Ben Enwonwu MBE

Ben Enwonwu was a major figure in modern African art, and one of the great artists of the twentieth century. He was the first African artist to sustain an active engagement with European contexts of modern art and was highly acclaimed globally during his lifetime. His exhibitions unfolded in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He directed his art towards the international struggle for African emancipation from colonization and also towards the struggle by Diaspora Africans for full rights in the various countries where black people were scattered as a consequence of slavery. Enwonwu's practice as an artist set a standard for the artist-as- professional in Africa and greatly contributed towards legitimizing fine arts as a career profession in Nigeria and other African colonies of Britain. Above all, his studies and successful practice in Britain broke barriers for Black British artists who cam after him.
Enwonwu successfully combined his training in indigenous Igbo sculpture (and anthropological studies of African art and culture) with a modernist sensibility to create a visual language for modern Nigerian art. This new language drew on Enwonwu's deep knowledge of masking traditions and Igbo sculpture practices as well as a sophisticated interpretation of British academic art school aesthetics to create a unique style of art. Within its rather large scope, Enwonwu engaged themes ranging from Christianity and Indigenous Igbo religion, to representation of immediate environmental realities in landscape and figural compositions, to the emergent ethnic identities of the new Nigerian nation before and after independence in 1960. His paintings are dense with spiritual allusions (the numinous form of the masquerade being a portal into the supernatural) while his sculptures are sensuous and quite organic.
Towards the end of his life, Enwonwu focused on representations of masquerades in painting and sculpture. Alternating between two principal Onitsha-lgbo masquerades Agbogho Mmo (maiden spirit) and Ogolo (the, male counterpart of the maiden spirit), he explored the limits of his formal and conceptual capabilities in works that achieve significant form. At the core of these works is a concept of organic growth and motion realized in elongated forms and multiple points of reference on a pictorial plane.
This core ideal proves very versatile in Enwonwu's work especially in the noted divergence of his styles of art: in one style, he adopts a mimetic focus while the other style uses more symbolic forms. Enwonwu's portrait of Queen Elizabeth II represents an apex of the mimetic style and the other style is evident in his late canvases of paintings such as the Aghogho Mmo and Africa Dances series. In the latter, the measured poise, the deliberate elegance, and panache of the dancers reference the characteristic aura and rapturous energy of an indigenous dance performance that narrates heroism, tragedy, comedy, intrigue, and love. Enwonwu utilizes expressive lines to create structural balance and formal harmony held together by a spectrum of analogous colors. Captured in the frenzied moments of their dance, these figures are fleshed out with broad strokes slashing diagonally through the canvas, which seem to radiate vibrant chords of energy.
Enwonwu saw art and cultural development as historical processes and he therefore encouraged modern Nigerian artists to tell their own stories as a safeguard against marginalization in the history of art. He was a prolific writer and art critic whose criticism was published and widely read in his lifetime. He particularly wrote about indigenous Igbo/African concepts of art and tried hard to enunciate their similarity and difference from European notions and definitions of art. Throughout his life and long career, he described himself as a sculptor to make a link between his contemporary practice and the millennia-old tradition of Igbo art, which he saw as his inheritance through his early engagements with his artist father. In his own practice as an artist, Enwonwu carved wood with his father's tool, an adz, which he kept with him and used as a primary tool for all his wood-sculpture. His facility with wood garnered him high praise, and he was regarded as one of the best living wood-sculptors of his generation.