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Lot 16*
Papa Ibra Tall(Senegal 1935-2015)Motherhood
Amended
8 October 2025, 15:00 BST
London, New Bond StreetSold for £165,500 inc. premium
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Papa Ibra Tall (Senegal 1935-2015)
Motherhood
signed and dated 'Papa Ibra Tall/ 65' (lower left)
oil on canvas
100 x 81cm (39 3/8 x 31 7/8in).
signed and dated 'Papa Ibra Tall/ 65' (lower left)
oil on canvas
100 x 81cm (39 3/8 x 31 7/8in).
Footnotes
Provenance
A private collection.
A major figure in the Senegalese modernist art movement, Papa Ibra Tall is a widely celebrated painter who was significant in developing the modern Africa aesthetic. An educator, he co-founded the Dakar School in 1960 to further establish and cement the pan-African visual language which was grounded in the Negritude principles. These principles embodied solidarity, and enhancing of traditional and cultural identity in an effort to promote decolonisation.
Tall's aesthetic extended beyond the visual. As Jean Kennedy explained, he uses color in the way that a musician improvises with sound. (p100, Jean Kennedy). The present work is a great example of Tall's decorative explorations, convalescing movement through a static material. Surreal in his approach, the artist used references of waterfalls, clouds, deities, and the mystique. Technically masterful, Tall uses a black background to accentuate and sharpen the colour of the depictions in the foreground.
Born in Tivaouane in Senegal, Papa Ibra Tall was exposed to the epicentre of the West African Sufi Islamic order of the Tijaniyyah. Displaying an artistic prowess from a young age, Tall was invited to draw murals by prominent Tijani families on public walls. He was educated at the most prestigious colonial school in French West Africa, the École Normale Supérieure William Ponty before further education at the College Maurice Delafosse in Dakar and then the Lycée Van Vollenhoven in Dakar. However, it was in Dakar that he encountered limitations to his further education by racist colonial administrators prevented him from taking the baccalaureate exam. Through the artists drive, passion, and defiance he managed to find a way of taking the baccalaureate through the École Universelle in Paris, passing in 1954. By 1957, Tall had concluded that his destiny was in the Arts and studied Fine Art, Decorative Art, and pottery at various institutions. After a while in Paris, he returned to Senegal in 1960 to take up a teaching position in the Ecole des Arts du Senegal, an institution grounded in the ideals of Negritude. Tall would go onto found a sub section Afro-centric group Recherches Plastiques Nègres before then leading and directing a workshop dedicated to the creation of modern tapestries in Thies in 1966.
Motherhood presents us with the tropes that signify Papa Ibra Tall as a giant in the Senegalese modernist sphere. Synchronising the linear formulations that reveal a depiction of a woman and child, the depiction of a female being is given a divine element, adorned in flowing colours, elongated in form dominant and central to the scene. Her physical depiction is synthesised with the Negritude philosophy in championing women and matriarchs as the pillars of society. Her dynamic presence is further adorned by the depiction of the child who gazes up at her as she carries him on her back. Mystical yet political, the present work is an outstanding blend of Papa Ibra Talls philosophical and aesthetic approaches.
Bibliography
Jean Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers; Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992)
Joshua I. Cohen, African Modernism in America, (New York: American Federation of Arts, 2022), p. 182.
Saleroom notices
Please note this work has been requested as a loan for the forthcoming Autumn 2026 MoMA, NYC exhibition "Freedom and Futures: Emancipatory Modernism in Africa 1956-1982".