Préface d’Abiola Irele, avec des contributions de Suzanne Preston Blier, Christraud M. Geary, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Christie McDonald, Enid Schildkrout, and Rosanna Warren et des commentaires des peintres Louis Finkelstein et Joan McD Miller.

Images of Congo brings to light 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 the place he founded, Camp Putnam, at the edge of the Ituri Forest. Her commitment to the people there made her stay for nine years. An eccentric in the colonial context, Eisner spent extended periods of time in Pygmy camps, transcribed legends, wrote ethnographic notes and brought up three orphaned Pygmy babies during their early life within a network of « mothers ». After Putnam destroyed almost everything he had built before he died in l953, Eisner salvaged the camp now named Epulu and published a ghostwritten autobiography that both described and distorted her experiences in the forest.
Celebrities, tourists, game hunters and art collectors came there for first-hand experience of the rainforest and the Pygmies of the area: among them, Colin Turnbull who later became famous for his descriptions of Pygmy life in the Ituri.

Eisner worked with and against the grain of artistic primitivism and modernist images of Africa. Her paintings, watercolours and drawings refract a memory of pastoral in celebration of a communal life and constitute a refuge from the world of violence and politics, just beyond the borders of their radiant world. Did that world exist? It existed at least, and still exists, in Anne Eisner’s paintings.

This book contributes an important aesthetic perspective to the understanding of an area that has long fascinated anthropologists and is part of a broadly emerging review of the colonial world in the Congo. The writers in this volume come together to discuss Anne Eisner’s life and collecting, her art and writing: how she fits into the history of the place called Epulu and the people who lived there.

Edited by Christie McDonald, Smith professor of French Language and Literature and Chair, Christraud M. Geary, curator of African and Oceanic Art, Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Chair of Fine Arts and of African and Afro-American Studies, Harvard University, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Abiola Irele, visiting professor in the Departments of the African and Afro-American studies and Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University Enid Schildkrout, Chair, Division of Anthropology, American museum of Natural History,New York Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Gordon Watts professor of Music and a member of the African and Afro-American studies Department, Harvard University Rosanna Warren, Emma Maclachlan Metcalf professor of the Humanities, University professor, and professor of English and Modern Foreign Languages, Boston University

Images of Congo brings to light 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 the place he founded, Camp Putnam, at the edge of the Ituri Forest. Her commitment to the people there made her stay for nine years. An eccentric in the colonial context, Eisner spent extended periods of time in Pygmy camps, transcribed legends, wrote ethnographic notes and brought up three orphaned Pygmy babies during their early life within a network of « mothers ». After Putnam destroyed almost everything he had built before he died in l953, Eisner salvaged the camp now named Epulu and published a ghostwritten autobiography that both described and distorted her experiences in the forest.
Celebrities, tourists, game hunters and art collectors came there for first-hand experience of the rainforest and the Pygmies of the area: among them, Colin Turnbull who later became famous for his descriptions of Pygmy life in the Ituri.

Eisner worked with and against the grain of artistic primitivism and modernist images of Africa. Her paintings, watercolours and drawings refract a memory of pastoral in celebration of a communal life and constitute a refuge from the world of violence and politics, just beyond the borders of their radiant world. Did that world exist? It existed at least, and still exists, in Anne Eisner’s paintings.

This book contributes an important aesthetic perspective to the understanding of an area that has long fascinated anthropologists and is part of a broadly emerging review of the colonial world in the Congo. The writers in this volume come together to discuss Anne Eisner’s life and collecting, her art and writing: how she fits into the history of the place called Epulu and the people who lived there.