IBA NDIAYE (1928–2008)

According to the New York Times_’ Holland Cotter, the Senaglese artist Iba Ndiaye, one of the most important painters of twentieth-century African modernism, died on October 5 in Paris, where he had lived for many years. Ndiaye was born in Saint-Louis, Senegal, in 1928, and moved to France in 1949 to study architecture in Montpellier and Paris. After Senegal gained independence in the 1960, Ndiaye created a department of plastic arts at the National School of Fine Arts in Dakar, at the request of the nation’s president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. Ndiaye taught there until 1966, influencing a generation of younger artists, among them Mor Faye. During this time he helped found, along with Papa Ibra Tall and others, a Senegalese art movement called École de Darkar, which was aligned with the literary movement of Négritude. And in 1966, he organized a large exhibition of Senegalese modernists for the first World Festival of Pan-African Arts in Dakar.

Although he made many drawings based on the forms of traditional African masks, Ndiaye painted in oil on canvas and in a semiabstract School of Paris style that, unlike his École de Darkar colleagues, made little direct reference to African subjects or techniques. His allusions were often to works by classic Western painters like Goya and Rembrandt, to which he gave a mordant political twist. Ndiaye’s work has appeared in many international exhibitions, including retrospectives in Munich and the Hague. “Certain Europeans, seeking exotic thrills, expect me to serve them folklore,” he said in an interview. “I refuse to do it—otherwise I would exist only as a function of their segregationist ideas of the African artist.” Today, many younger African-born painters like Moshekwa Langa, Odili Donald Odita, and Julie Mehretu have followed his lead.