Maurice Poncelet "the Pink Market Of Bamako" Oil On Panel, Early 20th Century

This panel depicts a very lively and colorful African market scene. Built in the purest Sudanese style during the colonial era, the Pink Market was, before it burned down in 1993, Bamako's main tourist attraction. The traders resettled on the ruins of the market and it is currently being rebuilt in its original style. It is still the economic heart of the capital. It is said that what you cannot find there, cannot be sold in Mali. Mauric Poncelet (1897 - 1978) reveals, in his 1935 confidences to René Huyghe, a very personal journey that he divides into four periods, the constant of which, he says, remains "the effort towards a good technique in the service of a greater spirituality." The years 1913 and 1914 where he carelessly indulged in "free color notations without precise drawing and without method." In 1933, he participated in the Grand Prix de Peinture Jacques Darnetal awarded by votes of a jury of art critics at the Galerie Georges Bernheim in Paris. He won third place behind Raymond Legueult and Adrien Holy. Thus, the catalog of the Salon de Mai, organized in 1948 by the Independent Bordeaux Artists at the Museum of Fine Arts in Bordeaux and where one of the paintings he presented was a view of Port-Vendres, no longer places him in the School of Paris but in the Toulouse School.