100 Years of How Black Painters See Themselves

The display at Bozar groups paintings according to six loose themes — “The Everyday,” “Repose,” “Triumph and Emancipation,” “Sensuality,” “Spirituality” and “Joy and Revelry” — mixing old and new. (The birth years of the artists range from 1886 to 1999.) Although each painter can be associated with a particular nation, artistic movement or era, Kouoh’s aim is to tease out the hidden connections. We begin to see a wider web that connects these artists across time and space, regardless of borders and boundaries.

In the first section, “The Everyday,” you might notice different attitudes toward realism: from the West Chester, Pa.-born painter Horace Pippin’s “Victory Garden” (1943), striking for its brightly blooming flowers, to the South African George Pemba’s portrait of a nurse at work, “At the Clinic” (1979), to the Botswanan Meleko Mokgosi’s immense triptych of enigmatic domestic scenes, “Pax Kaffraria: Graase-Mans” (2014).

But not every painting is straightforward in style. In the “Repose” section, figures are more at ease, sitters are engaged in conversation, lost in thought or looking away from the viewer. The styles here vary, with figures sometimes painted loosely, abstracted, or collaged, as if to say that, in repose, we are permitted some leave of our bodily selves.

I loved the pairing in this section of two radically different paintings that upended the traditional Western “odalisque,” or eroticized reclining nude: the Kenyan painter Wangari Mathenge’s “Sundials and Sonnets” (2019), a large, realist portrait of a woman in a blue bathing suit who fixes us in her gaze as she reclines languidly on a bright yellow sofa, was hung next to the American artist Henry Taylor’s “Ly for Me” (2010), a small, impressionistic image of a woman lying on an ornate couch in a cluttered living room. In both, the women are clothed, self-possessed and commanding of our gaze. They look as if they might get up and walk away at any moment.