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

The Lubakis worked as a genuine collective. Antoinette and Albert painted watercolors side by side under one shared signature, and the two hands merged into a single practice. Separating their individual contributions is nearly impossible.

Archives recorded the joint signature accurately. The error came later: scholars assumed Albert was the master and Antoinette his assistant. Their footing was actually equal. What got inverted, historically, was the origin of the style itself.

Albert trained as an ivory carver before the partnership and sold figurines along the railway. The flat-planed visual language of the watercolors did not grow out of that work. It traces back to the mural-painting tradition Antoinette grew up with in Kabinda. Albert took up the lineage through marriage, which makes the style hers by inheritance and theirs in execution.

Restoring Antoinette as the source does not take anything away from Albert. The collaboration just becomes clearer this way: a Kabinda mural tradition carried by Antoinette into the partnership, absorbed by Albert through marriage and joint practice.

Through that shared surface, the Lubakis filtered the colonial world through a Luba visual lens. Cars turn up beside antelopes, railway tracks cut across ancestral routes, and rifles replace spears in older hunting scenes. The compositions read as commentary on two worlds in collision, and they turn village walls into an open archive of celebration and upheaval.

The Colonial Encounter: Discovery and Exploitation

In 1926, Georges Thiry, a Belgian administrator with an eye for modern art, came across the Lubaki murals in Katanga. Most colonial officials of his generation dismissed African painting as decoration. Thiry did not. He supplied the couple with paper and watercolors, and later extended the same arrangement to the artist Tshyela Ntendu. The works survive in European archives because of that intervention.

“Discovery” in the 1920s Belgian Congo was never separable from extraction. Thiry’s materials let Antoinette’s mural tradition move onto a new surface, carrying the directness of wall painting into the softer washes of watercolor. The colonial system took ownership the moment paint touched paper.

The Lubakis handed over every finished piece. They did not know the work was being sold in Europe, and they could not have guessed that a single sheet would one day bring thousands of euros at auction. The paints arrived with quotas, subject restrictions, and an enforced distance from their own output. Thiry’s artistic eye and the extractive machinery of the colony cannot be cleanly pulled apart; any account that tries to separate them misreads the record.

Systematic Erasure: The Périer Period

The Lubakis’ last documented watercolors date from 1935. After that, the trail in colonial archives goes quiet. Production stopped, and the reasons are not fully clear from the surviving record.

A few factors line up with the timing. Périer’s quotas and pricing left the couple with little to show for years of output. Rumors circulating in colonial circles questioned the authorship of their work, which would have stung in a setting where recognition was already withheld. The wider market for “Art Nègre” in Belgium also cooled in the mid-1930s as institutional attention shifted. Any one of these pressures could have ended the practice. Together they made continuing close to pointless.

What happened to Antoinette and Albert after 1935 is largely unknown. No death records, late portraits, or oral histories from the family have surfaced in the scholarship to date. The watercolors that reached Europe were preserved; the artists who made them were not tracked with the same care. That asymmetry is itself part of the story, and it shapes what can and cannot be said about the end of their working life.

The murals in Kabinda, the original surface for Antoinette’s tradition, have not survived either. Wall painting is fragile by nature, and no systematic photographic record was made during the years the Lubakis were active. What remains is the paper work Thiry and Périer extracted, held now in European collections, separated from the village walls and the lineage that produced it.

A Visual Language of Resistance

Antoinette’s formal innovations grew out of her inherited mural lineage. Her use of indigo, a color with spiritual weight in Luba tradition, carried the psychological strain of colonial contact onto the page. Figures inside her frames hover between worlds. Their traditional dress sits under colonial additions that feel decorative and confining at the same time.

She worked against European realism by mixing perspective systems, setting flat mural planes next to sudden pockets of depth. Placing animals and humans on the same visual plane quietly undid the nature-versus-culture split that colonial ideology depended on. Her palette choices, including pink and black crocodiles, were deliberate rather than primitive errors. Negative space kept the compositions conceptually open.

Her subjects do more than document. Women pounding manioc become studies of labor and lineage. Colonial officials get caricatured through stiff postures, while Congolese figures receive fluid, expressive lines. Railways and roads cut through her compositions like scars. No written statements of intent survive, so the paintings have to do that work themselves. Read carefully, they come across as the deliberate, politically positioned output of a master artist rather than passive ethnographic records

Rediscovery and What Remains

The institutional recovery of Antoinette Lubaki has moved slowly. Early European exhibitions corrected the misattributions and pulled her work out of the ethnographic frame. More recently, African and Congolese curators have bypassed Western institutional centers altogether, building histories of African modernism on their own terms.

Recovery efforts still fall into an archival trap. By trying to isolate individual watercolors and assign each one to a single partner, historians keep applying Western, colonial ideas about individual ownership. The blending of their hands was not a puzzle to be solved. It was the practice. Untangling who held the brush on which line forcibly sorts a collaboration that was built to be inseparable.

This blind spot fits a wider pattern. Art history mishandles peer collaborations as a matter of course, and when one partner is a woman, the default tends to be erasure:

• Picasso and Braque treated authorship as secondary during their Analytic Cubist phase, blurring individual attribution on purpose.
• Hokusai and his daughter Katsushika Ōi shared a late body of work under his signature, leaving her contributions to be recognized two centuries later.
• Christo and Jeanne-Claude operated as one creative unit from 1961, though Jeanne-Claude’s official co-authorship was not added to the record until 1994.

Antoinette faced a compounded version of this. Her cultural lineage was first sorted into a primitive ethnographic archive. Her individual identity was then folded into her husband’s masculine default.

Restoring her properly means accepting what a broken record can and cannot tell us. She was a master artist in her own right, Albert’s equal partner, and the bearer of the lineage that produced their shared aesthetic. Whether she acted explicitly as Albert’s teacher may never be settled by the surviving sources. The creative bond between them was closer than a colonial archive was ever set up to record.

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