MOR FAYE (1947-1984)

 The night before his death in Dakar in November 1984, Mor Faye had been drawing with total immediacy on cheap floating fabric the portrait of a mysterious beauty. This is the same fabric with which Muslims wrap corpses in Senegal before burial. As if he were expecting or wishing the event, he drew on the cotton sheet his essential tools: a brush and palette. This last work was found under the pillow upon which he enjoyed his last sleep. He was thirty seven- years old. In 1990 I was entrusted by the estate of Mor Faye with the assignment to set up a retrospective exhibition. Many artists, among them Elhadj Sy, Saidu Barry, Issa Samb of the Laboratoire Agit-Art, Ibou Diouf, devoted their time to helping with the concept, selection and installation of the exhibition. A highlight of the exhibition was the display of a stunning series from 1982 about Apartheid, long before it became the international concern that mobilized many great artists. The Mor Faye first retrospectiv

African art (but not African artists) was at the inception of modern art, and has again become part of the critical nexus of art currents of the twentieth century. Even as Africa seems to be relegated to the margins of global politics and economics, its two-pronged relevance to the wider cultural world is, ironically, more central than ever. Beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, traditional African art provided a seminal inspiration for Modern Western art; as the century closes, contemporary African art has reemerged as another possible source of inspiration and new ideas. African artists today propose new ways of incorporating the inherited lessons of twen- tieth-century Western art. Like European artists at the beginning of the century who, without subscribing to the beliefs it embodied, seized on African art for the formal ideas it contained, contemporary African artists fluently incorporate whatever they see as useful into their work, and they