Images of Congo
Available: Amazon, 5 Continents Editions
Images of Congo explores the life and work of New York artist Anne Eisner who lived in the former Belgian Congo (now DRC) during the 1940s and 1950s.
Her passion for maverick field anthropologist Patrick Putnam brought her to Camp Putnam (a research station, lodge and medical dispensary now named Epulu) at the edge of the Ituri rainforest. Her commitment to the people there made her stay. An eccentric in the colonial context, Eisner spent time in Mbuti pygmy camps, transcribed legends, wrote ethnographic notes and brought up three orphaned pygmy babies within a network of ‘mothers’.
Celebrities, tourists, game hunters and art collectors came to Epulu for first-hand experience of the rainforest and the Pygmies: among them, Colin Turnbull who became an anthropologist famous for his descriptions of pygmy life. Eisner and Turnbull’s fraught relationship in time divided them on ethography and the importance of art in culture. Eisner entered fully into the lives of the people whose everyday gestures and context inspired her work. Her art refracts a memory of pastoral in celebration of communal life and constitutes a refuge from the world of violence and politics, just beyond the borders of its radiant world.
This book contributes an important esthetic perspective to the understanding of an area that has long fascinated anthropologists and others. It is part of a broadly emerging review of the colonial era in Congo.
PREFACE Abiola Irele
INTRODUCTION Christie McDonald
Ch. I “Drawing on the Forest: Anne Eisner at Epulu,” Rosanna Warren
Ch. II “Ethnography, Literature and Art -: Making Sense of Colonial Life in the Ituri Forest,” Christie McDonald
Ch. III “Modernism and Ethnology in the Ituri: Anne Eisner, Colin Turnbull, and the Mbuti,” Enid Schildkrout
Ch. IV “”Mapping the Ituri: Mbuti Bark-Cloth Paintings and the Canvases of Anne Eisner,” Suzanne Blier
Ch. V “Pygmy Images and the making of ‘Madami,’ A Memoir by Anne Eisner Putnam and Allan Keller (1954),” Christraud Geary
Ch. VI “Beyond the Images: Hearing Anne Eisner Putnam’s African World,” Kay Shelemay
Bibliography
Appendix: Art Commentary:
-Early reviews and critics’ comments
-“Sight-reading the work,” Louis Finkelstein (1992
-“Notes from a painter’s point of view” Joan McD Miller (2002)