Murid Methodology: Moustapha Dimé’s Figurative Sculptures

In 1986 sculptor Moustapha Dimé returned to Dakar after a year-long religious retreat in the Murid holy city of Touba, Senegal. He had abstained from carving for an entire year, the only such hiatus in his incredibly productive career. He announced his return to the art world that December in a joint exhibition with friend and painter Abdoulaye Ndoye (Senegal, b. 1951) at the National Gallery of Senegal. Entitled Rupture: Peinture Sculpture, the exhibition featured twenty-six sculptures by Dimé, a few of which had been completed prior to his religious sojourn, but most achieved upon his return. The accompanying brochure depicts three of them: le Deuil, la Souffrance, and le Penseur, all in wood and all depicting the human form in a lightly abstracted fashion (Figs. 1a–d). Le Deuil is a group of smoothly carved cylindrical figures clustered together with their heads bowed, while le Penseur and la Souffrance are each a single contorted figure with deeply carved grooves striating their surfaces. In fact, all of Dimé’s sculptural contributions to Rupture were figurative. None was as sexualized as his later objects would be, and none fully employed Dimé’s now-famous style of récupération—the art of re-forming objects from found materials. And yet, Rupture set the artist in motion toward both of these ends, and the exhibition marked a critical turning point in the artist’s career.

Despite the fact that the Qur’an does not explicitly prohibit making figural objects, in Senegal, where 98% of the population identifies as Sufi Muslim (primarily of the Tijani and Murid brotherhoods), figuration is routinely questioned as to its appropriateness in art. Yet here was Dimé in 1986, newly refreshed and rededicated to Islam, carving bodies, and lots of them.

Bearing titles such as Personage, les Jumeaux, le Couple, and la Dame, the theme of Dimé’s sculptures in Rupture was decidedly figurative (Dimé and Ndoye 1986). Even when the titles seemed abstract, such as le Deuil or la Souffrance, the objects were figures. For an artist who had just returned from a sequestration in the heart of the Murid world, the fact that the human body emerged with such decisiveness in his work seems, if not problematic, at least ahistorical and certainly radical. Furthermore, reconciling the overtly sexualized figures of some of Dimé’s later récupération works, such as le Gardien (1995), with his professed faith appears to require a forceful separation of the artist’s spiritual and artistic values (Fig. 2).

I am convinced that Dimé’s transformation from carving virgin wood to récupération was motivated by his year in Touba and thus inspired by his rededication to Murid spiritual and social values. Here I offer suggestions as to how Murid methodology appears in Dimé’s works after 1986, and I explain how the artist’s faith can be reconciled with the omnipresent human bodies that remained his favorite subject matter. The Murid philosophy is the most challenging aspect of Dimé’s late works to comprehend and yet the most profound analysis I can offer of his signature sculptural style.

The rupture that Dimé and Ndoye envisioned in their 1986 exhibition was not with Islam, however. Rather, it was a direct break with art history and academic art training. Both Dimé and Ndoye had experienced the impossible situation of being treated like “neo-primitives,” expected to work in nineteenth-century “traditional” African art styles while embracing European art methods during their Fine Art schooling in Dakar and Brussels respectively (Kart 2007, 2016).¹ For artists working and training at the École National des Beaux-Arts du Sénégal (ENBA) before and during Dimé’s tenure in 1977–1979, Négritude had been the prescribed methodology, and it often meant compromise: mixing European modernism with African historical culture, however broadly defined. As a result, many artists were concerned that there was no room for a totally modern Senegalese art or form of visual expression that did not involve codependence on European art and culture (Grabski 2006). Rupture was an attempt, therefore, to create a new...