Iba N'Diaye

Iba N'Diaye (1928 – October 5, 2008) was a French-Senegalese painter. Trained in Senegal and France during the colonial period, N'Diaye utilised European modernist fine arts training and medium to depict his views of African realities. He returned to Senegal upon its independence, and became the founding head of Senegal's national fine arts academy. Disenchanted with the prevailing artistic and political climate of mid-1960s Dakar, N'Diaye returned to France in 1967 and exhibited around the globe, returning to his birthplace of Saint-Louis, Senegal, to present his work in Senegal again only in 2000. N'Diaye died at his home in Paris in October, 2008 at the age of 80.

N'Diaye died in Paris on October 4, 2008 at the age of 80 of heart failure. The Senegalese Ministry of Culture is coordinating his interment, beside his mother, in the Catholic cemetery of Saint-Louis, Senegal. Upon the artist's death, President of Senegal Abdoulaye Wade called N'Diaye the "Father-founder of Senegalese Modern Art."

Thus N’Diaye’s works transcend barriers of race, culture, aesthetic, by capturing the past, the present to highlight existential issues. One of the most notable influences in his works, is Jazz. From the streets of New orleans to Harlem, crossing the ocean to Paris, knew as the Jazz capital in Europe, the artist, as most of his fellow Africans in the diaspora, will readily fall in love with the afro-americain rhythmics and the spontaneousness of the genre which recall the west African rhythms and the noble ancestral art of the Griot. Moreover, it is to its intrinsic connotation of fight against racism, discrimination, alienation that N’Diaye tried to attune his voice, in the aim to lay hold of this powerful channel of protest, recusant and of autodetermination, in a timeless dimension, through the use of his academic artistic knowledge. In addition, noteworthy it is to see the manifest will of N’diaye to spotlight the impact of women in the burgeoning modern afro-american culture, but especially in their front position in fighting against segregation, represented in his series on Jazz, notably in “Hommage à Bessie Smith” (1986) <<Homage to Bessie Smith>> or “Trio” (1999). This last, can let us reflect about these feminine Jazz figures but active civil right activists as Billie Holiday with her famous performance of “Strong fruit”, or Nina Simone with “Young, gifted and Black” which became a popular civil rights anthem. Thereby, N’diaye place himself as a feminist figure regiving praise to the place of the woman in african societies, where with continuous past years of cultural and religious brewing has been corrupted.

N'Diaye exhibited his paintings in New York City (1981), in the Netherlands (1989); in 1990 in Tampere (1990), and at the Museum Paleis Lange Voorhout in The Hague (1996). In 1987 was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Munich. In 2000, he returned to Saint Louis for his first exhibition in Senegal since 1981. In 1977, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Musée Dynamique, while in 1981, his work was presented at the Centre culturel Gaston Berger de Dakar. Since that time major showing of his work was staged at the Senegalese Galerie nationale (2003) and the Musée de la Place du Souvenir (2008), both in the Senegalese capitol.

During his peregrinations in Europe’s museums and Africa, Iba N’diaye assess the past via the artistic productions that prevailed from Velasquez to Picasso, to some primitive African masks and sculptures. Through the means of sketches and drawings, N’diaye succeed to master the forms and techniques of paintings that he observed and fastidiously analysed. Considering “Head of a Djem Statuette Nigeria”  (1976) or “Study of an African Sculpture” (1977), they demonstrate the studious control in N’diaye’s drawings, yet remind the analogy between the series of The cry of Edvard Munch and those of N’Diaye; though completely reappropriated in terms of form, details and subject to the negro context of freedom acquiring. The question of racism and injustice is discussed with the painting “Juan de Pareja attacked by Dog” (1986), where the narrative of Juan de Pareja, a slave moors who was granted freedom thanks to his art, is revised in the stolidness of the subject which prefers to not answer to the bestiality, but let his talent speak for himself.

N'Diaye, along with Papa Ibra Tall and Pierre Lods founded the Ecole de Dakar, a genre that allied painting, sculpture and crafts into the literary movement of Négritude: an attempt to assert a distinctively African voice in the arts, free of, if borrowing elements from, the traditions of colonial nations. "Africanité" (Africanness) combined the Negritude of Senghor and the Pan-Africanism of decolonialism. N'Diaye, however, remained committed to teach the fundamentals and techniques of Western art, at times putting him at odds with his fellow teachers and artists. He wrote of the danger of "Africanness" sliding back into a simplistic Noble savage self-parody if rejecting Western forms meant rejecting a rigorous technical background. The pursuit of this "instinctive" Africanness is best exemplified by Papa Ibra Tall, who felt that African artists must "unlearn" western habits, tapping instinctual African creativity. Tall and N'Diaye were the two best-known French-educated Senegalese fine artists of their time. While Tall's vision was to win out in the short term, the 1970s and 80s saw a reappraisal of N'Diaye's positions and an eventual rejection of the more straightforward state-sponsored "Africanité". President Senghor, as a poet one of the founders of Negritude, devoted as much as %25 of the Senegalese budget to the arts and was seen as the patron of artists like the Ecole de Dakar. Misgivings by artists such as N'Diaye (as well as outright opposition by artists such as film-maker/author Ousmane Sembène) fed into a later creative break with Negritude, in the 1970s led by the Laboratoire Agit-Art art community in Dakar. N'Diaye's disenchantment and return to France in 1967 came just a year after the World Festival of Black Arts was founded in Dakar: a triumph of the "Africanité" arts.

Working at his Parisian "la Ruche Atelier" and his home in the Dordogne, N'Diaye painted some of his best-known works, a series on the theme of the biblical ritual slaughter of a lamb: the "Tabaski" series, exhibiting them at Sarlat in 1970 and at Amiens in 1974.

When Senegal achieved independence in 1959, he returned at the request of President Léopold Senghor, to found the Department of Plastic Arts at the National School of Fine Arts of Senegal in Dakar. There he exhibited his work in 1962 and worked as a teacher until 1966. He taught and inspired a generation of fine artists, including painters such as Mor Faye.

Born in Saint Louis, Senegal, in a religious family, He was rapidly exposed to the catholic artwork within a Church of his hometown. When he was 15 years old began his studies at the prestigious Lycée Faidherbe. As a student he painted posters for cinemas and businesses in his town. He studied architecture in Senegal before traveling to France in 1948, where he began studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. The sculptor Ossip Zadkine introduced him the traditional African sculpture, and he traveled throughout Europe, studying art and architecture. N'Diaye frequented jazz music clubs while in Paris in the 1940s, and his interest in the medium continues to show itself in his work. In Paris he studied fine art at the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie de la Grande Chaumière.