Painting fictions/painting history: modernist pioneers at Senegal's Ecole des Arts.

The visual production of pioneer Senegalese modernists has become synonymous with colorful, decorative, and semiabstract depictions of recognizably African subjects rendered in oil paint, gouache, China ink, or tapestry (Fig: 1). Scholarship dealing with modernist art in Senegal has focused on the relationship between such visual production and the newly independent nation, especially the Negritude rhetoric and patronage of the nation's first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor (Fosu 1993, Harney 2002 and 2004, Kennedy 1992, Snipe 1998). Often referred to as the Ecole de Dakar, the visual production of first-generation artists in Senegal has been easily likened to a government-sponsored canon and oft interpreted as the visual corollary to Negritude, a philosophy developed in the 1930s by black Francophone intellectuals including Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Leon Dumas. A discourse on racial identity, Negritude sought to redefine the collective black experience by affirming the common heritage of blacks and members of the African Diaspora.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

By devoting 25% of the state's annual budget to the arts, Senghor's patronage and vision were undoubtedly fundamental to enabling an infrastructure for modern art production. However, the narrow focus on state patronage and the rhetoric of Negritude in defining visual production of this era has created a top-down, totalizing metanarrative about modern art in Senegal that subsumes individual artistic practices and eclipses other sites crucial to the enterprise of cultural production. While it is certain that the visual propositions of the first generation of modernists responded to Senghor's call for a national art to represent the newly independent nation, the processes of modernist artistic creation and its narration in post-independence Senegal demand further analysis.

The development and institutionalization of modern art in post-independence Senegal involved two interdependent sites of collective activity: local Dakar-based art production at Senegal's national art school, the Ecole des Arts du Senegal, and the international exhibition of these artworks within the mediating frame of Negritude and national art. By focusing on the art school as an arena for visual production and state-sponsored exhibitions as the discursive space for constructing the so-called Ecole de Dakar, I wish to shift the focus from Negritude philosophy as the pretext for artistic creation to Negritude as a tactical mediating framework. Building upon interviews with pioneer Senegalese artists conducted between 1998 and 2002, this article addresses the school's pedagogical orientation and approach to art-making in shaping the visual production of Senegal's pioneer modernists as well as the strategies of art-making employed by these individuals today.

Because artists' interviews are at the core of this study, my analysis is premised on the centrality of the individual artist's voice in proposing an art history. In keeping with recent scholarship problematizing oral interviews, this study acknowledges the blurred boundaries between history and fiction, individual and collective memory, and the dialogical complexities of the interview process in shaping narrative (Okely and Spencer 2002). As a narrative relying on individual accounts of a collective process, this article seeks to tease out the complexities and contradictions suggested by individual interpretations. For instance, dialogues exploring the discursive location of artists' work indicate the varying degrees to which they engaged the philosophical tenets of Nrgritude to locate their work. So much is this true that our interviews suggest that the metanarrative of modern art in Senegal involves a struggle between individual/personal and collective/national narratives. Specifically, with the exception of a handful of artists such as Papa Ibra Tall, Ibou Diouf, and Alioune Badiane, for whom Senghor's theories of Negritude acted as a thematic pretext for their visual production, artists of this generation contest the claim that Negritude, either specifically or as a general "spirit of the times," provided the catalyst for their 2creative work. Rather, in discussing their histories and practices, many artists relate both the subject matter and formal properties of their production to their training, especially the convention of art-making advanced in the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres. To this end, a thought-provoking statement is offered by artist Oumar Katta Diallo, who emphasized, "In the beginning, Senegalese artists were an independent group, we never met Senghor. We did not read Senghor, no, we were in the atelier working on our own and just being artists." (1)

Art-Making at the Ecole des Arts du Senegal

Established in 1960, the Ecole des Arts du Senegal was one of several institutions dedicated to building cultural infrastructure in post-independence Senegal (M'Bengue 1973, Axt and Sy 1989). The school consisted of two visual art departments: the Section Arts Plastiques, directed by French-trained artist Iba Ndiaye; and the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres, which was headed conjointly by Papa Ibra Tall, a Senegalese artist trained in France, and Pierre Lods, amateur artist and founder of the Poto-Poto School of Painting in Brazzaville, Congo. The division in the school reflected each department's distinct pedagogical approach and objectives. The department led by Iba Ndiaye offered a classical Western artistic education emphasizing an academic approach and technical training in drawing, anatomy, color application, laws of perspective, and art history. As Ndiaye's former student Pape Mballo Kebe explained, this department was considered the classical, academic section because it functioned in the same manner as an art school anywhere else in the world. (2)

By contrast, artists who trained in the department headed by Tall and Lods received no formal academic instruction. Ibou Diouf, Modou Niang, Ousmane Faye, and Amadou Ba, the first artists to have studied in this department, emphasized that the department's purpose was strictly for "artistic research," not the perpetuation of European art traditions. Described as the section libre, or independent department, it was founded as a site to research and develop a distinctive new art form: modern Senegalese art. Narratives dealing with the art school have emphasized the role of Senegalese Tall and Ndiaye as teachers, eliding the fact that both held relatively brief tenures at the school. Ndiaye left the school in 1967 to return to France. Similarly, Tall left his post at the school in 1965 to serve as director of the Manufacture National des Tapisseries, thus advancing his political ambitions and extricating himself from rivalries at the school. Lods continued working with artists at both the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres and his home atelier until his death in 1988. For this reason, many artists consider Lods to have been the school's main presence for more than two decades. Compared to Ndiaye and Tall, who had few students and were remembered mainly as figureheads, Lods was remembered affectionately by many artists as "mon professeur," whose greatest contribution was his belief in their individual creativity and his steadfast encouragement. Indeed, the formal similarities between many works produced during Lods's tenure at the Poto-Poto school and in Dakar underscore the place of his pedagogy in shaping visual production (Grabski 2002).

As the heads of the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres, Lods and Tall embraced a common vision for what would constitute modern Senegalese art. Both viewed modern African art as translating the authentic "character" of Art Negre, regardless of the divergent experiences informing their perspectives (Hossman 1967:36). As Harney has discussed, Tall was deeply inspired by Negritude theory (Harney 2002 and 2004). Tail's convictions were shaped by the years he spent studying in Paris, especially his exposure to discussions about Negritude by Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire and his participation in the Deuxieme Congres des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs Rome (1959), where papers dealing with the Negritude movement were presented. In this respect, Tall provides a rare example of an artist who both read Negritude writings of the 1930s and 1940s and consciously interpreted the philosophy's tenets in his paintings and tapestries. Tall stated that an artist "should make known the thought of his country, like the writer or the musician. We Africans have a philosophy, sensibilities, and values that we must translate into works of art" (Tapisseries 1970:63). Thus, as an African artist, his charge was to "translate African philosophy, sensibilities and values into his art" (ibid.). His energetic work imaginatively celebrates African culture (Fig. 2). It is ironic and somewhat misleading that art writers posit his production as "representative" of modernist Senegalese art, for it was, in fact, exceptional in its formal sophistication as well as in his interest in visually translating Negritude philosophy. Of the students who attended the department headed by Tall and Lods, only the work of Ibou Diouf approaches a similar formal language and interest in Negritude theory (Fig. 3). Yet, despite Diouf's term at the school coinciding with Tall's brief tenure as professor, Diouf attributes the formal style of his work to the school's prevailing art practice and especially Lods's pedagogy. (3)

[FIGURES 2-3 OMITTED]

Lods's pedagogical orientation was forged primarily by his experience in Brazzaville, where he founded the Poto-Poto School of Painting (4) in 1951 after stumbling upon his cook Ossali using his paints and brushes. As Lods recalled, Ossali painted "with all the superb purity and simplicity of line found in African art" (Mount 1973:84). From that point on, Lods dedicated himself to "saving the essential spirit of this art and helping it adapt to modern African life" (Tati-Loutard 1978:26). Senghor recruited Lods from Brazzaville because of his work at the Poto-Poto School, which was well known in Europe and Africa by the time of Senegal's independence in 1960 (Hossman 1967:35). (5) Lods's pedagogical approach was of particular interest to Senghor, who shared a set of ideas regarding the African artist's inherent creativity and the contribution of Africa's art and culture to what Senghor termed "universal civilization."

Creating the Genre of Modern Senegalese Art

The invention of modern Senegalese art aligns with Bakhtin's (1986) analysis of genre as a process configured by a particular mode of conceptualization and representation, the heart of which resides in a dialogue with the canons and practices of art historical modernism. As the discourse underpinning the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nogres would later ascribe, modern Senegalese cultural production was conceptualized as original and authentically African as well as universally resonant. (6) The genre's creation was intimately linked to the conventions of art-making practiced in the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres, for artistic production was inscribed with a particularly modernist vision of creativity and the assumption that an undefinable yet essential African spirit would direct the artists' works. (7) As several scholars have discussed, such precepts were not unique to art practice in Dakar (Kasfir 1999, Mount 1973, Mudimbe 1994). Rather, the visual production at art schools founded by expatriates Romain-Defosses, McEwen, and Trowell was similarly predicated on theories of innate African creativity.

In Dakar as in Brazzaville, (8) Lods's pedagogy was described as laissez-faire because he believed that the artists' inherent creative capacity would sufficiently drive their production. Thus, artists were provided with the tools of modernist art expression--paper, brushes, and paint--and left to create without technical guidance. That artists were encouraged to express themselves freely, intuitively, and spontaneously is suggested by Amadou Seck, who recollected, "we were given the materials, the supplies, and left entirely free to express ourselves." (9)

The convention of laissez-faire was one component of a broader philosophy of art-making practiced in the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres. Appropriating various elements of modernist Primitivist art practice, artistic production was premised on a "state of being" rather than a mastery of materials, mechanics, or techniques. Making art was more a question of feeling deeply and expressing an internal vision than depicting the visible world or critically exploring an issue or premise. Art practice was not based on what the artists observed, but on what they "felt" intuitively as artists and as Africans. As several artists explained, art practice in Lods's department pivoted on the assumption that, provided a conducive setting, they would "bring out what they have inside"--an internal vision--for it was this that would direct their productions. Expression was to be spontaneous under the right circumstances of inspiration and neither intellectual premeditation nor formal sketches were expected. According to the artists who trained in this department, the expressive and even visceral aspect of the creative process was of paramount importance. Artist Modou Niang elaborated, "I am driven by instinct. I paint spontaneously in front of the paper. I cannot describe to you what I am going to do. I paint and the work practically draws itself." (10) This approach, often described as "transcendental," focused on the transmission of thoughts and feelings to the canvas.

A second essential component of the pedagogy advanced in the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres was the avoidance of "external influences," especially academic traditions and subject matter associated with classical Western painting. In this, artists often distinguish between their own ostensible lack of training and the art academicism practiced in Ndiaye's department. According to several artists, "external influences" were akin to constraints that could block their internal vision and hinder their creativity. (11) In light of the premium placed on creating "original and authentic" works, Lods intentionally choose not to expose students to the visual production of historical and contemporary artists. Not only were their classroom walls completely devoid of images, but Lods, also an amateur artist, did not draw or paint in front of his students, nor did he show them the works of his former students at the Poto-Poto school. (12)

Despite the premise that artists not be influenced by Western visual traditions, they were most certainly exposed to a variety of cosmopolitan visual propositions by way of book illustrations, traveling exhibitions, and Dakar's hybrid visual landscape. A compelling example is offered by Cherif Thiam, whose familiarity with Western art movements was gleaned by browsing art books at the French and American Cultural Center libraries. While Thiam invokes notions of inherent creativity when discussing his practice, he also describes purposefully conceptualizing his work to be unlike the images he saw. (13) Like Thiam, several artists described themselves as pioneers whose enterprise was concerned with creating an original art form, which was at once a peer to twentieth century modernist movements and distinctively African. The complexity and contradictions embedded in the processes of visual production are herein suggested. Artists purposefully excluded certain subjects just as they deliberately created their work in dialogue with modernist art.

In keeping with the conceptualization of modern Senegalese art as a genre in dialogue with modernism yet distinct from Western academic traditions, the formal qualities associated with naturalistic and realistic representation were almost entirely absent from the artists' works. Little attention is paid to academic formal conventions such as linear perspective, depth, volume, or anatomical accuracy. As the works of Boubacar Coulibaly, Bacary Dieme, Amadou Seck, Diatta Seck, Papa Ibra Tall, and Ibou Diouf illustrate, Senegal's pioneer modernists avoided producing still-life paintings, monumental landscapes, portraits, or other genres associated with Western academic art (Figs. 4-5). (14) Artist Modou Niang explained, "In our department, we painted what we felt, but above all, no cowboys, Indians, or horses." (15) Even with subjects derived from Senegal's flora and fauna, such as Thiam's Gouye Birame Coumba (1973; Fig. 6) or Sene's Pangolin (1970s; Fig. 7), the artists have chosen to focus on their subjects' folkloric connotations. Thiam and Sene avoid realism and naturalism, emphasizing instead the fictive and fantastic. The tree's animated presence connotes the spirits believed to inhabit baobabs and pangolins are supernatural creatures with shape-shifting powers. As with the work of their colleagues, decorative motifs dominate the compositions.

[FIGURES 4-7 OMITTED]

The artistic trajectory of pioneer artist Alpha Wallid Diallo, who attended the department in the early 1960s, offers an illustrative example of the nexus between art practice, pedagogy, and visual production. By painting "history rather than fiction," Diallo actually contested the school's dominant paradigm of practice and visual norms. As early as his student days in Lods's department, Diallo advocated that modern Senegalese art should deal with Senegal's history rather than mythology and generic African folklore. He asserted, "The history of Senegal is rich enough that one does not need to invent fictions." (16) Considering himself a "history painter" who works in a narrative and realistic style in the tradition of French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), Diallo compared his work to the images published in textbooks dealing with the Napoleonic wars or the American Indian battles. His subjects are epic and narrative, and his treatment of Senegalese history is heroic and ceremonial. He focuses especially on historical scenes involving Lat Dior, Blaise Diagne, and Cheikh Amadou Bamba, who live in Senegalese popular memory for resisting the French (Figs. 8-10). (17)

[FIGURES 8-10 OMITTED]

In contrast to his artist-colleagues who participated in the mode of art-making advanced in Tall and Lods's department, Diallo did not view the artist as expressing freely, but as researching and narrating archives and photographs to render "real" stories and histories of particular relevance to the Senegalese. Unlike his colleagues, Diallo openly acknowledges that he was influenced by the works of other artists and even credits them in the development of his style. Considering himself an autodidact, Diallo learned to draw and paint by looking at the work of academic painters in European history books. Observing that his oil and canvas reproductions could approximate the verisimilitude of photographs, he endeavored to depict his subjects with the same fidelity and visual accuracy. Essential to this objective is his use of academic conventions, including one-point perspective.

In the context of the newly independent nation, Diallo anticipated that the Senegalese government would support his work because it was, after all, about "patriotic pride." (18) After three months of attending the department headed by Lods and Tall, Diallo realized that his work met with disapproval because it did not conform with the school's objectives and the cultural production that came to be associated with the Ecole de Dakar. His work was both representational and naturalistic, and too close to Western academic traditions. Rather than "paint fictions," Diallo chose to leave the art school and work independently. (19) Aside from the naturalistic and expressionistic work of art school professor Iba Ndiaye, Diallo is remembered as the only artist who attended the school in this period who painted historical scenes in a naturalistic and representational style. Despite his work's incompatibility with the body of work from this period, it was nevertheless selected for inclusion in the state-sponsored exhibitions, likely because the organizers realized that his propositions would round out the exhibition by portraying another facet of Senegalese cultural history.

Regardless of medium, the works by the pioneer generation of artists exemplify a dedicated concern for abstract or stylized forms and decorative, ornamental patterning. African visual traditions including masks and sculptures were formal resources for the artists, who used them inventively. Rather than copying specific masks or sculptures, they reinterpreted their formal qualities, thereby innovating a visual language alluding to generalized African forms and motifs while capitalizing on the visual tactics of modernist abstraction. In contrast to Lods's pedagogy at the Poto-Poto School of Painting, where many artists depicted actual masks such as the Kuyu arya, artists in Dakar were encouraged "to visit the museum and look at the objects, not to recopy them, but to be impregnated with inspiration." (20) Like the work of many of his colleagues--including the frequently published oil on canvas Rencontre des Masques (meeting of the masks; 1976) by Boubacar Coulibaly and Bacary Dieme's drawing for a tapestry, Le Couple (the couple; 1978)--Ibou Diouf's early work imaginatively interpreted the formal qualities he observed in the African objects, especially the stylized forms and abstract ornamentation (see Fig. 3). (21)

Formally, the art of this period is unified by its African subject matter and general decorative tendency; yet, it is significant that a variety of individualized expressions exist within the genre of modern Senegalese art. In fact, the variety of formal expression not only points to the aesthetic choices of the individual artists, it also reveals the premium placed on authoring a highly individualized corpus of themes, an oeuvre. The fact that Lods's methods are characterized as laissez faire does not preclude his use of a subtle pedagogy Specifically, artists' "training" in Lods's department involved a purposeful cultivation of an oeuvre or a recognizable body of unique works identified with a particular artist. Artist Katta Diallo explained, "Being a good artist is not a question of being a good draftsperson. Being a good artist is a matter of having your own ideas, ideas that make Ibou different from Cherif, and Cherif different from Katta." (22) The oeuvre was to be diverse yet unified and recognizable, but not repetitious or mass-produced. Above all, every artist's oeuvre was to be original. The premium on originality relates implicitly to modernist notions that artists were authoring specialized themes drawn from their unique internal vision, an idea that continues to inform contemporary art practice in Dakar.

To build an oeuvre, Lods suggested that students identify and expand upon a specific visual element in their work in order to develop a unique pictorial and stylistic vocabulary. As Diatta Seck recalled, "Lods used to have me identify one formal element in a painting, a detail, pull it out and use it as the foundation in my next canvas." (23) In many respects, being an artist meant originating a style based on a highly personal vision. As the expression of an internal vision, art was something the artists carried with them, something that they discovered spontaneously and that belonged to them alone as individuals. Each artist mastered a cohesive body of works consisting of the subjects and the style that he had authored. Artists were encouraged to "specialize" in certain subjects and styles to develop a well-affirmed artistic personality. Thus, authorship and ownership of subjects and styles are inextricably connected. Pioneer artists insist that each individual is known for a certain pictorial vocabulary and artistic personality. To explain that each artist is identified with and recognized by "his hand," Cherif Thiam stated, "Everyone has his own artistic personality. You see a Cherif and you say this is Cherif's work, he is the one who paints baobabs. When you see a Modou Niang, you see that he is the one who makes birds, he is a specialist in that. You see a pangolin and it is Philippe Sene." (24)

Like the genre of modern Senegalese art, the persona of the modern artist was significantly informed by the ideology of art-making practiced at the school. The modern Senegalese artist was a free, expressive individual. Academic training was unnecessary, for spontaneous creativity was considered to be a natural state of being and inherent capacity of the modern artist. It was assumed that the artists had a particular vision to express and would explore it using the media of modernism. A constellation of modernist tropes dealing with creativity, individuality, originality, authenticity, and inner vision were forged in the experience of national art school (Cuspit 1993, Krauss 1985). Artistic experience in the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres was central to the process of shaping modernist art practice and the persona of the modern artist in Dakar. Despite the school's restructuring and the implementation of new curricula in the past two decades, these modernist valuations still underpin strategies of art practice and artistic identity in Dakar today.

Sites of Narration

Like the art school, government-sponsored exhibitions were crucial sites for constructing the discourse surrounding the visual production of Senegal's pioneer modernists. Modern Senegalese art was exhibited to an international audience for the first time at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres. Hosted by Senghor's government, the month-long festival was held in Dakar in April 1966. The artists who exhibited at the festival, such as Ibou Diouf, Modou Niang, and Ousmane Faye, remember it with great nostalgia as a groundbreaking moment for Senegalese art and artists. A strategic platform for expounding the narrative of Negritude, the festival provided the primary discursive frame for both the artists and interpretation surrounding their works. As artist Alpha Wallid Diallo asserted, "Senghor wanted to show the Western world that the Africans also had their cultural philosophy (Negritude) as well as their own painting based on their own culture. " (25)

As the cultural philosophy which became the Senegalese government's ideological platform for post-independence economic and cultural development, Negritude affirmed and valorized "file cultural patrimony, the values, and especially the spirit of black-African civilization" (Vibrance 1980). By emphasizing a collective African cultural heritage, Negritude provided the social capital upon which the idea of the nation would be based as well as the foundation for Senghor's strategies of national development (Renan 1990). In writing about this event, Senghor emphasized its intent to represent and valorize the contributions of black artists and writers to what he termed the "universal civilization" (Senghor 1966). While individual artists emphasize the "purity" of their visual production, Senghor narrated this "national art" as the epitome of cultural hybridity and symbiosis, qualities that would be instrumental to Senegal's post-independence development. In Senghor's discourse, the modern art exhibited at the Festival was heralded as a successful marriage of tradition and modernity, especially the fusion of "imported technical knowledge and traditional culture felt from within" (Senghor 1966b:58). More profoundly, national art represented both literally and figuratively the promise and possibility of the young nation's development. Like his vision for the young nation, national art was built on a great heritage and changed with the times, taking in the best of what the world had to offer. Senghor anticipated that the same paradigm--progress built on a traditional foundation--would usher his nation into the first decade of its independence.

The Festival featured multiple platforms of artistic expression, including musical and theatrical performances along with exhibitions of traditional and modern art. The largest exhibition displayed 800 traditional objects from all of Africa and its entire history. The process of according value to the modernist propositions entailed positioning them in the long shadow of the traditional objects on display. Opening at Dakar's newly inaugurated Musee Dynamique, the traditional objects were heralded as testaments to Africa's glorious past and "treasures for humanity."(Art plastiques 1966:2). Much in the shadow of the traditional art on display, modern Senegalese art was exhibited for the first time in the exhibition "Tendances et Confrontations," which was held in various halls of Dakar's superior court building, the Palais de Justice. (26) According to all accounts, critical appreciation of the modern exhibition paled in comparison to the exhibition of traditional art.

Within the discursive frame of the Festival, modern Senegalese art was valued as a distinctive and sustained contribution of African cultures to "universal civilization." (27) Even the exhibition's title, by referring to tendances or trends, posited modern Senegalese art as an extension of the African creativity witnessed in the other domains of the Festival. The merit of modern art involved the premise that the genre retained its roots and the spirit of Art Negre. According to Senghor, Senegalese painting "has spontaneously given, as task to express itself, in a plastic art form, the dreams in which our people are nourished: the old mythological and legendary foundations that have always interpreted Negro art" (Senghor 1996b:58). Like the music, dance, and traditional arts celebrated at the Festival, modern art was interpreted as exemplifying the essential virtues and fundamental characteristics of Negritude. Not only did the subjects of this modern genre refer to a generic African cultural heritage, their "visual character" was also described as "perfectly expressing the same elegant nobility that characterizes the art of the northern Sudan" (Senghor 1994:34). The expressive features so admired in Art Negre were further attributed to the exhibition of paintings and tapestries that were celebrated as decorative, abstract, emotive, rhythmical, and melodious (Senghor 1996a:218). In this, the site also served as a point for the further conflation of Primitivist modernist and Negritude discourses, a combination that spawned much well-known criticism from Soyinka and others over the years.

The modern art exhibited at the festival was collectively referred to as the Ecole de Dakar. According to several artists, this rubric was spoken into existence when Andre Malraux, the French Minister of Cultural Affairs, proclaimed, "just as one cannot deny the Renaissance, the masters of the Middle Ages, Cubism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Neoclassicism, one cannot deny the Ecole de Dakar." (28) The label Ecole de Dakar suggested that the artists constituted an art movement similar to other world art movements. Appropriating the notion of a "school," the rubric legitimized their work as a peer to art movements in the West. For the artists enveloped by this label, the notion of a "school" existed in name only. It offered a strategy to promote the national ideology of Negritude by unifying the visual arts of this period and positioning their group work as the collective expression of the national consciousness. It is both significant and problematic that among the artists associated with the Ecole de Dakar, not one of them discussed his identification with this group on the basis of shared style or ideological point of departure. Rather than asserting that they worked within the conceptual or stylistic framework of a "school," each artist narrated his artistic trajectory by way of practice-oriented issues such as personal inspiration, artistic vision, and the development of an individual style. It is here that the struggle between personal and national narratives comes to the fore. Moreover, even when asked pointedly about the interplay of their individual work with that of the collective Ecole, artists emphasized the differences among their styles while situating their production within a web of modernist rhetoric privileging creative vision, originality, and artist's hand.

Following the Festival, Senghor established a special commission to administer state-sponsored group exhibitions of the Ecole de Dakar. (29) These traveling exhibitions were destined for venues in Europe, the United States, and South America, and as such, were an ideal means to promote an image of the nation on an international stage. The first major traveling exhibition of modern Senegalese art was "Art Senegalais d'Aujourd'hui," which opened at Paris's Grand Palais in 1974. Many Senegalese artists consider it a landmark exhibition that carved out a niche for Senegalese art on the world stage and afforded them some degree of celebrity. Representing the state's collection of modern art amassed during the preceding decade, the exhibition comprised more than one hundred paintings, tapestries, and sculptures. (30) After opening in Paris, the exhibition traveled in various forms to several venues in Europe, North America, and South America until it returned permanently to Dakar in the mid-1980s (Axt and Sy 1989:83). Between venues, the exhibition returned to Dakar, where the commission incorporated more recent acquisitions so as to keep the public apprised of the latest developments in Senegalese artistic expression.

As with the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres, the exhibition "Art Senegalais d'Aujourd'hui" acted as a strategic discursive space for narrating post-independence visual production as premised on the collective spirit and national ideology of Negritude. The exhibition's illustrated catalogue was accompanied by an introductory text in which the then Minister of Culture, Assane Seck, spoke authoritatively about the artists and their work. The exhibited works were posited as the result of an artistic renaissance fostered concomitantly by the country's independence and Senghor's policies supporting the arts. The catalogue's text opened with the following quote: "The spiritual forces which animate a people may have to lie dormant in silent catacombs for centuries; then, with millennial vigour, as it were, they suddenly surge forth in the new and different forms of the modern era" (Seck 1992:7). The artists were seen as tapping into the depths of their "collective unconscious" to recast cultural memories using the strategies and media of modernism (Seck 1992:8).

The Ecole de Dakar Today

State-sponsored traveling exhibitions were the primary sites for discursively orienting modern Senegalese art for more than a decade. On the international stage, the exhibitions reified the Ecole de Dakar as a coherent school of artists who expressed the collective spirit of the new nation. Among the artists' community in Dakar, the Ecole de Dakar came to connote much more than national art propounding a thematic and aesthetic canon. It was likened by some to an official art produced by a troop of government-employed artists. Although at the time the pioneer modernists seemingly advanced state ideology by way of Senghor's powerful narration, they still view their role as one in which they demonstrated tremendous agency by "orienting people to the value of culture," and thus shaping the independent nation's identity. (31)

Positioned in written accounts and speeches as ambassadors and griots singing of their nation's culture, the artists' professional activities were well supported by the Senegalese government, which made being an artist a sustainable career by creating an extensive infrastructure to support the arts. In addition to establishing the Theatre National, Manufacture National des Tapisseries, Musee Dynamique, and the Ecole des Arts du Senegal, Senghor's administration created a variety of civil service positions for artists, provided sizable travel scholarships and studios, and regularly collected the artists' work for the state collection. The state's wide-reaching role in supporting the arts is best exemplified by the Manufacture National des Tapisseries, where several artists including Papa Ibra Tall, Ibou Diouf, Ousmane Faye, and Modou Niang benefited from employment as cartooniers to create drawings that were later transferred to the medium of tapestry. A substantial number of these works were purchased by the government, which later offered them as state gifts or displayed them as hallmarks of national identity in its many ministries and embassies abroad.

While Senghor carved out the professional category of Beaux-Arts artist and legitimized the profession, it was up to the artists to negotiate this category, which was previously virtually unknown in Dakar. Referring to the new role of the artist, Ibou Diouf explained, "When one is in an artistic milieu in an African country and you are a painter, first off, your family does not understand. The people you want to understand do not understand. It was not typical in a family. It was something else all together. After all, what was a painter?" (32) The local public's misunderstanding of what constituted a painter was mirrored by a general lack of understanding of the notion of Beaux-Arts. The gap in local understanding of the arts was further widened by the fact that the artists played their role on a largely international stage. Although they were implicated in the national development project, their works were destined for an international public, considered "capable of understanding and valorizing them" (Evrard 1966:25). In this respect, notions about modern art and artists in Senegal were fashioned with a distinctive elitism. (33)

At the time of my research, three decades after what is remembered as the belle-epoch of state support, many pioneer modernists continue to produce and sell their works, especially to tourists and expatriates. Although governmental support and the rhetoric of Negritude have faded, the majority of the Ecole de Dakar artists produce the same themes and styles as they did decades ago. (34) From the perspective of their younger colleagues, the diversity of the artists' visual productions were limited by two key factors: their economic dependence on the state and their lack of training at the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres. In discussing why they continue to produce the same themes as they did decades ago, several Ecole de Dakar artists invoke modernist ideas they hold regarding artmaking, especially the premium on authorship, internal vision, self-expression, and unique artistic personality. Modou Niang explained, "Even up to the present time, I paint what I feel. The artistic currents that are passing around me have nothing to do with me. It is just spontaneity. I know no other painter, no other French painter." (35)

Cherif Thiam, who attended the Section de Recherches Plastiques Negres from 1969 to 1974, is an artist who has practiced for more than twenty years in "his style." Like many of his Ecole de Dakar colleagues, Thiam continues to make use of distinctively and recognizably African themes. Common subjects in his artistic repertoire include fanciful figures riding to the weekly market in horse-drawn carts, characters with mask-like faces, figures fusing animal and human qualities, and the fantastic baobabs which Thiam considers his "most mastered subject." (36) An early China ink rendering of Gouye Birame Coumba (1973) is illustrative of Thiam's oeuvre. This particular baobab, a prominent subject in Wolof mythology, is positioned centrally and animated by faces and long, leglike roots and branches stretching across his composition. Even with a subject derived from Senegal's natural landscape, the artist has interpreted the tree's folkloric connotations. The tree's animated presence refers to the spirits considered to inhabit baobabs. His works are fanciful and fantastic, featuring fluid shapes and curvilinear forms combined with meticulous geometric patterns. Like in the work of so many of his colleagues, intricately rendered decorative motifs dominate the composition.

A 1998 depiction of the same subject, Gouye Birame Coumba, illustrates the continuity of the artist's subject matter and style (Fig. 11). A notable difference in his rendering of the 1998 image includes the artist's change of medium. Rather than drawing with China ink, his more recent work is in oil on canvas, a change precipitated by his failing eyesight and aging hands. China ink requires a precision he could no longer guarantee, whereas oil and acrylic afford the opportunity for revision. His recent works are frequently rendered with a palette of gold, orange, and brown. These earth tones are most noticeable in the warm, almost luminescent background of his painting. While the 1998 composition has retained the same general form, the baobab's fantastic features have become even more exaggerated. Using bright colors, the artist has embellished the tree with bold curvilinear forms, concentric circles, and ornamental decorative motifs.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Dakar's first-generation artists are remembered as pioneers who laid the foundation for art in Senegal, yet they are also heavily criticized for having situated modern Senegalese art on the periphery of broader discussions on contemporary art. Many younger artists contend that the styles, themes, and mode of practice of the Ecole de Dakar artists inscribed modern Senegalese art with an undeniable Africanite. Specifically, art associated with the Ecole de Dakar set up the expectation that modern art from Senegal should "look African" or deal with expressly African subject matter. Artists with more recent training criticize the Ecole de Dakar artists for institutionalizing the Primitivist assumptions that "an African artist wakes up one fine morning and with art in his blood, he begins to create." (37) While this approach to creativity and the resultant visual production may be interpreted as indicating a modernist dialogue between African and Western art centers, it has also resulted in serious consequences for subsequent generations of artists. In this respect, by announcing itself as original and distinct from other contemporaneous art movements, the artists marginalized themselves and their expression from mainstream artistic currents and created an impasse for the following generations to negotiate.

Commentary

by Elizabeth Harney University of Toronto 

Joanna Grabski urges us to debunk facile equations between Leopold Senghor's philosophical writings and the visual productions of Senegal's modern artists--between theory and practice, metanarrative and individual creativity. I couldn't agree more with her agenda. Far too many reviews of the Ecole de Dakar resulted from intellectual laziness and bias, ignoring the complexities of the visual process and the negotiations involved in crafting modernist vocabularies.

As the author notes, the overwhelming majority of visual artists active in this early period of government patronage were not, in fact, attempting to translate philosophical precepts literally. Many did not even read Senghor's treatises. One should, as she suggests, focus upon the artists themselves and acknowledge the key role that the institutional framework of the art world played in mediating this relationship. But, in her attempt to counteract earlier lacunae in scholarship, Grabski runs the risk of underestimating the central role Negritude ideology played in the construction of the very concept of artistic modernism and the contours that made up the profile of the modern artist in Senegal.

What were the operating principles of Negritude within the cultural landscape of independent Senegal? For Grabski, Negritude seems to be present in several guises--as an ideology, a philosophy, a rhetoric, and a metanarrative. Perhaps it assumed all of these forms. I would argue that in Althusserian terms Negritude operated as a form of social cement that informed everyday practices and rituals, held social and political structures together, and ultimately sustained relations of domination. That overarching presence did not necessarily deny each of the artists the ability to negotiate a place for his or her arts and persona within this ideologically informed cultural sphere.

Grabski rightly argues that Pierre Lods was more influential as a teacher than either Papa Ibra Tall or Iba N'Diaye both because he ran a home atelier and continued as a figure at the school. However, we'd do well to remember the reasons why he was recruited for this position by Senghor, focused as they both were upon the innate creativity of the African artist. Also, it seems critical to emphasize Lods's laissez-faire approach as pedagogy.

Lods's students were "instructed" to be spontaneous--their training, a result of teaching. Through him they were encouraged to adopt what Grabski terms "a particularly modernist vision of creativity" with its attendant myths of creativity, spontaneity, individuality, and genius. All of these myths were perfectly consistent with the modernist Primitivism in Negritude writings or at least with Senghor's attempted resolution of these in his advancement of an "aesthetique negro-africaine."

Grabski's privileging of the artist's voice is admirable and desirable within a field that has often spoken for others. However, she might have considered whether the keenness of artists to distinguish themselves from the Ecole de Dakar is the result of the clearly pejorative manner in which the term is now used. Their understandings of their art and its place within Senegalese art history, let alone a broader contemporary arena, are colored by thirty years of history, criticism, and avant-gardist activity. As such, our interpretations must acknowledge the shifting, malleable nature of history and slippery character of memory and identity.

References cited

"Arts plastiques negro-africains au Festival de Dakar: Tendances et confrontations." Vivante afrique 246 (September-October 1966):1-3

Axt, Friedrich, and El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, eds. 1989. Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal. Frankfurt am Main: Museum fur Volkerkunde.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Camara, Dansy. 1967. "L'Ecole des arts; un etablissement polytechnique d'education artistique." Senegal carrefour 1 (January):35.

Cassirer, Thomas. 1967. "Africa's Olympiad of the Arts: Some Observations on the Dakar Festival." (Amherst) Massachusetts Review 8 (1):31-7.

Diouf, Saliou Demanguy. 1999. Les Arts plastiques contemporains du senegal. Paris: Presence Africaine.

Evrard, H. 1966. "L'Artist moderne en divorce avec son people." Vivante afrique 246:25.

Fosu, Kojo. 1993. Twentieth Century Art of Africa. Rev. ed. Accra: Artists Alliance.

Grabski, Joanna. 2001. "Pierre Lods and the Poto-Poto School." In Anthologie de l'art africain du xx siecle, eds. N'Gone Fall and Jean-Loup Pivin, pp. 17941. Paris: Editions Revue Noire.

Harney, Elizabeth. 2002. "The Ecole de Dakar: Pan Africanism in Paint and Tapestry." African Arts 35 (3):12-31, 88-90.

--. 2004. In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995. Durham: Duke University.

Hossman, Irmeline. 1967. "Entretien avec Pierre Lods." Afrique 65:35-9.

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield. 1999. Contemporary African Art. London: Thames and Hudson.

Kennedy, Jean. 1992. New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Kuspit, Donald. 1993. The Cult of the Avant-Garde. New York: Cambridge.

"Le Peintre senegalais, artiste, temoin et griot de la Negritude." 1967. Senegal carrefour 1 (January):44-8.

M'Bengue, Mamadou Seyni. 1973. Cultural Policy in Senegal. Paris: UNESCO.

Mount, Marshall Ward. 1973. African Art; The Years Since 1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mudimbe, V.Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Okely, Judith, and Hellen Calloway, eds. 1992. Anthropology and Autobiography. London: Routledge.

Renan, Ernest. 1990. "What is a Nation?" In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha, pp. 8-22. London: Routledge.

Seck, Assane. 1992. "Introduction." In Contemporary Art of Senegal. Baltimore: Garamond Press.

Senghor, Leopold Sedar. 1963. "Negritude et civilization de l'universal." Presence Africaine 46 (2):8-13.

--. 1966. "The Function and Meaning of the First World Festival of Negro Arts." African Forum 1 (4):5-10.

--. 1996a. "From Ce que je crois." In Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clementine Deliss, p. 218. Paris: Flaremarion.

--. 1996b. "Pour Une Tapisserie Senegalaise." Cimaise 43:56-9.

--. 1994. "Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century." In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, pp. 27-35. New York: Columbia University Press.

Snipe, Tracy. 1998. Arts and Politics in Senegal: 1960-1996. Trenton: Africa World Press.

Tall, Papa Ibra. 1972. "Negritude et arts plastiques contemporains." In Colloque sur la negritude. Paris: Presence Africaine.

"Tapisseries de Thies." African Arts 3 (2):61-3.

Tati-Loutard, Jean-Baptiste. 1978. "The Poto-Poto School of Painting--Congo," Africa Quarterly 18 (1):26.

"Vibrance des formes et sens du mystere." 1980. Le Soleil (Dakar) June 13.

(1.) Omar Katta Diallo, interview with author, tape recording, Dakar, February 19, 1999.

(2.) Pape Mballo Kebe, interview by author, tape recording, Dakar, October 12, 1998.

(3.) Ibou Diouf, interview by author, tape recording, Dakar, September 14, 1998.

(4.) Histories of modern art in African centers have discussed the role of several expatriates in founding art schools. This analysis does not intend merely to shed light on Lods's role in the school or replace Senghor's role with Lods as the primary force in shaping post-Independence visual production. It seeks to position the national art school as an essential site in Dakar's art world, both today and in its earliest years. Dakar's national art school is currently in a state of serious crisis as funding has been dramatically cut back. Critics in Dakar have raised the question of whether funds going towards the Dakar biennial should be directed to the art school instead.

(5.) Senghor met Lods in Paris in 1956 at an exhibition of work from the Poto-Poto School.

(6.) In discussing these themes, the artists emphasized that they were "originally African" or "purely African."

(7.) Several artists also mentioned that they knew of other African artists working contemporaneously, such as Nigerian Twins Seven-seven and Ivorian sculptor Christian Lattier. The Senegalese artists met many of their international colleagues, including a group of Congolese artists from the PotoPoto School of Painting, at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres.

(8.) I conducted research in Brazzaville, Congo, in 1996.

(9.) Amadou Seck, interview by author, tape recording, Dakar, August 27, 1998.

(10.) Modou Niang, interview with author, Dakar, November 13, 1998.

(11.) Countless artists used the terms "external influence," "imposition," and "constraint" in discussing the philosophical foundation of their training.

(12.) Lods's students consistently claim that he did not show them his work. One former student remembered that, while visiting Lods's home studio, he saw Lods at work on a collage made with seashells. In Brazzaville, Lods painted a fresco of St. Anne crossing the Congo River in a pirogue in St. Anne's cathedral.

(13.) Chetif Thiam, interview with author, tape recording, Dakar, September 18, 1998.

(14.) As discussed above, Iba Ndiaye is an exception to this assertion.

(15.) Niang, interview with author, 1998. (16.) Alpha Wallid Diallo, interview with author, tape recording, Dakar, August 28, 1998.

(17.) Cheikh Amadou Bamba is considered a Senegalese hero for his resistance of French forces. Blaise Diagne was the first Senegalese to be appointed as a deputy to the French National Assembly.

(18.) Diallo, interview, 1998.

(19.) Ibid.

(20.) Diouf, interview, 1998.

(21.) Since returning from Switzerland in the late 1980s, Diouf has changed his artistic style. His more recent works are subtle and impressionistic. They no longer deal with distinctively African themes.

(22.) Oumar Katta Dialio, interview with author, tape recording, Dakar, February 19,1999.

(23.) Diatta Seck, interview with author, tape recording, Dakar, September 15, 1998.

(24.) Thiam, interview, 1999.

(25.) Wallid Diallo, interview, 1998.

(26.) The works which comprised the exhibition were selected by a jury from France appointed by Iba Ndiaye, head of the Section Arts Plastiques.

(27.) The term "universal civilization" is used by Senghor In many writings of this period. See especially Senghor 1963:8-13.

(28.) Katta Diallo, interview, 1999. See also interviews with Diouf, Seck, and Thiam.

(29.) For more on the commission's objectives and accomplishments, see Axt and Sy 1989:83.

(30.) See Axt and Sy 1989:75. One of the primary mechanisms for building the state collection was the annual Salon des artistes sengalais.

(31.) Diouf, interview, 1998.

(32.) Ibid.

(33.) Individuals who were considered artisans, such as glass painters Babacar Lo and Mor Gueye, did not enjoy the same privileges as the elitely fashioned Beaux-Arts artists. For more on the establishment of an artistic elite, see Camara 1967:35.

(34.) Exceptions to this assertion are Ibou Diouf, Amadou Sow, and Souleymane Keita.

(35.) Niang, interview, 1998.

(36.) Thiam, interview, 1998.

(37). El Hadji Sy, interview with author, tape recording, Dakar, July 2, 1998.