Transnational Sources: Drawings and Annotations in Iba N’diaye’s High Museum Sketchbook

An additional reason why N’diaye’s sketchbook matters is that the continuity between his drawing from discernible sources is especially noticeable in his 1986 painting Juan de Pareja Menaced by Dogs (After Velázquez) (fig. 17). In this painting, N’diaye engages in a heated dialogue with Diego Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja (1606–1670) of 1650 (fig. 18), introducing threatening dogs on the right side of the composition with an enslaved Black man’s portrait. N’diaye highlights the perilous life the man might have lived in seventeenth-century Rome. His rendition discards Velázquez’s detailed lace collar, replacing it with a single brushstroke of white paint. The edges of Juan de Pareja’s hair blend into the background, introducing an indeterminacy about where the figure ends and the background begins. The canvas shows an energetic red underpainting. The warm red accentuates the black and white in the man’s eyes, echoing the dogs’ eyes in an atmosphere of unrelenting looking, likely undesirable to the represented man. Enwezor characterizes these eyes as “orbs of light that stand for eyes.”⁴4Enwezor and Kaiser, 8. In this painting, as one might observe in most of his drawings, N’diaye has selected one feature from Velázquez’s work to emphasize: the eyes. When he visited museums, N’diaye was learning from art history, but he was also making thoughtful selections of the qualities he wanted to study.

Similar techniques of selection are observable in N’diaye’s paintings of jazz musicians, although some represented figures and musical instruments are not readily apparent. In Trio of 1999 (fig. 19), which N’diaye made during the time he was compiling the High Museum sketchbook, the singer’s figure is readily perceptible. Head tilted to the side, her wide smile and downcast eyes express a deeply felt joy, suffused in the dark orange hue connecting this ecstatic face to the saxophone or trombone next to her head. N’diaye depicts the woman with shoulders sensually bared, arms adorned with white bangles that echo the stripes in her strapless white top. N’diaye paints layers of lines on both sides of the singer and sets her against a dark, shallow background, leaving the viewer to guess at the other figures making up the trio of performers.

N’diaye also makes conceptual links between the arts. In Hommage à Bessie Smith (Homage to Bessie Smith) of 1987 (fig. 20), N’diaye links the improvisation of jazz with his painted layers of lines and fields of color. At least eight figures populate the shallow, blue-gray background, their faces bearing suggested features in what Underwood describes as “gestural brushstrokes,” inviting the viewer’s eyes to fill in the missing lines.⁵5Underwood, “Iba N’Diaye,” 243. Three brass instrument players in dark suits share the foreground space with a wide-open-mouthed singer dressed in red, presumably Bessie Smith (1894–1937), the renowned jazz singer born in Chattanooga, Tennessee. N’diaye must have experienced pulsating covers of her music in Harlem and Paris jazz clubs, for the painting he makes in her honor possesses a layered complexity that gives visual voice to the lead singer in the bright red garment and the only open mouth among the figures represented. N’diaye experienced jazz music unmediated by the museum institution and the language of museum labels. So, although his drawings of jazz musicians in the High Museum sketchbook bear no inscriptions, they nonetheless capture another dimension of his movement among museums and social spaces. The interviews he gave during his lifetime further guide our understanding of the importance of travel and drawing for his art practice.

Iba N’diaye’s Biography

N’diaye was born in 1928 in Saint-Louis, a port city on the Atlantic coast of Senegal. As a teenager, he made comic strips and painted film posters for the city’s popular Cinema Vox to advertise screenings of American, French, and Senegalese films.⁶6Underwood, “Parisian Echoes,” 160. Beginning in 1948, he studied art and architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and Paris before joining the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Within a ten-year period, N’diaye had worked in the ateliers of the architect Georges-Henri Pingusson (1894–1978), the painter Yves Brayer (1907–1990), and the sculptor Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967). Zadkine’s formative years as an artist coincided with the burgeoning ethnographic and art market interest in African sculpture in Europe, inspiring works such as Venus (1920–1924) in the Tate collection.⁷7Strong, 26–27. Notably, Zadkine studied museum objects at the Louvre and encouraged N’diaye to visit France’s large collections of art from its colonies displayed in Paris museums, such as the Musée de l’Homme. So began N’diaye’s frequent visits to museums that would continue throughout his career.

N’diaye returned to Senegal in 1958 and set up a studio in Dakar during the lead-up to the country’s gaining independence from France. The newly elected president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, invited N’diaye to direct the Section Arts Plastiques, or the fine arts department, at the newly founded École des Arts du Sénégal in Dakar in 1960. Scholars have located N’diaye’s art in opposition to the Négritude movement, a literary and philosophical undertaking started by a few Black students from the French colonies who met in Paris in the 1930s.⁸8Underwood, “Parisian Echoes,” 160. While in Paris, these students found themselves isolated and treated as inferior despite their French citizenship. Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana, and Senghor responded by conceiving a philosophy to contest French domination and revive African cultural heritage so that Black people around the world might regain pride in themselves and their histories. However, during the euphoric 1960s, when many countries in Africa attained independence, N’diaye did not follow the Négritute ideas of reclaiming African art or his colleague Papa Ibra Tall in rejecting some aspects of his French education to retrieve Africa’s pre-colonial heritage.⁹9For more detailed discussions of the differences in approach between Iba N’diaye and Papa Ibra Tall at the École des Arts du Sénégal, see Joshua Cohen’s The “Black Art” Renaissance and Elizabeth Harney’s “The Densities of Modernism.” Instead, N’diaye had “a healthy skepticism about the advocacy of a uniquely African aesthetic,” as Ima Ebong asserts, and he continued to study, draw, and paint using techniques he had acquired in French art academies and praising the accomplishments of artists anywhere in the world.¹⁰10Ebong, 204. In 1987, N’diaye reflected, “Africa is an immense continent whose peoples and cultures I am far from knowing.… As for the formal relationship which may exist between my art and the visual arts of the African continent, I didn’t research them in a systematic manner. I studied African sculpture just as I did Roman and Gothic and European sculpture: by drawing it when I saw it in the museums.”¹¹11Iba N’diaye, in Vogel, ed., Perspectives, 163. N’diaye’s statement suggests that the artist relied upon multiple sources from different cultures by directly observing art displayed in museums. However, because few countries in Africa possess Roman or Gothic art, his statement indicates a complex geography encompassing multiple locations within and beyond the continent.

While in Dakar, N’diaye appears to have modeled his department on his own education, emphasizing art history and drawing.¹²12Grabski, 39. Notably, he urged his students to familiarize themselves with art from cultures around the world. Reflecting on his teaching in a 2002 interview with Franz-W. Kaiser, N’diaye said, “While I was teaching, I introduced an art history course using slides, so that the students could become familiar with artists from all over the world—including those who were profoundly influenced by African art—and their techniques and artistic careers. In my opinion, this was an indispensable step in educating the eye.”¹³13Enwezor and Kaiser, 55. Alongside sustained looking, N’diaye encouraged his students to draw from reproductions of European and African art “in educating the eye.” In a photograph of him instructing a student at the École des Arts du Sénégal, N’diaye points at the student’s drawing from a plaster reproduction of the Hellenistic Greek statue of Venus de Milo sitting on a shelf beside a nineteenth- or twentieth-century wooden Kpeliye’e mask, possibly made by peoples classified as Senufo in northern Côte d’Ivoire.¹⁴14Cohen, 180. In this instance, N’diaye expected his student to train by drawing from both European and African sculptural traditions.

Other artists and scholars have discussed the problems and merits associated with the belief that drawing educates the eye. Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001), an art historian of the twentieth century, describes in his 1960 book Art and Illusion a historicized stylistic change that distinguishes between the way one sees and how one represents what one sees. He warns that “it is dangerous to confuse the way a figure is drawn with the way it is seen.”¹⁵15Gombrich, 74. Deanna Petherbridge, an artist and writer specializing in drawing, explicates in her 2008 essay “Nailing the Liminal: The Difficulties of Defining Drawing” that “the correlation between the act of drawing and training the eye is a significant aspect of drawing which has dominated much subsequent art school teaching, in the West and globally, and which remains one of the few notions about drawing generally regarded today as ‘irrefutable.’”¹⁶16Petherbridge, 31. Although Petherbridge outlines this position, she also highlights the prevalence of “deliberately deskilled” drawing among twenty-first-century students. N’diaye believed, taught, and practiced the art of drawing from a range of sources to train the eye. To demonstrate the importance he attached to drawing, his April 1962 exhibition at the École des Arts showed twelve paintings and ten drawings of the human figure, including a drawing simply titled Anna (1962).¹⁷17Exhibition catalogue in file 3FI -1537 at the Archives du Sénégal in Dakar.

In 1967, N’diaye and his wife permanently relocated to France. In subsequent years, N’diaye participated in the First Salon of Senegalese artists at the Musée Dynamique de Dakar (1973), held a solo show at the Chiwara Gallery in Atlanta (1980), and exhibited another at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1981) curated by Lowery Stokes-Sims.

Provisional Conclusions

Many questions remain unanswered regarding the sources and locations of N’diaye’s High Museum sketchbook. In 2013, N’diaye’s estate donated 154 works to his country of birth, Senegal. My advisor, Dr. Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, and I traveled to Senegal and France to locate comparative examples of his sketchbooks. We also aimed to visit the places N’diaye had lived, worked, and studied to try and trace his lived experiences and understand the conditions that shaped him as a person and an artist. The structure of Cinema Vox in Saint-Louis still stands; however, with a dilapidated roof and interior, the building no longer functions as a cinema hall. Nonetheless, its location along the waterfront suggests a leisurely atmosphere and a rich cultural life during its active time. Florence Alexis curated N’diaye’s retrospective, titled The Work of Modernity, as part of the 2008 Dak’Art Biennale. The biennale institution remains vibrant, and its archives will furnish scholars with research resources. Concerted efforts of Collection Jom in Dakar ensure that works by Senegal’s eminent artists return to the country and are available for research purposes. Unfortunately, N’diaye’s house in Paris was demolished; however, the Dupont Café, where he made the drawing on the back of a receipt dated 2006 in the High Museum sketchbook, still stands on the bustling corner across the road from the Convention Metro stop. Back in the United States, I visited the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., to examine the wooden sculpture (fig. 21) by an unrecorded Kongo artist in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, attributed as a source for N’diaye’s Maternity drawing. The woman in the sculpture is not suckling a child; rather, the child places its right hand on the outside of the mother’s breast. If this sculpture served as N’diaye’s source, it demonstrates the artist innovating a close and tender familial relationship. In this instance, what N’diaye saw might not have translated directly into what he drew. In these pages, I hope to have demonstrated that examining an artist’s drawings and annotations, such as those in N’diaye’s High Museum sketchbook, provides information about the artist’s materials, movements, and techniques that might otherwise remain obscure if one looks at finished works alone.