Africain Woman: Auguste Mambour (1896 - 1968) Circa 1930

African woman by Auguste Mambour (1896 - 1968) circa 1930

This beautiful charcoal is signed at the bottom left and is presented in a beautiful frame under glass.

Dimensions including frame: 86 x 72 centimeters

Biography :

Auguste Mambour is a Belgian painter, born in 1896 in Liège where he died in 1968. His work from the 1920s is of a very personal style, marked by the influence of African art. He studied at the Liège Academy of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1919.
His style will then be influenced by Évariste Carpentier, Auguste Donnay and Adrien de Witte before discovering African art. He spent 6 months in 1923 in the Belgian Congo after receiving the second Prix de Rome in 1922.
He adhered to surrealism between 1926 and 1929. He founded an advertising agency at the end of the 1930s. He was also a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Liège. A gifted designer and especially portraitist, established as an advertising and decoration agent after the Great War, the character already has a solid reputation, both for his disturbing pride and for his shocking paintings. In revolt against impressionism, academicism and even realism, he very quickly moved from a cross-hatched Fauvist period to passionate expressionism. But he did not want to paint landscapes, preferring the men and women whom he represented in sculptural forms. Second Prix de Rome 1922, contrary to the custom of going to Italy or Greece, Auguste Mambour decided to learn Negro art and went to the Congo for six months... in order to rediscover a "primitivism of which the Western world had lost every trace” No more than he had painted the Walloon landscape, he will not paint the Congolese landscape. He renders only the most everyday gestures as well as heads and busts. Far from persevering in an African vein, Mambour launches into a series of new paintings which confuse and scandalize by their presentation of bodies or body parts deemed erotic. He then began to break little by little with his way of representing reality (1924-1926): he thus came to adhere to surrealism (1926-1929). But at the moment when Magritte becomes a reference, Mambour, isolated, discouraged, ceases to appear. To ensure his livelihood, he founded a new advertising agency and created sometimes exceptional posters.