Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Time

Kuba Textiles: Geometry in Form, Space, and Time is the first exhibition catalogue to consider the splendid skirts and overskirts worn by Kuba men and women from all social classes from a historical perspective. It contains critical essays from important international scholars in the field and illustrates in color, for the first time, thirty-five extraordinary garments, the surfaces of many of which are entirely covered with embroidered, appliqued, or tie-died irregular and asymmetrical motifs. Most of the selected textiles are drawn from the two great early Kuba collections of the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale in Tervuren (Belgium), Tervuren (1897) and the William Henry Sheppard collection (1890), Hampton University, Virginia. Both contain textiles of documented date and provenance. To complete the selection, a few additional textiles with no specific date and provenance from the Brooklyn Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a few private collections. By comparing the techniques and styles of undated textiles to early documented examples, one can for the first time through expert evaluation not only constitute a chronology but dispel notions of a monolithic Kuba style.Kuba Textiles also considers the embellishments on skirts and overskirts within the context of Kuba arts. This publication considers them alongside carved embellishments found, for example, on an important eighteen-century wooden sculpture of a seated Kuba king(nyim) from the Brooklyn Museum, and on tukula/ngula carved objects that served to dye the textiles from the Musée Royal de l'Afrique Centrale. The unique ensemble of accessories and carved objects dates for many of them to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Kuba textiles have exerted an influence on modern Western art. Already considered has been its influence on artists such as Henri Matisse and Paul Klee. Kuba Textiles concludes with an innovative essay on Gustav Klimt that will evoke the continued presence and visual language of Kuba design in the twentieth century. Here an argument is advanced to establish an affinity between Kuba textile design and the work of Klimt, who possessed an ethnographic collection that included African textiles.