/8 x 11 5/8 in.)
- Geography
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- See more items in
- National Museum of African Art Collection
- National Museum of African Art
- Topic
- dog
- weapon
- rabbit
- tree
- male
- Record ID
- nmafa_2002-11-1
- Metadata Usage (text)
- Usage conditions apply
- GUID (Link to Original Record)
- http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ys75a0f0eb2-2dee-4674-99fd-e8533827bd94
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