Afond of the French language, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, civil servant of the colonies, wanted to enter the “Panthéon de Victor Hugo”, according to his expression. Anyone who has spent his life recording what he observed has certainly entered the “Picasso Pantheon”. Exhibited in many museums around the world, today in New York at the MoMa, he has transcribed a world of observation through drawings on small cards, always in the same format. Born around 1923 and died in 2014, Bouabré marked the history of contemporary art.
In the 1970s, Bouabré began to “record” everything that came to him, what he observed, his dreams, his revelations… This work, rich today in some 4,000 drawings gathered under the title “Connaissance World” is a sort of encyclopedia of world knowledge. Exhibition curator and gallery owner, André Magnin discovered it and made it known throughout the world. Thanks to this Parisian exhibition, we enter the fascinating universe of an artist who also invented the Bété alphabet. André Magnin reveals to us part of the complex universe of this artist. Maintenance.
The Africa Point: Can you tell how you discovered this artist and the circumstances of this meeting?
Andre Magnin: We met on April 11, 1988. I was looking for artists for the upcoming exhibition “Les Magiciens de la terre”. I have traveled a large part of sub-Saharan Africa. At the beginning of April, I am in Abidjan to meet artists. I have met hundreds of them. And the day before leaving the Ivory Coast, during a dinner in a maquis, I meet Élisabeth Clavé, who tells me about a letter she received that very morning from Bruly Bouabré. . When I read it, it’s so beautiful, I say right away that I want to meet this man. The next day, she picks me up at the hotel and takes me to Bouabré’s.
It appears to me. It’s a real vision, I take the picture before he sees me. That one is not to be done. After the usual greetings, I tell him that I admire the letter he has written. I tell him that I am there to visit artists. He said to me: “You know, I tinker with drawings. Are you interested in seeing them? He goes back to his hutch, comes back, places a mat on the ground and spreads out his colorful drawings, by the dozen, in the same format. I don’t quite understand, you have to enter his world, it took me years. I took pictures. Back in Paris, our committee meets to select the artists. We all vote for Bouabré. He had his first exhibition at Beaubourg in Paris in 1989, with the “Magiciens de la terre”. And from there, I put together the Jean Pigozzi collection. I’m pretty much the only one interested in this artist who produced some 4,000 drawings.Bouabré, no one really knows him. I spent part of my life with him, 35 years. I made him known worldwide, but he built me. He is one of those who nourished me a lot.
With him, I traveled the world! Maybe 100 exhibitions, collective, personal. Among the major exhibitions, there was that of 1994 at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, but he was also exhibited at the American Center in Paris in 1993, in 1991 at the Center Atlantico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, in Spain, but also in the Netherlands, and many others. Today, he is exhibited in New York, at the MoMa, with a personal exhibition: “World Unbound”. And it is only the second black African artist to have had a solo exhibition in this prestigious museum, after the Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez.
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Frédéric Bruly Bouabré was known for having invented an alphabet. Can you explain to us how he designed this alphabet and how it works?
All his work begins in the manuscripts. But the most striking is its alphabet. These are pictograms, there are approximately 449 of them, if we add the signs and the exclamation points. He made three volumes, one in the 1970s, to convince the Queen of England to take an interest in his invention. The first version on cardboard was disseminated, because at the time no one had really understood what it represented. He redid it for the collector Jean Pigozzi. It is an inventory of all the sounds associated with the corresponding pictograms. These organized pictograms allow you to write.
In fact, everything goes back to the day when he had this divine revelation in 1948, when he felt invested with a mission: to transmit the knowledge of the world and to pacify the world. He then invented this alphabet to give his Bété ethnic group a script that did not exist. While working on it, he discovers that one can write all the languages of the world thanks to his alphabet, through sounds. It’s a hell of an invention. Théodore Monod (French scientist and explorer, Ed) was the first to publish it in 1957.Bouabré is the only contemporary person that we know of who invented writing that is effective. He taught it for a long time on a blackboard, to the children of Marcory. The children have grown since then. Two of his sons write it, like the caretaker of the church in his native village of Zépréguhé. It’s a bit of a utopia… but one that is of great interest to scientists.
This pictographic alphabet is a real invention. For most alphabets, there is no inventor. We can think that they are several, but there we know him. Initially, he records all explanations in writing. Then, when he decided to enter the “Picasso Pantheon”, Bouabré’s expression, since President Houphouët-Boigny did not help him to enter the “Victor Hugo Pantheon” as he wished, he transposed his alphabet on drawings. The first alphabet is disseminated, the only complete copy was made in 1989-1991, for Jean Pigozzi who has just offered it to the MoMa.
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Can you describe Bouabré’s universe to us? What is his approach?
In this exhibition, I tried to approach all the fields of knowledge embraced by Bouabré. Of the tale, he wrote about thirty, but also and of course his pictorial universe. He is an observer. He does not invent anything, he raises. Among his first drawings, he observes the clouds and he sees figures in them, like all of us, and makes a comment, written around the drawing in capital letters. For him, we come from the earth and we return to the earth. When we die, we are buried, it creates gases and vapor that we find in the clouds. So, “when it rains, it rains humanity,” wrote Bouabré. He is very poetic and very religious. We published his bible at Barral, which is nearly 500 pages. In this Bible, he recorded his daily thoughts revealed to him by God. It is a personal mythology. Everything that happened to him at his desk as an archivist, he transformed into drawings. He has a graphic solution where everything is said in a postcard format, always identical, even if there are some counter-examples, like this drawing where he represents himself with eyes everywhere, to show that he is an observer.
One of his series is dedicated to his mother. For the “Worlds Envisaged” exhibition at the Dia Center with the artist Alighiero Boetti (Italian painter and sculptor, figure of Arte Povera) and Bouabré, I went with Boetti to Côte d’Ivoire to prepare the exhibition. Unfortunately, Boetti died three months before the exhibition from overwhelming cancer, but Bouabré discovered Boetti’s “mappa”, the maps of the world with the flags. He took up the idea of Boetti’s flag and, in a vast series, he represents his mother who was lame, and walks her around the world, with his stick, in America, in Portugal, in Zimbabwe, with a flag of country. Bouabré is a whole universe!
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All these drawings are on the same format of postcard on cardboard. Why did he make this choice?
In the late 1970s, early 1980s, he worked in a library at Ifan, the French Institute for Black Africa in Senegal. On these cards were noted the name of the borrower and the date of return of the books. As he was poor, he collected these boxes and drew his very first drawings on them. Then, when he returned to Côte d’Ivoire in 1982-1983, as he still did not have the means to buy paper, he sent his children to hairdressers to collect the Darling lock boxes, on which locks of hair were hung up to braid them. He cuts these boxes in postcard format. From one cardboard, he makes three and he draws on them until I discover him. Afterwards, we bought him, from a printer in Abidjan, cardboard boxes in postcard format, of better quality. On these cards, he drew only with ballpoint pen and colored pencils.
Poor at first, was he able to make a living from his art afterwards?
Oh yes ! They had him build a very big house for his whole family. He has traveled the world. What he wanted was to be known and recognized. He had a high consciousness of his worth. He was proud. Agnès B, who also exhibited him, invited him to come and receive his knight and commander of arts and letters medals in Paris. He made more money than me (laughs). They had him build a real little palace in his native village of Zépréguhé, but he was never able to go there because his children kept him in Abidjan. They needed his signature.
We built his foundation, he’s buried in front. The same day, I buried the museologist Yaya Savané and Bouabré. Yaya Savane was responsible for turning the foundation into a museum. The problem if the building is built, the children do not get along. There are also more than a hundred manuscripts. A part is preserved here, they belong to the family, I don’t know what we will do with them. They are 23 children who do not even speak to each other. If a minister, a head of state, understood the magnitude of this artist, considered a great artist of the XXe century, they would be entrusted to a museum, or else to the National Library of France (BnF), but the family must agree.
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* Exhibition: Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: “We don’t count the stars”. Galerie Magnin A – Exhibition from June 2 to July 30, 2022. 118, boulevard Richard-Lenoir, 75011 Paris.