Mor Faye at the 45th Venice Biennale. Susan Vogel








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 do this however they like. Regarding the Western art tradition from a distance, and without necessarily agreeing with its underlying assumptions, they are free to handle its vocabulary in new ways. In their art the Africanized (and other) forms of European Modernism return to us, digested, altered, fresh. 
Arguably one of Africa's finest artists working in an international contemporary style, Mor Faye died in 1984, before African artists would be shown at the Venice Biennale. He would in any case have been an unlikely candidate, since, rejected by Senegal's official art supporting organizations, he had refused to participate in exhibitions during the final decade of his life. He was an art teacher and a student of world art though he lived almost his entire life in Senegal, struggling to survive. The mental institution in which he spent his last two years afforded him the materials and the freedom in which he created his most fully realized works. A superb colorist who relished the sensuous fluidity of paint, Mor Faye absorbed the vocabulary of a dozen modern European masters, and created work alternately idyllic, erotic, nightmarish, and whimsical, but always his own…

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