The Untold Story of Antoinette Lubaki: Congo’s Avant-Garde Female Artist

Antoinette Lubaki was among the first Congolese painters whose works on paper reached European exhibitions, alongside her husband Albert Lubaki and the artist Tshyela Ntendu, called Djilatendo by his Belgian patrons. She was born around 1895 in the Katanga province of what was then the Congo Free State. Sources disagree on whether her birthplace was Bukama or Kabinda, where her father served as chief. Her work circulated in Brussels, Geneva, and Paris between 1929 and 1931, then largely disappeared from the European record for nearly eighty years. The story is being recovered slowly, beginning in earnest with the 2012 Fondation Cartier exhibition Histoires de Voir. Almost everything we can say about her comes through sources that were never built to preserve her voice.

Her career on paper lasted about five years. It began when a Belgian official took an interest in the murals she and Albert had painted on the walls of huts, and ended in the mid-1930s when the patronage network around them collapsed. She received small weekly sums for a fixed quota of works, and she had no control over any of them once they left her hands. One man opened the door. Another shut it. The Lubakis never controlled either decision.

Roots in Tradition: The Early Years

Antoinette Mfimbi grew up in Kabinda among the artistic traditions of the Luba. Her father was a village chief. She learned mural painting in the local manner, working with ochre, charcoal, and plant-based pigments on the walls of village houses. Most of what we know about this early period comes from Thiry’s later writings rather than any record she produced herself, so the details should be held with care.

The early subjects are reported as births, harvest celebrations, and ancestral spirits. The paintings were made at night by candlelight, following a local rule against telling legends before sunset. The murals carried communal memory at a moment when colonial pressure was eroding it. The flowing lines and rhythmic patterns that European critics later admired came out of these walls, where geometric ornament and figurative scenes sat together in a recognizably Luba idiom. She would later sign her watercolors “Antoinet.”

A Working Partnership: The Question of Signature

Antoinette and Albert Lubaki worked as a couple, inseparable as artists too. The watercolors that bear their joint name came out of a shared practice, made side by side, often at night by candlelight. Their hands worked so closely that telling the two apart is often impossible, and that closeness was the practice itself. Two artists drew together and let the work move through a single name. That is rare, and it was theirs.

The archive got the joint signature right. What it got wrong was the assumption that one artist and one assistant stood behind it, and that the artist was the man. Both were artists. The work was made together. One question inside the partnership is still worth answering, because the existing record has it backward. Whose practice did the visual language come from?

Albert was a trained ivory carver who sold figurines along the railway. The painted-surface tradition Thiry first encountered on the walls of huts, with its flat planes, chromatic borders, balanced figures, and freedom of color, did not come from ivory work. It came from the mural practice Antoinette grew up in. That tradition was her inheritance, carried from Kabinda into the marriage. Albert joined it through her. The visual language they shared from then on was hers by origin and theirs by practice.

The distinction matters and takes nothing away from him. He was a real artist who joined a tradition through marriage. She was a real artist who grew up inside it. Both made the work. She held the lineage. Naming the source puts the visual language back where it came from, and lets the partnership be seen for what it was: two people, one practice, carrying a history that came in through her.

Through that shared signature, the two of them pulled the colonial world into Luba visual language. Cars appeared next to antelope. Railway tracks cut across ancestral pathways. Rifles took the place of spears in hunting scenes that had never shown them before. The compositions read like commentary on two worlds that refused to settle into one frame. Their joint works appeared on the walls of private homes and public spaces, turning the village into an open archive of celebration and disruption.

The Colonial Encounter: Discovery and Exploitation

In 1926, Georges Thiry, a Belgian administrator with an interest in modern art, encountered the Lubaki murals during his postings in Katanga. He met Albert first, along the railway between Port-Francqui and Élisabethville, where Albert was selling ivory figurines. The murals that drew Thiry in were on the walls of huts, in the painted-surface tradition Antoinette had carried into the partnership.

Credit where it belongs. Most colonial officials of that generation looked at African painting and saw decoration, or saw nothing at all. Thiry looked and saw artists. His familiarity with modern European painting gave him a frame for recognizing what was in front of him, and he acted on it. He returned with materials. He arranged for the work to be shown. He brought Tshyela Ntendu into the same arrangement a year later. The Lubaki watercolors exist on paper in Europe because of Thiry, and the article owes him that.

It also has to be said plainly that in the Belgian Congo of the 1920s, there was no version of discovery that was not also extraction. Thiry could see the work and move it into a European market, but the system he operated within stripped ownership from the artists at the moment of recognition. He brought paper and watercolors into the household, and the painted-surface tradition Antoinette had carried since childhood adapted to the new support. The visual language moved from wall to paper, keeping the immediacy of mural work and drawing out the gradation and transparency watercolor allows. Albert worked alongside her. The same shift that gave the work its new public form turned it into a commodity the artists no longer owned.

The artists handed over every piece. They never knew their work had been sold in Europe, let alone at what price. The same watercolors now move at auction for thousands of euros. With the supplies came quotas, restrictions on subject matter, and enforced distance between the artists and the work after it left their hands. Thiry’s eye was real. So was the machinery that eye was attached to. The two cannot be cleanly separated, and any account that tries to separate them falsifies the record.

Systematic Erasure: The Périer Period

Gaston-Denys Périer, an official at the Belgian Ministry of Colonies, handled the European promotion of the Lubakis. A search of the Belgica database of the Belgian daily press shows that more than half of all references to “Art Nègre” before 1950 trace back to his activities. He arranged the major exhibitions: Brussels in 1929, Geneva in 1930, Paris in 1931. The 1929 Brussels show at the Palais des Beaux-Arts was framed as a solo for Albert, with Antoinette’s work folded in under the “Lubaki” attribution. Périer called the watercolors “imagery of the bush,” keeping them in the ethnographic register rather than admitting them to fine art.

Under his hand, patronage became closer to managed labor. He fixed production schedules. The artists were paid small weekly sums for hitting quotas. Périer also built up a substantial personal collection. The Lubakis stayed poor.

As the work drew attention in European galleries, rumors began circulating in colonial circles that the watercolors had actually been made by a European copying African subjects. The implication was that this kind of refinement could not come from Africa. The rumor belonged to a broader colonial habit of denying African cultural achievement whenever recognition would have been inconvenient.

The comparison with Tshyela Ntendu is useful, but not in the way it is sometimes told. In 1931, Djilatendo’s watercolors hung at the Galerie du Centaure in Brussels alongside Magritte and Delvaux. The Lubakis, both of them, were left out of that show. The line being drawn was not just between male and female artists. It also separated the genre Djilatendo had been placed in, proximate to European modernism, from the one assigned to the Lubakis: “Negro art,” ethnographic. Inside that broader exclusion, Antoinette suffered an additional, gendered one. Périer’s writing flattened her into Albert. The shared first initial, the convenient “A.,” let him fold two artists into one. In catalog entries and reviews, her work vanished into a “Lubaki” attribution that read as masculine by default. When her existence was acknowledged at all, she was an assistant, or a copyist. She was not an artist. What was being erased was not only her authorship of specific watercolors but her authorship of the tradition the watercolors came from.

A Visual Language of Resistance

The work is inventive, and the inventions come out of the inheritance Antoinette carried into the marriage. Her use of indigo, a color with spiritual weight in Luba practice, has been read as a way of mapping the psychological ground of colonial contact. Figures in the paintings often hover between worlds. Traditional dress is layered with colonial additions that read as both decorative and confining.

Her technique mixed perspective systems. The flatness of the mural tradition sits next to moments of depth. Animals and humans share the same picture plane, which alone undermines the nature/culture divide on which colonial ideology depended. The pink and black crocodiles and the unexpectedly colored trees are deliberate departures from European realism, not naïve mistakes. Her use of negative space, large areas left untouched, leaves the work open. The viewer is invited to finish it.

Her subjects did more than document. Women pounding manioc became studies in labor and inheritance. Colonial officials appear with a hint of caricature in their stiff postures, set against the looser line given to Congolese figures. Railways and roads cut through her compositions like scars. These readings are scholarly, not testimonial. We have no statement of intent from her hand. What we have are the paintings, and a growing recognition that they ask to be read as the work of an artist with a position, not a subject documenting her surroundings.

Rediscovery and What Remains

The return of Antoinette Lubaki to art history has been slow, and most of it has come from European institutions. Early shows still listed her pieces under Albert’s name. Later ones corrected the attribution. More recent exhibitions have shown her outside the ethnographic frame she was first received in. African and Congolese curators entered the conversation later and from outside the main institutional engines, building accounts of African modernism that do not pass first through Paris.

What this recovery has not yet done is name the actual finding. Most of the work has stayed at the level of single watercolors, asking which can be reassigned from one Lubaki to the other. That framing keeps asking the colonial archive’s question. The closeness of their hands was the practice, not a problem to be solved.

There is a lineage question worth answering, because the existing record has it backward. The visual language of the watercolors, with its flat planes, chromatic borders, and figures balanced in open space, came from the painted-surface tradition Antoinette grew up in at Kabinda. Albert came to painting through her. Saying so takes nothing from him as an artist, and puts the source of the practice where it actually sits.

Once that is straightened out, the larger point comes into view. Two artists worked side by side, sometimes on the same canvas, and let the work move through a single name. That was the form of their being together as makers. To recover who held the brush on which line is to keep sorting a practice that was not built to be sorted. They made it together, in a tradition that came from her side of the marriage and that both carried forward.

The Lubakis’ arrangement is not unique in art history, even if their version of it is. Picasso and Braque worked so closely during analytic cubism that they treated authorship as beside the point, and neither minded that some canvases from those years are hard to attribute. Hokusai and his daughter Ōi shared late output under his name, and her hand in that work is still being recovered two centuries later. Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked together from 1961, and Jeanne-Claude’s co-authorship was only added to the record in 1994. The cases differ from each other and from the Lubakis, and a full comparative study would be its own project. What they share is enough to be useful here. Art history has mishandled peer collaborations more than once, and when one of the partners was a woman it tended to mishandle them worst. The Lubakis sit inside that pattern, with the added weight of a colonial archive that had already filed the work under ethnography before the question of authorship was even put.

She was pushed out twice. Her tradition was filed in the ethnographic register and kept out of the fine-art rooms where Djilatendo’s watercolors hung alongside Magritte and Delvaux. Inside that filing, she was folded into Albert. The “A. Lubaki” of the catalogs erased her as both a woman and the bearer of the lineage. Eighty years of art history followed that erasure without checking it.

What is recoverable today is partial and should be held as partial. She was an artist in her own right and Albert’s partner in a working practice. She carried the painted-surface tradition into that practice, which makes her, in some real sense, the source of what the two of them did together. Whether she was also his teacher, in any clearer sense than that, the surviving sources do not say. The relationship was closer than the colonial archive was built to describe, and naming it more precisely may be more than the record allows.

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