Among the most arresting abstract works to have emerged from twentieth-century Africa are the barkcloth paintings of the Mbuti women of the Ituri rainforest. Drawn freehand with plant dyes on pounded bark, their rhythmic lines, grids, dots and floating motifs have a spontaneity and a graphic intelligence that modern eyes instantly recognise, and which place them among the most compelling expressions of abstraction outside the Western canon. Long made to be worn and eventually discarded, they are now held in major museum collections and prized by collectors for their extraordinary freedom and modernity.
The Mbuti live in the Ituri rainforest of north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, and are among the last hunter-gatherer peoples in the world. They have long been celebrated above all for their music and dance, and their way of life, intimately bound to the forest, became known to a wide Western readership through the anthropologist Colin Turnbull's The Forest People in 1961.
The making of a barkcloth is a shared undertaking. Men strip the inner bark of fig trees and certain vines, then pound it flat with a mallet of wood, bone or ivory until it becomes a supple, fibrous surface. The painting itself is the work of women. They soften the cloth with water, then draw upon it with a finger, a twig or a fibre brush, most often in a black made from gardenia juice and carbon, sometimes accompanied by a red drawn from bark. The process is a social activity, and Mbuti children learn it from an early age.
These cloths were never conceived as pictures to hang on a wall. They were worn as loincloths and skirts for ceremonies and dances, and larger pieces were used to receive newborn children, the bark of the sacred forest trees being thought to offer protection. Their imagery is drawn from the living world around them: trees, vines, seeds and leaves, the tracks and markings of reptiles, mammals, birds and insects, and the stars of the night sky. Scholars differ on how to read them. Robert Farris Thompson saw in their compositions a deliberately wandering, improvised quality, while Suzanne Preston Blier regards them as intentional and carefully balanced constructions, closely related to the body painting that Mbuti women also practise.
Ephemeral by nature, Mbuti painting remained almost unknown outside the forest until it began to attract Western collectors in the 1980s. An exhibition at the Musée Barbier-Mueller in Geneva, Art pictural des Pygmées, followed in 1990, and the landmark study by Georges Meurant and Robert Farris Thompson, Mbuti Design: Paintings by Pygmy Women of the Ituri Forest, drew on works collected between the 1950s and the 1970s by anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and scientists. In 1996 the Berkeley Art Museum presented An Eternity of Forest: Paintings by Mbuti Women. Today Mbuti barkcloths are held in collections such as the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which acquired a significant group in 2018.
