New Essay: The Poto-Poto School
We've added a new essay to our reading room: The Poto-Poto School, the story of one of Central Africa's most influential art movements, born in 1951 when the French painter Pierre Lods found his own servant, Félix Ossali, sketching birds in a manner unlike anything he had been taught.
The essay traces the school from that first informal studio through Nicolas Ondongo and Guy Léon Fylla keeping it alive after independence, to the later generation of painters — François Thango, François Iloki, Joseph Dimi, Marcel Gotène, Philippe Ouassa and Jacques Zigoma — who carried its distinctive flat-colour, bold-outline style through the rest of the twentieth century.