The Love Of His African Art

Nigeria Mon 28-06-2010

The Love Of His African Art
Book Review by David Kaiza|AfricanColours.com

Nigeria Story

Book: Contemporary Art in Nigeria & Ghana
Text: Ester Adeyemi
Photos: Michele Kippeli
Publisher: Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag

When he was a boy, Fred Spinnler was asked to make a presentation before class. While other boys chose subjects like aviation, he brought along a pair of wooden figures for his topic, “Wood Curving of West Africa”. This was at the end of the Second World War, a time when “African art” was not as well-known among the general western public as it is today, and in Switzerland, which was not a colonial power, the subject would have been a curiosity.

As he says, his interest in Africa was awakened at a very early age, when he was a boy living in Basel who wanted books about the continent for his birthday.

As circumstances would conspire, he was to end up working for many years during his adult life as a pharmaceutical industry executive in Africa. He was right in the middle of it. His interest in the continent’s art was given vent and over a period of ten years, he collected some 150 pieces of art chiefly exhibited in Nigeria – not all of it by Nigerian artists.

It is a considerable collection, and given the quality of the work, also a very precious one. This book, Contemporary Art in Nigeria & Ghana, presents the works of some 40 artists, an extensive range that gives a fairly good introduction to the contemporary art produced in that part of the continent over the last forty years.

Bruce Onobrakpeya is, for many people, the most influential Nigerian artist, if not one of the best known African artists. Born in 1932 in what is now the Delta State, he is principally a graphic artist who has worked with traditional ideas synthesizing various heritages from around his country into his work.

You open the book and instinctively start looking out for his name. Perhaps for two reasons, the first to do with the fact that he is probably Spinnler’s favourite artist because he mentions his name first in the forward.

Secondly he is the grand-old man of Nigerian art, whose seriousness cannot go unnoticed each time you look at his print and “plastographic” works.

But more on Onobrakpeya later.

For various reasons, this is a successful collection. There is a thread of commonality running through the works, which one imagines reflects the taste of the collector. Spinnler has an eye for faultless technical execution. His artists are fine colourists.

They are also very diligent – you only have to look at the works of Nike Davies-Okundaye, some of which at the first glance do not look as if they are formed of beads because the work is that intricate – to see this.

At 300 pages and measuring 11 by 10 inches and 1.5 inches thick, it is a substantial and satisfying book covering the history of art in Nigeria. We read about the entry of western ideas on art into the country, about the career of Kenneth C. Murray, a British art teacher who, in contrast to so many other colonial instructors, did not attempt to drive a wedge between his African students and their heritage.

It is with dismay that we learn that Nigeria, despite its vast oil wealth, puts little money into the arts. This last point says something about the energy and enterprise of the artists themselves. And also about men like Spinner whose patronage has kept palette, brush and artists together for some time now.

As it is a focus on the collection of one man, this book is in effect an invitation by Spinnler into his private museum so that we are standing by his walls as he tells us the history of his interest in the subject as well as what he feels about his collection.

Ester Adeyemi, who provided the companion text to the art, describes as a “proletariat” the artist named Duke Asidere, an unimportant detail which one considers wryly contrasting the word “proletariat” with the name “Duke”.

Given his name, you might expect the adjective “patrician” or the like. But that Asidere needed to point out his “common man’s” affinity perhaps says something about the instrumentalisation of art in Africa. One must mean something to the community, serve it in one way or the other.

The subjects of these works, like a lot of the art from the continent, are social – community scenes, beliefs, myths and communality; topics like “Togetherness”, “The Mother”.

The artist whose work is presented on the preceding pages is Samuel Amurawaiye Ajobiewe. When you leaf forward to Asidere, you are struck by the contrast between the two men:

Hopeful Gaze, Oil on canvas, 140 x 140 cm, 2002.

Ajobiewe is the kind of artist who makes the word “important” come to mind. His portrait of a woman, titled Hopeful Gaze is done in a – for want of a better word – “classical” style, as in old European.

This is an unfair comparison to make and is the sort that brings up all sorts of arguments, but you immediately think of Rembrandt for the earthy palette Ajobiewe employs, and for the use of light and the effort he makes at bringing out the personality of his subject.

The word “important” tends to be allotted to artists who slog away seeing life “as it is”; the old grindstone of realism; keeping at it, resisting the temptation to fly off into the next interpretive dimension.

At any rate, that Ajobiewe keeps it consistent and even manages to wrench something significant is a hard-won achievement. His Rams for Sallah (Be yourself) is painted in a striking light. It might be morning light, except the shadows are too sharp.

It cannot possibly be evening light because the fur on the he-goats catches the glare from a very bright light source. It cannot possibly be studio light. One concludes that this light is created for effect, which here, alienates, putting the subjects at an emotional distance. It is the lowered heads of the goats that gives a hint of what they are gathered for.

In contrast, Duke Asidere is more overtly “contemporary” – if taking that to be synonymous with “abstract”. Asidere speaks the language of contemporary art anyway, crazy colours, things going here and there.

Painted at a time when Asidere was travelling through northern Nigeria, today depicts a deluge of yellows in the lower ¾ of the canvas with a green dub at the top. The artist is quoted saying of it that “On the way to the North you see clusters of trees. They start to decrease, until they stand out alone. It is the issue of solitude, quietness and pride.”

Slightly romantic and compelling, today is a lovely evocation. Perhaps because it succeeds more than the other works of his shown here, it made me recall playing truant and when you react like that to an artist’s work, you know he has captured something that rings true.

Nike Davies-Okundaye’s apparently mundane work with its mundane title, Black Jesus, with the oft-depicted crucifixion of Christ I passed over to see something else. The surface seemed like a combination of pointillism and wash.

Life's Circle

Life’s Circle, Glass Beads On Board, 38 x 31 cm, 2002.

The ochre sheds forced my eyes to linger a while but the topic was something you have always seen somewhere. On the next page, Life’s Circle was tremendous for its overt bead-work. The night before I had been looking at a piece of work in Nairobi by Yoga, who did meticulous bead-work and I lingered a bit contemplating this technique.

The bead arrangement on Life’s Circle is delicious to look at, a rounded, wholesome creation which makes one think of the arduous hours the artist put into it. Davies-Okundaye is said to be an influential textile artist who has trained more than 2000 batik artists.

Looking at the two different works of hers shown in the book, I could not easily reconcile Life’s Circle with Black Jesus as work coming from the same hand, and looking for connection, decided to give the first a second look.

“Phew”, the breath just came out as I held the page closer to my eyes. Reading the caption on art pieces tends to rob you of the magical play of appearance and reality and I missed the small print. I only read the caption at the second glance. It is not a painting.

The bead-work is of much greater intricacy that at a causal glance, it looks like a painting. If the topic is religion, then there was faith of another kind going on here. To create such an effect with a material like glass beads (not the easiest) is something that requires near-religious fervor with one’s work.

Split Personality II, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 115 x 90 cm, 2000.

Split personality by Uche Edochie is a straight away homage to the ancient African masks. This particular acrylic and mixed media on canvas instantly reminded me of an ancient mask I have spent years scouring the Internet trying to find.

Across the mask runs a line separating the face in two halves of contrasting, black and white features. It brings to mind ideas about life and death, light and darkness, appearance and reality. It is an ancient piece of African art that rebuts much of the insouciance directed at African history.

Edochie’s Split Personality is frontal with its subject and makes a postmodern statement on the old form. I was unsure about the paintwork, but it’s still a delight to see this homage, intended or otherwise.

His Journey of a lifetime is of a more effective brushwork, one in which subject, mood and execution come together. The forlorn air of it, the woman lonely and anxious, matches well the yellows and browns and colours between the two the artist deploys.

The inclusion of his commentary, that “The Journey captures a bride in her dressing room on the morning of her wedding…” rather spoils the intrigued questions that come by giving the subject away too soon.

Bruce Onobrakpeya is a famous man whose name comes to mind first whenever one thinks of Nigerian art. There’s a profundity in his work, a seriousness that has shored up his reputation as the grand old man of Nigerian art.

Ibiebe (Glyphs) and Images III are done in the style he’s best known for – details, so much of it squeezed into little spaces which congeal and command.

Nudes And Protest, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Plastograph, 95 x 68 cm,1994.

Nudes and protest is one piece of his work presented here that is overtly symbolic. But it does not fail to strike, nonetheless. The women protesting are here transformed into spiritual beings and the light in the work is made to radiate outwards from the women.

The greens, yellows and blacks give it an added enchantment, like the essence of folklore.

Onobrakpeya reminds one of the solemnity with which ancient African artists did their work. And one has only to think of the Ugwu Igbo and Yoruba bronze sculptures of a millennium ago. He works like man in no hurry to get at the subject.

The minute details show a hand paying attention to every corner of the canvas. Whether they are dashes, dots, curvatures, everything is given equal weight. You think of dignity, patience and seriousness. These are in turn passed on to his work which stands to be respected.

The title of the book says Nigerian & Ghana, and it’s inevitable that one looks out for contrasts. Well, there is not too much of it, although you notice a degree of intensity and experiment with the Ghanaians. There is as much contrast between the Nigerian artists as there is between the two countries’ products here.

There is a delicious quality to Ablade Glover’s art which keeps you coming back. Twig-brittle and sumptuous, his work lends legitimacy to a certain way of looking. Flame Tree is chaos as subject, as though the artist peered out through a window at a blossom.

The fulsome presentation of this subject takes the entire canvass, from corner to corner. Wiz Kudowor’s pictures are perhaps the most intriguing and delightful of the collection – at least in terms of innovation and sheer ability to cast a spell.

Bodyscape, acrylic on canvas,100 x 150 cm, 2003.

Bodyscape, Draped Figuration I and II, pulsate with human contours, attractive and then when you understand the subject, also a little discomfiting to look at human bodies brought so close, so contoured.

For an East African, the stability with which West Africans produce art is a reminder that this region lost connection to the deep pool of culture, because of the brand of colonialism our forefathers were subjected to, the kind that men like Onobrakpeya have access to.

You read a book like this, presenting African art in the hands of a non-African, not just to get an insight into what African art is, but also to see what others make of it. Given the relationship of the continent to the rest of the world, you as an African approach it with some level of anxiety.

What you get instead, is the kind of congregation that we in Africa have less and less of on the continent itself, where pictures are no sooner hang up than they are on the plane to Western capitals.

Yet before one bemoans this exodus, African art is so rarely bought on the continent that they would not be produced in the first if it was left in hands of our government policies as well as our stingy would-be patrons.

The Book can be purchased at any of the below outlets:

From the Publishing house directly (approx 50 $ for retailers)

Friedrich Reinhardt Verlag
Missionsstr. 36
CH 4012 Basel
Switzerland
e mail: verlag@reinhardt.ch
Fax: 0041 61 264 64 88
Tel: 0041 61 264 64 50

2. Signature Arts and Interior Design, 107 Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos
    M. + R. Akar Mail: Signatureartgallery@yahoo.com

3. Nike Art Gallery, 2 Etegushi Rd., Lekki, Lagos
    Nike Ogundaye Mail: art@nikeart.com

4. Quintessence Ltd. Gallery – Falamo Shopping Centre, Ikoyi, Lagos
    Chief (Mrs.) Aino Oni-Okpaku Mail: info@quintessence.com

5. Artists Alliance Gallery. Okuniye house, Accra
    Prof. A. Glover Mail: niiglo@gmail.com

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Your Comments

Grace Kokoeka Soyinka: Well done!I believe there are still more serious minded artists in both Nigeria and Ghana.Painters, Textile, Ceramists etc. More grease to your elbows

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