The development of modern art in post-independence Senegal was the result of two interdependent activities - - he Ecole des Arts du Sénégal, founded in 1960, the local Dakar-based art school, and the exhibition of these artworks within the framework of Négritude and national art. This article focuses on the Dakar art school, and especially the part of it, the Section de Recherches Plastiques Nègres, headed until his death in 1988 by Pierre Lods, from Congo Brazzaville. In Dakar, Lods gave artists the tools of modern art and left them to create without technical guidance. They were meant to externalize interiority, rather than to observe or be guided by Western art. The artists were not exposed to the visual work of contemporary and historical artists, although they almost certainly had contact with them through books and traveling exhibitions. Senegalese modernists focused on folklore, the fictive, and fantasy.
Modern Senegalese art was exhibited at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar in April 1966. The exhibition Art Sénégalais d'Aujourd-hui was first shown in Paris in 1974, then traveled to North and South America and Europe, returning to Dakar in the mid-1980s. The Senghor administration supported Senegalese arts, although today government support and the rhetoric of Négritude have faded. In the event, the Ecole de Dakar, with its emphasis on authorship, interior vision, and self-expression, resulted in a creative impasse for the following generation of Senegalese artists.
