africa art

SENEGAL

Leopold Senghor Negritude

1st generation artists Ecole de Dakar (School of Dakar) Iba Ndiaye, Papa Ibra Tall (Pierre Lods)

2nd generation artists Laboratoire Agit Art Issa Samb, El Hadji Sy, Kan-Si, Moustafa Dime, Viye Diba

Elizabeth Harney

Léopold Sédar Senghor

Dakar, Senegal is the furthest west point of the African continent.

Léopold Sédar Senghor

Negritude was a Black Consciousness philosophy or ideology that affirmed the value of African culture, heritage and identity, in opposition to French colonialism and racism. It began as a literary movement in the 1930s, but under Senghor as Senegal’s President it became a larger framework for celebrating Panafrican culture.

Leopold Senghor was an intellectual, a poet, and huge supporter of the arts. Drawing on the writings of Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, Senghor developed the ideology of Negritude as national policy with transnational aspirations. Educated in Paris, France, became a professor of linguistics, served in the French army, captured and spent 2 years in internment camps, returned to teaching and then entered politics, ultimately becoming Senegal’s first president for 20 years from 1960-1980.

Ibou Diouf Poster for the First World Festival

of Negro Arts, Dakar, 1966

Art and culture were central to Senghor’s plans for nation building in Senegal. Senghor’s government put as much as 25% of the state budget into the arts (by comparison, the US budget for the National Endowment for the arts was .004% in 2016, and Trump has proposed eliminating all funding for it and NEH). Senghor sought to make Senegal the leading voice of African culture, including hosting the First World Festival of the Arts in 1966.

Papa Ibra Tall (1935-2015)

Iba Ndiaye (1928-2008)

Among other cultural institutions including a national theater and museums for both traditional and contemporary art, Senghor established the Ecole des Arts du Senegal, a national school of the arts. The school had two distinct sections: Section Arts Plastiques, directed by Iba Ndiaye, and Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres, directed by Papa Ibra Tall and French expatriate Pierre Lods. These artists and others who studied at the School became known under the art

historical label “Ecole de Dakar” (School of Dakar).

Pierre Lods with students at the Poto Poto art school he founded in Congo-Brazzaville before Senghor convinced him to come to Senegal

Note: the term “plastic arts” is a reference especially to sculpture, but was also used broadly for all of the visual arts (painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, film and photography)

Iba Ndiaye was trained in art and architecture in France. What

he offered in his department was a classic Western style art education with technical training, the same kinds of things we offer at Stony Brook: drawing, perspective, figure drawing (and

anatomy from live models and casts), color theory, and (Western) art history.

Ndiaye in his studio (in Paris)

Iba Ndiaye Tabaski: The Roundabout, Whose Turn is it?, 1970, oil on canvas, 59 x 98.4”

Theme is the slaughter of goats of the feasting that comes at the end of Ramadan. The style is consistent with Modernism elsewhere: loose brushstrokes, figurative, based on observation.

Iba N’Diaye, The Poet and His Muse, oil on canvas, 1966

In this painting, Ndiaye’s work is in a Modernist style: figurative, with loose brushstrokes. But the image includes a visual reference to traditional Africa with the Dogon kanaga mask in the background. (Ndiaye had traveled in Mali and spent a lot of time in Dogon country) Ndiaye did not stay long in Dakar, giving up the position and moving back to Paris in 1966, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. (note: he was married to a French curator at the main ethnography museum - the Musee de l’Homme - where most of the stuff collected by Marcel Griaule from the Dogon ended up, and where Ndiaye worked and sketched).

Ndiaye: “As concerns any formal relationship that might exist between my production and the plastic arts of the African continent, I have not looked for them systematically. I studied African sculpture by drawing in museums, just as I did for Antique, Roman or Gothic sculptures...or European painting. I never borrowed directly, and even if certain forms of African sculpture are frequent in my sketches, this was because they offered solutions to problems in representing volume in space, proportions, and important formal details.”

Ndiaye, Study after a Dan Racing Mask, 1982, ink on paper

Dan Racing Mask from Cote d’Ivoire

Iba N’Diaye, Jazz Musicians, oil on canvas, 1966

Aside from the themes of Tabaski, and an occasional reference to traditional African art, Ndiaye preferred to focus on jazz and musicians in the clubs of Paris, rather than themes from Africa.

Ndiaye: “Certain Europeans, seeking exotic thrills, expect me to serve them folklore … I refuse to do it otherwise I would exist only as a function of their segregationist ideas of the African artist.”

Students in the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres were not given formal academic training. The idea was to provide them with a space and encouragement to discover their own voice and create a modern Senegalese or PanAfrican art. Pierre Lods and Papa Ibra Tall shared a similar philosophy and working methods. The idea was to research African visual traditions (especially figurative sculpture and masks) and African folklore and incorporate them into the work.

Pierre Lods and students in Dakar, ca. 1975.

Lods: “To nourish the inspiration of the painters, I surrounded them with traditional African objects, with a great variety of plants in the gardens, and I organized festivals. Sometimes we read African legends, proverbs or poems which seemed to me to correspond with the Negro world, or share the same values…”

Papa Ibra Tall, Cosmic Vigil, oil on canvas, 1978, 47.2 x 39.4”

Kwele mask from the Democratic Republic of Congo

Papa Ibra Tall, like Ndiaye and Senghor, was trained at art school in Paris, and heavily influenced by the ideology of Negritude. Tall was reading poetry and hanging out with some of the same African and Afro-Caribbean artists and intellectuals in Paris as Senghor. His idea was to translate African philosophy into visual art, but like Ndiaye, he worked with Western mediums of oil painting and tapestry. In 1965, Tall left the school to become director of a new tapestry workshop where he continued to preach a symbiosis of imported techniques with indigenous “African” themes.

Papa Ibra Tall, First Song, 1963 tapestry, 152 x 222”

Grabski: “The subject evokes the genesis of African civilization and serves as a metaphor for the rebirth of African culture. At once mythic and imaginative, Tall's skilled draftsmanship is evidenced by meticulously detailed patterns and the balanced, swirling forms animating the composition. “

Papa Ibra Tall, Seamstress of the Stars, c 1970 wool tapestry (about 12 x 15 feet)

Ibou Diouf “The Three Wives” wool tapestry 1978, 143 x 187”

Boubacar Coulibaly “ Masks”

gouache 1973-74

Boubacar Coulibaly, Meeting of the Masks oil on canvas 1976, 45.7 x 35”

Bamana mask, Mali

Teke mask, Congo

Bacary Dieme Couple

wool tapestry 1978 115” x 78.8”

Senufo figure, Cote d’Ivoire

Samba Balde Mask

wool tapestry 1974

76.4 x 39.4”

chiwara

Not significantly different from Lorenzo Pace

being inspired by a Bamana chiwara

headdress

Elizabeth Harney on the Ecole de Dakar (School of Dakar):

“ The works of this Ecole were said to use the techniques of European modernism, often producing images that were Cubist, Fauvist, and Expressionist in nature. Its typical themes focused on images

of an exotic Africa, either idyllic in its villages, lively in its markets, or mystical in its bush.”

Harney describes how art works (full of masks and African women and folklore) created by students at the school under the encouragement of Pierre Lods were then turned into huge tapestries at the factory run by Papa Ibra Tall, that were commissioned or purchased by the Senegalese government

and used as gifts, and exhibited as emblems of Negritude and of Senegal positioning itself as promoter and guardian of an African renaissance. The combination of government patronage and

commercial success led others to emulate this style and content. These were the “first generation” of Senegalese artists.

Harney then moves to talk about the “second generation” of Senegalese artists, including Viye Diba, who understood the legacy of the first generation artists, but were more interested in moving beyond the nationalist and PanAfrican ideals of the School of Dakar artists, to explore more personal issues: issues of identity as personal expression, and other concerns. These second

generation artists did not want to be constrained by the cultural politics of the past (i.e. Senghor and Negritude).

Harney, E. 1996. "Les Chers Enfants" sans Papa. Oxford Art Journal, 19, 1, 42-52. on Blackboard