Locating Senghor's École de Dakar: International and Transnational Dimensions to Senegalese Modern Art, c. 1959–1980
2018; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 51; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00413
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)North African History and Literature
ResumoIn September of 1960, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001)—poet, philosopher, statesman, and cofounder of the loosely conceived Négritude movement in Paris beginning in the 1930s—became president of the newly independent Republic of Senegal. Over the next two decades, Senghor devoted considerable resources to the arts,1 including the creation of a government-supported cadre of modern visual artists known as the École de Dakar. To date, virtually all who have studied the state-funded École de Dakar, for reasons that are in many ways logical and compelling, have read its core fabric as quintessentially nationalist. This reading first became prevalent among critics who faulted Senghor for subordinating the École's production to what they saw as his Négritude philosophy-cum-nationalist ideology (Pataux 1974, Samb 1995 [1989], Ebong 1991).2 More recently it has been taken up by pioneering scholars who argue generally that École artists preserved their integrity even while relying on state patronage (Sylla 1998, 2006; Harney 1996, 2002, 2004; Grabski 2001, 2006, 2013).3 Yet the École de Dakar also stands to be explored for its international and transnational dimensions, which confirm art historian Elizabeth Harney's important observation that Senghor aimed to cultivate “supranational (i.e., pan-African and humanist) models of community” (2004: 50).4 Whereas nationalist readings suggest a decisive rupture with the French and a mandate to build Senegalese identity, I contend that cross-cultural collaboration and worldly participation lay at the core of Senghor's enterprise.In pursuing this argument, careful distinctions must be drawn between, on the one hand, notions of mid-twentieth-century territorial nationalism in Africa (aiming to transform colonies into independent nation-states), and on the other hand, two closely related terms: “international” (usually denoting interactions between states), and “transnational” (applying especially to phenomena existing across national borders and/or transcending allegiance to any one state). Readers familiar with Négritude but unfamiliar with the École de Dakar may not be surprised by a wider conceptualization of the École, given that Négritude is well known as a pan-African movement aimed at building broad solidarities.Nationalist readings have nevertheless been explicit in the existing literature and are on some levels persuasive. While curator Ima Ebong stressed that “Senegalese art … from its inception, was incorporated into a national agenda” (1991: 199), art historian Joanna Grabski stated more directly that “the visual propositions of the first generation of modernists responded to Senghor's call for a national art” (2006: 38). And in Harney's thesis, “Senegal's artists have engaged with the histories and practices of modernism and have participated in attempts to link a new aesthetic to the project of nation building” (2004: 4). These readings all feature Senghor using art to enhance post-independence Senegalese nationality—presumably by encouraging people who had long identified as Wolof or Serer or Haalpulaar to prioritize national belonging and by showcasing productions of Senegalese national culture to the rest of the world.5 Such readings are logical insofar as Senghor is well known to have retrofitted black nationalist Négritude with a Senegalese nationalist function in the 1960s (Markovitz 1969, Diouf 2003, Diaw 1993), and insofar as post colonial African nation-states faced a common challenge of forging cohesion among disparate cultural groups (cf. Askew 2002, Hess 2006, Straker 2009, Ivaska 2011, McGovern 2013).Yet in considering Négritude as a prelude to the École de Dakar, it is important to recall that Senghor's agenda always included cultivating an African presence within global modernity and what he called Civilisation de l'Universel (Civilization of the Universal) (Senghor 2003 [1939], 1963, 1966b: 16; Mouralis 1988: 5; Edwards 2001: 47–48; Jachec 2010; Diagne 2011; Wilder 2015: 51–64). Senghor's Négritude, in other words, took root in diaspora consciousness, but it also aimed to interfere with Eurocentrism on its own terms. Building on this essential but sometimes overlooked aspect of Senghor's project, I will argue that the École de Dakar was significantly international: Its core mandate involved facilitating cultural diplomacy with foreign national governments and societies. I will also argue that the École was transnational: Many of its members laid claim to multiple (often French and Senegalese) cultural elements and artistic traditions—if not by birth, then by education, travel abroad, or appropriated forms and techniques.To ground this claim visually, let us briefly consider Afrique (Africa, c. 1976, Fig. 1), a tapestry composition by the École de Dakar artist Ansoumana Diédhiou (1949–1990s). Although Diédhiou hailed from Senegal's lush southern Casamance region (Merceron 1966: 9) and may have been meditating on that landscape here, it is clear that his totalizing title, along with the depicted jungle flora, could easily evoke exotica for audiences viewing the continent from afar. Meanwhile, the composition's geometric patterns, strong lines, extreme flatness, sleek aesthetic, and bright colors link it to an international visual language of modernist abstraction. Diedhiou's artistic strategies in these ways both belonged to, and exceeded the scope of, Senegalese culture.By taking Diedhiou's Afrique as a point of reference, layers of internationalism and transnationalism can be seen embedded in the discourses, institutional histories, and artistic practices that were most relevant to the École de Dakar during decolonization. To paint this picture in broad strokes: Senghor in the 1950s championed francophone West African federation as preferable to fracturing the region into disparate independent territories; Dakar's national art school was established under the Mali Federation (1959–1960), Senegal's short-lived union with French Sudan (now Mali); many influential figures at the national art school in the 1960s and 1970s either received training in France or were themselves French; and works by École artists often circulated through channels devised by Senghor's culture ministries for the purpose of reaching audiences of diverse national backgrounds and to offer signature gifts of state to foreign dignitaries. Overall, Senghor sponsored modernism in his country not so much to galvanize the Senegalese as to project the image of a sophisticated and fully modern Africa around the world. The École was arguably conceived to reimagine, through art, Senghor's longstanding yet ultimately thwarted political dream of an African federation existing within multiple global communities wherein black cultural contributions would be highly valued.Following especially on Frantz Fanon's (1963 [1959]) well-known critique of Négritude as elitist and ineffectual, scholars and critics have tended to disparage Senghor for his longstanding ties to France and have often framed African modernism in relation to the postcolonial national cultures that Fanon championed. While in certain ways justified, these positions, as applied to Senegal, miss the pragmatism in Senghor's elite-driven cultural politics, whereby modern art was envisioned to build international bridges through high-profile channels. In a present scholarly conjuncture featuring proliferating discourses on “global” modernisms and contemporary art,6 it is worth investigating how Senghor—a distinguished twentieth-century figure by any standard—engineered Senegalese modernism to operate across borders.At the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Rome (1959), Senghor famously stated that,With these words, Senghor highlighted the importance of creative expression to decolonization. And yet, for Senghor in 1959, decolonization did not, in an ideal scenario, equate to replacing the colonial territory with the independent nation-state. Beginning with the work of Ruth Schachter Morgenthau (1964), some historians of French West Africa have shown that the narrative of an inexorable and instantaneous national independence at the territorial level is one that has become dominant only in retrospect (Foltz 1965, Chafer 2002, Schmidt 2011, Cooper 2014, Wilder 2015).7 In a recent landmark study, Frederick Cooper notes how nearly every major political player native to the region through at least the mid-1950s sought to transform the colonial empire into one or another mode of federation or confederation of African states linked, in Senghor's terminology, both “horizontally” to one another and “vertically” to France (2014: 188). In 1959–1960, federal nationality remained a clear option for Senegal and French Sudan in the form of the Mali Federation until a complex concatenation of events drove each territory toward its own, isolated independence.8Other statements by Senghor serve to throw processes of decolonization into further relief. As quoted by Cooper, Senghor's worries about the prospects for maintaining the French Community of the fledgling Fifth Republic led him to write, in October 1959: “Nationalism, I acknowledge, is an illness. It conquered Europe in the nineteenth century, Asia in the first half of the twentieth century; it now gnaws at Africa” (Cooper 2014: 346–47).9 As articulated here, Senghor in the 1940s and 1950s did not tie advocacy for African rights and self-governance to demands for complete political autonomy. His anti-colonialism, in other words, avoided pivoting on the false promise of territorial nationalism, which risked engendering what he called “balkanization,” or the division of independent Africa into small, economically and politically weak states (Cooper 2014: 237). Though the potentials of supranational political unions were (and remain) contested, Senghor's bet was that a West African federation joined in confederation with France would give the region greater power and leverage in world affairs, while obliging France to make continuing concessions to its former colonies.By 1966, well after the collapse of both the Mali Federation and the French Community, Senghor's best-known statement addressing the “national” character of Senegalese art still defined the African nation as something transcendent of what it had become:Senghor here references some of the key elements picked up later by scholars to characterize Senegalese artistic production: shared identity, a recognizable style, imported techniques and media applied to African forms and subject matter. At the same time, it is impossible to overlook his characterization of the nation as existing “long before independence” and of national style as a complete “symbiosis” bringing together local culture and “French imported technology.” These phrases point to a need to adjust our understandings of postcolonial Senegalese modernism to align with Senghor's own lofty “nationalist” vision. For Senghor in this context, “nation” referred to African states preceding the artificial boundaries drawn by colonization. Senegal's contemporary “national” culture would hark back to those precolonial times, while also appropriating French technological elements. This articulation of an enduring West African artistic style can be read as transnational in time and space. It also mirrored Senghor's ideal of a West African federation that would retain strong connections between territorial states and between those states and France.Clues to the École's character also emerge from the annals of state-sponsored art institutions whose general histories are now well known, but whose transnational dimensions stand to be examined in greater detail. A first bit of evidence derives from the name of the “school” itself, which today has come to connote the generation of Senegalese modern artists who worked under Senghor's patronage. In fact the name does not seem to have been coined by Senghor or the Senegalese, but rather by France's first minister of cultural affairs, André Malraux, on April 1, 1966, in a speech inaugurating the Tendances et Confrontations exhibition at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar (Grabski 2001: 53; Sylla 2006: 119).11 No written or recorded trace of Malraux's speech has been found, but the ideas undergirding the label are fairly straightforward. On the one hand, Malraux sought to offer Senegalese visual modernism a place alongside the artistic traditions best known in Europe. On the other hand, Malraux could only manage to distinguish Senegalese art by relating it back to French modernism and the so-called École de Paris. As art historian Hannah Feldman has noted in an essay on Malraux's musée imaginaire, “Malraux's pretension toward a global aesthetic order” was “still organized from the point of view of France” (2014: 26).To situate the development of the École itself, it is useful to begin with a brief prehistory of art education in late colonial Senegal. Although a private Conservatoire de Dakar had trained many West African performing artists during late 1940s through the 1950s (Sylla 2006: 159), and although the French colonial administration in 1953 instituted a network of cultural centers which immediately played a role in supporting local artistic activities (Nedelec 1997), no studio art program had existed in Dakar during these years.12 By the mid-1950s, a handful of African painters had exhibited at the French Cultural Center and other venues, but these artists remained in the minority among a larger number of French artists participating in the private and loosely organized Académie Africaine des Arts Plastiques.13Following the 1956 Loi-Cadre (Framework Law) granting semi-autonomy to the territories of French West Africa and the founding of the Mali Federation within the French Community in early April of 1959, a decree signed on April 22, 1959, created a federal arts school, the Maison des Arts du Mali.14 Housed largely within the Théâtre du Palais on Avenue Roume in downtown Dakar, the school was mandated to serve the full federal territory.15 As outlined in the decree, the school was to comprise five sections: an Arts Plastiques (studio art) section; a section devoted to researching and teaching what were referred to as arts nègres (“black arts”); a section where classical disciplines (including music and dance) were taught; a film section; and a cultural affairs section.16 Archival evidence suggests that music and theater dominated the school at this point, while studio arts, dance, and cinema attracted less interest, and the arts nègres and cultural affairs sections had yet to be established in practice.17Around this time (probably in early 1960), the Saint-Louis-born painter Iba Ndiaye (1928–2008) returned from France to head the Arts Plastiques section (Fig. 2).18 Ndiaye's colleague in the first configuration of the section was Papa Ibra Tall (1935–2015), a prominent painter, illustrator, and draftsman from Tivaouane who had also spent time studying architecture and art in France in the late 1950s (“Interview avec Papa Ibra Tall,” 1962: 62; Diouf 1999: 97, Cochrane 2011: 380).19 Shortly after the Mali Federation collapsed in August 1960, the Maison des Arts du Mali became the École des Arts du Sénégal. During the 1960–1961 academic year, the two artists, Ndiaye and Tall, worked together in the Arts Plastiques section, with Tall overseeing an introductory class while Ndiaye taught life drawing.20 The earliest students in Arts Plastiques included Doudou Diagne, Alioune Badara Diahkhaté, Ansoumana Diédhiou, Mar Fall, Mor Faye, Silman Faye, Souleymane Keita, Pathé Mbaye, Abdoulaye Ndiaye “Thiossane,” Ibrahima Ndiaye, Mamadou Niang, Eugène Sané, Mamadou Sène, Moustapha Touré, and Mamadou Wade, along with two French students resident in Dakar, Catherine Sollier and Dominique Merlin.21In the fall of 1961, personal disagreements between Ndiaye and Tall prompted the latter to found a new studio section known as Recherches Plastiques Nègres (Fig. 3), whose first students were Amadou Ba, Ibou Diouf, Ousmane Faye, and Mamadou Cheikh “Modou” Niang, followed by Papa Sidy Diop and Seydou Barry.22 In this section, Tall was also eventually joined by an influential French assistant, Pierre Lods (1921–1988). Lods was a mathematics teacher and amateur painter who had founded the so-called Poto-Poto School of modern painting in Brazzaville as early as 1951 and whom Senghor had invited to Dakar to teach art.23 The overall mission of the École des Arts in the early years, as stated in an introductory pamphlet published by the Senegalese government, was to train students to master “universal artistic techniques while applying them to traditional sources of African inspiration.”24According to this document, the École des Arts at this time reflected a twin emphasis on “universal” and “African” concerns (cf. Senghor 1964 [1937]). “Teaching” sections in music, dance (Fig. 4), theater, and Arts Plastiques apparently remained predominantly academic and Western in orientation, while the “research” division (comprising the Recherches Plastiques Nègres and Recherches Musique Africaine sections) ostensibly favored indigenous forms and idioms (even though a photograph from the music section features musicians with a West African kora as well as a Western saxophone, piano, and sheet music; Fig. 5).25 A third studio arts section, the Section de Formation de Maîtres d'Education Artistique (also known as the Section Normale d'Education Artistique), was added in 1965 under the direction of Frenchman Philippe Bonnet.26 This section, which trained artists to work as art teachers, may have leaned toward classical pedagogy, given its French leadership in Bonnet and other faculty members. Its earliest students included Bocar Pathé Diong, Mor Faye, Chérif Mané, Omar Ngalla Faye, and Massène Sène.27Scholarly accounts of Senegalese art education have widely identified two opposing pedagogical currents: a classical beauxarts training directed by Ndiaye in the Arts Plastiques section, and a fully spontaneous, laissez-faire approach pervading the Recherches Plastiques Nègres section under Tall and Lods.28 This formula demands to be complicated on several counts. It is true that Ndiaye held academic training in high regard, and he evidently looked askance at the noninterfering approach as a kind of essentialism or “primitivism” that assumed inborn creativity among Africans (N'Diaye 1977; Ndiaye quoted in Klotchkoff 1983: 49; N'Diaye and Kaiser 1994: 53–54). But Tall, even though he did not embrace academicism and sought to instill free expression, saw Lods's noninterventionist pedagogy as lacking in rigor. As Tall recalled of the moment when he learned that Lods would be joining his section: “I said, ‘I don't want anything to do with the Poto-Poto brand. Poto-Poto has an air of being undisciplined. I don't want Poto-Poto in the École de Dakar.'”29 Tall accepted Lods in the Recherches section only on the condition that Lods recognize his authority as the sections founder and director.30As for Lods, he undoubtedly subscribed to certain race-based notions of “African” creativity. He stated in 1967, for instance, that, “Since almost all Africans are powerful artists, one can choose [as students] the ones who have multiple strengths: imagination, facility, a sense of composition and of the harmony of colors” (Lods quoted in Hossmann 1967: 38). Still, it seems excessive to say of Lods, as Abdou Sylla has done, that “he didn't teach, thus had no teaching method” (2006: 131). Several testimonies report Lods advising his students in matters of composition, color, and technique (Diouf in Hossmann 1966: 37; Hossmann 1967: 37; Tati-Loutard 1978: 27–28), although he may have offered less in the way of technical and conceptual guidance than did his colleagues.Further, Iba Ndiaye was not solely responsible for academic training at the École des Arts. Ndiaye, a painter who studied with the Russian-born sculptor and painter Ossip Zadkine in Paris and whose personal style bore influences from Rembrandt and Soutine, among others, was undoubtedly a crucial figure (Fig. 6), as he was the senior instructor in Arts Plastiques (“Iba N'Diaye” 1962: 36–37; Merceron 1966: 8–9). But we have no reason to believe Ndiaye's colleagues were less influential, even though their names have not appeared in published accounts of Senegalese art pedagogy. In fact, Ndiaye led the section but he initially taught only drawing.31 Two French professors, Gaffier and Voigny, meanwhile also taught drawing in Arts Plastiques in the early 1960s, when painting was the domain of several other instructors from Europe, including one Mrs. Kaiser (d. 1961), and Michèle Emmanuel (who taught briefly in 1961–1962).32 Outside of painting, another Frenchman, Pierre Delclaux, taught tapestry weaving to a pair of Senegalese students—Samba “Vieux” Mané and Thierno Touré—from 1961 through 1963 on a small loom imported from France.33 There was also a Professor Saros teaching perspective; Jean-Jacques Bourgoin, a young medical student offering a weekly anatomy class; Will Petty, an African-American instructor of clay modeling; and Suzanne Bourgoin (the medical students mother) and Francine Ndiaye (Iba Ndiaye's French wife) teaching Western and African art history, respectively.34 The Section Normale led by Bonnet must have added yet another model of academic training, wherein pedagogy itself was a central concern.The Manufacture Nationale de Tapisseries (MNT; now Manufactures Sénégalaises des Arts Décoratifs [MSAD]) was another important art institution founded during Senghor's presidency.35 Located in the inland city of Thiès on the site of a former army barracks, the tapestry workshop officially opened on December 4, 1966. Its inauguration ceremony presided over by Senghor, had in attendance President Modibo Keita of Mali (1915–1977) as well as two luminaries of modern French tapestry: Michel Tourlière (1925–2004), then director of the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs d'Aubusson, in central France; and François Tabard (1902–1969), a master weaver whom Senghor introduced as “the very source” of the French renaissance in tapestry-making. In his speech, Senghor also credited the French artist Jean Lurçat (1892–1966): “Several years ago in Cotonou, [Lurçat] encouraged me to start a manufacture like this one in Senegal” (1966a: 11).Even if Lurçat did make this suggestion, the driving force behind the MNT/MSAD was Papa Ibra Tall, who in Paris in the late 1950s had studied modern applied arts: pottery at a studio on the Impasse de l'Astrolabe in the 15th arrondissement; diverse media and techniques at the École des Métiers d'Art on rue Thorigny in the 4th; and tapestry in the private workshop of a weaver in Vincennes.36 Whether the original idea for the Thiès workshop was Lurçat's or Senghor's or Tall's, it was Tall who became the workshops first and longest-serving director (1966–1975, 1989–2010) and who arranged for the training of its first generation of weavers—Mamadou Wade (b. 1944), Mar Fall (b. 1944), Doudou Diagne, and Alioune Badara Diahkhaté—at France's Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins in Paris in 1963–1964 (Senghor 1969; Sylla 2006: 173–74).37 Tall's general interest in applied arts, as well as his personal artistic style, with his strong emphasis on line conducive to tapestry design and his affinity for color and the realm of fantasy, also exerted a marked influence on production at Thiès. Especially carrying on Tall's method were Ousmane Faye, Seydou Barry, and Modou Niang, who all went to work at Thiès, joining Abdoulaye Ndiaye “Thiossane” and Ansoumana Diédhiou as the first generation of cartonniers transforming maquettes into blueprints for weaving.Tall's style was, in turn, partly a product of cosmopolitan influences that included—as the artist divulged in a radio interview broadcast in France in 1967—a particular attraction to the work of the Russian Symbolist artist Mikhail Vrubel (1856–1910).38 In a more recent interview, Tall recounted how he discovered Vrubel's compositions reproduced in art books in Dakar, noting that it was the Russian artist's “lyricism” that most appealed to him.39 Perhaps what additionally held Tall's attention was Vrubel's interest in local fairy tales (comparable to the African folktales Tall was known for illustrating [see Terrisse and Tall 1965]), and Vrubel's interest in applied arts such as pottery and stained glass. The connection is especially visible in comparing Tall's The Sower of Stars (Cover) with Vrubel's The Swan Princess (Fig. 7). Both compositions feature regal female subjects in flowing dresses, elaborate regalia, and jewel-encrusted crowns. Although a marked contrast can be noted in Tall's low-angle approach to his subject versus Vrubel's view from just above eye level, both works feature rhythmic and undulating lines, accented in the fingers and radiating presence of Tall's Sower and in the sea behind Vrubel's Princess. Tall's Beautiful Birth (Fig. 8) and Vrubel's Knight (Fig. 9) evidence a similar kind of selective borrowing, as Tall invokes traditions of chivalry to reference local anticolonial resistance struggles. As Tall explained, cavalry serving the Wolof resistance fighter Lat Dior (1842–1886) hailed from Tall's hometown of Tivaouane; Tall's father's side of the family was famous for its master horsemen.40Tall was by no means the only École artist to incorporate cross-cultural influences. To cite one further example, the artist Abdoulaye Ndiaye “Thiossane” (b. 1936) stated in an interview that American and French movie posters had first piqued his interest in visual art as early as the 1940s.41 Ndiaye specifically noted that Songho, his tapestry composition depicting Senegal's national sport of wrestling (Fig. 10), drew inspiration from a character in Alexander Korda's 1940 blockbuster film The Thief of Bagdad, based loosely on The Arabian Nights. The “Silver Maid” in Korda's film (Fig. 11), a six-armed, Kali-like “magical toy” programmed to kill on command, gave Ndiaye the idea to paint multiple arms on his composition's wrestlers to suggest furious action.Such cosmopolitan influences went hand-in-hand with the international personnel working at Thiès. Line Bacconnier, a French artist and weaver who had trained under Lurçat, moved to Senegal in 1964 to continue training Wade, Fall, Diagne, and Diahkhaté and to aid in preparations for the opening of the tapestry workshop at Thiès, where she then worked as a technical assistant from 1966 to 1974 before starting her own tapestry workshop, the Atelier de Tapisserie l'Arantèle, in a suburb of Dakar (c. 1973–82).42 Aubusson-trained weavers Gilette Lecherbonnier and Sténia Domanski also worked as technical assistants at Thiès beginning in the late 1960s, with Domanski going on to join Bacconnier at Arantèle in the 1970s.43Meanwhile, the art school in Dakar was revamped under a new name in 1972 as the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts (ENBA), situated within a larger arts and industrial design complex, the Institut National des Arts (INA).44 This change, too, must be registered in defining and characterizing the École de Dakar, in the sense that art training in the 1970s came to be dominated by French coopérants, or development workers employed by France's Ministère de la Coopération (Harney 2004: 125).45 Senghor-era art training, in other words, was carried out in part by European instructors, and beginning in the early 1970s, the fine arts curriculum followed an increasingly internationalized and professionalized agenda in conjunction with cultural policy amendments responding to the major student protests of spring 1968 and 1969.46As explained by Senegalese cultural policy veterans Alioune Badiane and Daouda Diarra, the new dispensation called for retaining academic art training while adding further specializations in graphic design, interior design, communications, advertising, and other areas of study promising marketable skills.47 At ENBA, however, academic training remained paramount and was guided by European professors such as Jean-Paul Fatout and André Seck in sculpture, Bernard Pataux and Michèle Strobel in art history, Simone Pataux in design and applied arts, and Jacques Ehrmann, François Pousse, Daniel Mangion, Jacques Lamy, Jacques Poulain, and Claude Chavan in drawing and painting.48 Meanwhile, the school's orientation gradually came to be influenced by artistic currents from the United States and France—Supports/Surfaces, conceptualism, mixed media, and use of found objects (eventually known in Senegal and elsewhere as récupération)—particularly under the influence of Paolo Paolucci, an Italian painter who was a fixture at ENBA in the 1970s.49Visual art seems to have played little if any role in state efforts to develop national solidarity and pride within Senegal during Senghor's presidency. Where national administration was concerned, the École de Dakar, although evidently comprising Senegalese artists based in Senegal, functioned largely within a second and almost entirely separate international domain of state-sponsored cultural activity. As early as 1962, Senegal's Ministry of Foreign Affairs contained a Division des Relations Culturelles et Sociales, meaning that culture occupied two very different institutional locations in the post-independence regime, simultaneously under the Ministry of Education and under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.50 Although documentation of the culture division in Foreign Affairs is scarce, it was likely this office that participated in organizing, in collaboration with Papa Ibra Tall, the first exhibitions of Senegalese art in Europe in the early 1970s.51 Subsequently the government established a Commission aux Expositions d'Art à l'Étranger within the Ministry of Culture to produce and manage international exhibitions, which toured the Americas and Asia in the late 1970s a
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