Tabaski III

Iba Ndiaye is among the foremost modern artists from the African continent. Raised in Senegal’s colonial capital of St. Louis, he became engaged in arts and design from an early age, painting posters for the local cinema. In 1948, Ndiaye relocated to Paris, where he studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and became a member of La Ruche along with contemporaries ranging from Chaim Soutine to Diego Rivera. Under the guidance of Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906-2001), Ndiaye also served as a co-founder of and teacher at the École de Dakar between 1959 and 1966. As part of these formative artistic experiences, Ndiaye travelled throughout Europe, North America, and West Africa, studying historic and contemporary drawings, prints, paintings, architecture, and sculpture. He kept extensive notebooks of these trips, believing drawing to be “the foundation of all work, the means of acquiring the necessary tools, without which nothing holds up.”

Throughout his life, Ndiaye returned to particular subjects, including musical performance, the expressive qualities of the head, landscapes, and the annual rites of Tabaski, or Eid al-Adha (the feast of sacrifice). The theme of sacrifice expressed through his Tabaski series served as a locus for Ndiaye’s further considerations of the legacies of colonialism, plein-air observation and drawing, and reflections on the European “old masters.” He first began painting on the subject between the early 1960s and 70s, drawing inspiration from events in his hometown, as well as from intense study of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox. He returned to these ideas later in life, producing a vivid series of smaller scale works from the 1990s. The Met’s Tabaski was among the early works from this series, marking one of the most important from Ndiaye’s oeuvre. This monumental creation, like many of Ndiaye’s other works, directly challenged Euro-centric notions a modernism by arguing that the basis of this artistic movement was built on the principles of global exchange. Thus, any artistic, technological, and scientific advances of this period already inherently belonged to all citizens of the world.