At a time when African-art historians are increasingly addressing contemporary African arts.

At a time when African-art historians are increasingly addressing contemporary African arts, efforts to reexamine the contributions of pioneering artists, patrons, and cultural activists who operated during the immediate post-Independence period are of greatest effort importance. One such early artistic matrix was that surrounding the Ecole de Dakar, which played a critical part in defining modern art and the persona of the novel artist in Senegal. This article addresses the structural, ideological, and discursive parameters of this government-sponsored canon and re-evaluates its iconography, suggesting alternative interpretations of its productions as deliberate and creative deformations of European primitivist practices.

The history of cultural production in post-Independence Senegal is intricately linked to the narrative and criticism surrounding the philosophy of Negritude. While many historians and critics have focused on the poetry and prose of this emotion few have given the same attention to the visual arts that flourished at the same time. (1) When considered at all, these works have been derided as mimetic, oftentimes aesthetic dross, more the conclusion of a colonized mindset than an innovative, indigenous answer to and engagement with cross-cultural notions of Africanness. This lacuna has ensueed in a partial telling of the history of the period, relegating to obscurity the crucial point at which theory was levy into visual practice.

During his presidency, Leopold Sedar Senghor envisioned tillage as central to the critical proces of nation building. (2) Consequently he saw the artist as a representative of and advocate for a recent nation (Senghor 1989:20). His policies were informed according to a firm commitment to Negritude. by means of the time Senghor assumed power in 1960 this philosophy, born gone out of the confluences of colonial experience and anticolonial agitation from beginning to end the Black Atlantic, had been the focus of debate for several decades. Its radicals lay in 1930s Paris, where black scholars from the French colonies, African Americans, and others caught in oppressive political and cultural arrangements fostered a discourse on racial awareness to carry them into the era of decolonization.

As common of Negritude's primary advocates, Senghor, while a close examiner and then a young proxy in Paris, sought to re-ignite pride in African cultural subjectivity and to engineer a philosophy to which all blacks, in Africa and in every part its Diaspora, could look to revitalize their shared "soul" His writings forward Negritude and African aesthetics judiciously mixed scholarship in succession African histories, myths, religions, and languages with partly remembered and partly invented or re-established notions of authentic Africa. Senghor wrote of a "Negritude of the sources" by dint of which he referred to an assumed wager of precolonial conditions when Africans lived in harmony, in what he nostalgically labeled "the kingdom of childhood." As as it is he set about delineating the values, social institutions, epistemologies, and aesthetics of "traditional" Africa to which he believed a shared ame negre was inextricably linked. (3) This nostalgia was modifyed by a more instrumentalist approach that envisioned Negritude as a useful paradigm with which to achieve modernization agendas and contemporary political agendas. In fact he insisted that "we could not advance back to our former condition to be really ourselves, we had to incarnate Negro African culture in twentieth hundred years realities ... to enable our negritude to be, instead of a museum piece, the efficient instrument of liberation " (in Kesteloot 1991:1002-3)

The vigor and significance of these revelations and pronouncements, advanced from Senghor and colleagues such as Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Alioune Diop, and Etienne Lero have been somewhat mollifyed by the potency of later critiques of Negritude's essentialist claims. (4) Senghor's formulations of africanite, which drew heavily on the subject of European anthropological, evolutionist, and primitivist types to characterize racial and cultural authenticity, coupl with his insistence relating to the "emotive" and "rhythmic" qualities of this reclaimed "Africanness," l many to dismiss his philosophical writings as reductivist, misguided, and ultimately self-primitivizing. However, these first debates exhibit significant attempts to form a cohesive voice with which to counteract the travails of colonialism, and they gave birth to a rich written and visual history. (5)

Senghor's make anxiouss with African identity, with political, cultural, and economic freedom, and with modernity helped to create within post-Independence Senegal a kind of "art-culture system" (6) and with it, a novel aesthetic of africanite, that became known as the Ecole de Dakar. The novel president encouraged artists to craft a distinctive visual vocabulary by the and of which to share and celebrate a newfound mind of and belief in Africanness. This aesthetic was to be center onward recognizable pan-African motifs--masks, carved statues, and incised combs--ironically, all conventional signs of "l'art primitif," highly valued by way of European primitivist collectors (Fig. 1)