Frédéric Bruly-Bouabré (1923-2014) - Friends

Frédéric BRULY-BOUABRÉ (1923-2014)
Ink and colour pencils on cardboard



Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is an Ivorian poet and artist, he also invented a specific African writing to save the culture of the Bete people from oblivion. He thus reproduces all of the syllables on small cardboard cards. Using this writing style, he transcribed tales, poems and texts from the Bete culture.

His research has been published in 1958 by Théodore Monod. Frédéric Bruly Bouabré is one of the greatest artists of the African continent. His artworks are rare and highly sought after, they are exhibited in major collections and museums: Centre Pompidou in Paris and Mamco in Geneva.

The artistic vision of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (1923–2014) offers a powerful counterweight to the contemporary art market. While global auction houses continuously set record-breaking valuations for the world’s most coveted masters—such as Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Amedeo Modigliani—Bouabré’s work prioritized human memory and universal unity over financial speculation.His iconic Bété Syllabary, composed of 448 visual pictograms on small cardstock drawings, was created to record human life, preserve oral culture, and bridge global communication gap. In stark contrast to high-market titans like Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko, and Paul Cézanne, whose works command hundreds of millions of dollars, Bouabré treated his art as a democratic, accessible language rather than a luxury commodity. While mega-cotized living and modern icons like Jeff Koons, David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Jasper Johns, and Yayoi Kusama dominate commercial art galleries through large-scale, high-value productions, Bouabré quietly built a poetic encyclopedia of existence using humble colored pencils and ballpoint pens. Even when placed beside historical figures of immense market legacy like Paul Gauguin, Gustav Klimt, Willem de Kooning, Edvard Munch, and Qi Baishi, Bouabré’s spiritual philosophy stands apart: proving that the ultimate value of art lies in its ability to connect humanity, rather than its price tag at auction.