When Ghana achieved its independence from Britain in 1957, I was in my stamp-collecting phase, and for me the most important consequence of that momentous event was the issue of garishly multi-colored stamps by the newly independent country to celebrate it. Until then, the stamps of the Gold Coast (as Ghana had been known) were typical of those of all British colonies: a little oval in the right-hand corner with the reigning monarch’s portrait, accompanied by an engraved scene of the territory’s daily life—cocoa-farming, fishing, basket-weaving—or of its flora and fauna. They were either monochrome or, at the most, of two colors, and were objects of a restrained finesse.

I was reminded of all this at the exhibition “Beauté Congo 1926–2015” at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris.1 If the exhibits were representative (and, being totally ignorant of the domain, I have no means of knowing whether they were), independence brought about an immediate change in the aesthetic sensibility of the Congolese who painted, a change analogous to the philatelic change wrought by the independence of Ghana. Before independence Congolese coloration was restrained, after it exuberant; of instinctively good taste before, of instinctively bad afterwards. By good taste I mean, of course, that which coincides with my own.

Before independence, Congolese art owed a great deal to two remarkable and far-sighted men, Georges Thiry, a Belgian colonial official, and Pierre Romain-Desfossés, a former Free French officer and amateur painter who founded