Dakar School

also: École de Dakar

movement school 1960-1974 Senegal Africa

The Dakar School (French: École de Dakar) was Senegal's modern art movement of the country's first independence years, active from September 1960 to 1974 and openly sponsored by President Léopold Sédar Senghor. His cultural policy built the institutions around it - the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, the National Tapestry Manufacture at Thiès, museums, and festivals - and his philosophy of Négritude gave it a program: to prove that Black Africans could create beauty on African models, within a modernist framework. Founded by the painters Iba N'Diaye and Papa Ibra Tall with Pierre Lods, the movement fused African aesthetic traditions and mythologies with Western avant-garde abstraction and bold graphic design, favoring warm color and flattened, decorative surfaces. It reached its widest audience at the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts, notably the exhibition Tendances et Confrontations, curated by N'Diaye. The state's preferred vision of Africanité eventually drew criticism, and the school dissolved in 1974.

Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Dakar School".
Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Dakar School".Public domain (credit: Unknown author Unknown author or not provided) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Warm, saturated colors and bold graphic silhouettes
  • Flattened two-dimensional space filled with decorative patterning
  • Figures and motifs drawn from African myth, ritual, and everyday life
  • Figurative and abstract representation combined within a single composition
  • Tapestry-like surfaces echoing the woven work of the Thiès workshops

Key figures

  • Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001) — Poet-president whose Négritude cultural policy sponsored the movement
  • Iba N'Diaye (1928-2008) — Painter and founding head of the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Dakar
  • Papa Ibra Tall (1935-2015) — Painter and founder of the National Tapestry Manufacture at Thiès
  • Pierre Lods (1921-1988) — French painter and co-founder of the École de Dakar
  • Seydou Barry (1943-2007) — Senegalese painter of the movement's first generation

Example works

  • La Forêt aux Souvenirs — Papa Ibra Tall (1962)
  • La ronde, à qui le tour? — Iba N'Diaye

Sources

← Back to the catalog