Ndiaye, Iba

▪ 2009

      Senegalese painter

born 1928, Saint-Louis, French West Africa [now in Senegal]

died Oct. 5, 2008, Paris, France

was one of Senegal's leading Modernist artists and a cofounder of the negritude art movement known as the École de Dakar, but his richly coloured semiabstract paintings more often reflected Western influences, especially jazz and classic European art, than the African Primitivism common to many of his compatriots. Ndiaye moved to France in 1949 to study art and architecture and remained there until 1959, just before Senegal gained its independence from France. At the suggestion of the new president, Léopold Senghor, Ndiaye founded Senegal's National School of Fine Arts, where he taught until 1966, the same year that he organized the first World Festival of Pan-African Arts in Dakar. Ndiaye returned to Paris in 1967 and thereafter divided his time between the two cities.

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