‘Léopold Sédar Senghor: Art and Poetry in the 20th Century’ closes on Sunday 6 September 2026 at the Musée d’Art moderne — Collections nationales Pierre et Denise Lévy in Troyes, France. The temporary hanging opened on 23 May and occupies the museum’s cabinet des arts graphiques, the low-lit room that is rehung twice a year with drawings, watercolours, prints and photographs from the fragile collections.
At its centre are the ‘Élégies majeures’, the long poems Senghor gathered in 1975 for illustrated art editions. He entrusted the plates to Alfred Manessier, Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages, Zao Wou-Ki, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Étienne Hajdu, who answered the verse with abstract etchings and lithographs. Alongside them is ‘Chants d’ombre’, Senghor’s 1945 debut, for which André Masson made a sand drawing for the 1976 slipcase.
The museum states that these works reached its collections through a donation, and that this is their first showing in the new graphic-arts cabinet. They were seen at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1978 and at the musée du Quai Branly in 2023.
Senghor (1906–2001) co-founded the Négritude movement in 1930s Paris with Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas, and was elected the first president of independent Senegal on 5 September 1960.
The museum is at 14 place Saint-Pierre and opens daily except Mondays, 10am to 6pm. Five days remain.
