Marie-Louise
Bastin
by Anne Leurquin
Marie-Louise Bastin has left us
Marie Louise Bastin trod the path of the ancestors one spring night
this year. Although she had been living in Portugal for several years,
she was always willing to write about the Chokwe people. With her characteristic
delicacy and honesty, she gave the University of Coimbra all of her
notes, photographs, and a large part of her library in memory of the
welcome she received from the Angola Diamond company when she traveled
to Dundo in 1956. The University of Porto recently paid homage to her
and her work. She was a discreet woman, rather shy in public, but funny,
witty, and outspoken in private. Our first meeting, at the Université
Libre de Bruxelles, where she was lecturing on African art, made an
indelible impression on me and was the start of a long friendship. She
had an unusual personality and managed to transmit her liking for ethnographic
objects to the students she addressed.
Her background was unusual too. She studied at the École d'Art de la
Cambre, founded in the pure tradition of the Bauhaus, and after graduating
as a graphic artist worked in advertising for several years. Her passion
for Modernism gave her a glimpse of African crafts while she was at
art school. In 1948, she met Professor Frans Olbrechts at the Musée
royal d'Afrique Centrale at Tervuren, and he had a decisive effect on
the future of her research. He opened her eyes to styles, substyles,
and artists' mannerisms, and she undertook a strict classification of
the collection of the Dundo museum in Angola. The knowledge she accumulated
led to an excellent publication, which is now a collector's item: Museo
Do Dundo, Art décoratif Tshokwe (Compagnie des diamants d'Angola, Lisbon,
1961, two volumes).
This seminal work highlights the symbolism associated with the patterns
used in Chokwe "decorative" arts, the context they were used in and
the styles that distinguish one from another. Two other projects in
Angola (1976 and 1984) gave her an opportunity to deepen her knowledge
of the history of the Chokwe people and its influence on the development
of significant stylistic areas. Delving more deeply into the topic,
Bastin applied the same approach to peoples with kinship ties to the
Chokwe in order to pinpoint areas of stylistic contamination in relation
to the original art form. By widening her field of investigation, she
gave us a broader panorama of Angolan arts.
A stylistic approach to statuary and masks, and a ritual approach to
traditions and beliefs guided her in writing an impressive number of
books, exhibition catalogues, and magazine articles. Her work significantly
helped define the aesthetic qualities of Chokwe arts.
Certainly, the Chokwe and African art in general monopolized her life,
but her interest in the contemporary arts never flagged. She was an
attentive listener and derived great pleasure from music.
She welcomed us, her students, among the paintings and sculptures made
by her friends, and gave us an opportunity to meet well-known African
specialists, who never failed to call on her. So we discovered another
world, which in turn led us into the worlds of friendship and learning,
alongside a woman known to a few of us fondly as Mama Chokwe.
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