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(More customer reviews)The life and work of the Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu (1917-1994) spanned the African colonial era, the ending of this, and the movement, often conflicting, to get in touch with original African roots and build an independent state. Thus Enwonwu's art can range from official-lke representations of the British Queen Elizabeth and an African jurist which would be found in government buildings to symbolic-like renderings of aspects of traditional, pre-colonial native and cultural characteristics reemerging in the period of postcolonial independence. Enwonwu has attracted international attention and stature for his works in the latter area. His distinctive achievement as an artist is rendering the traditional characteristics such as dance, masks, and wear with techniques of modern art. The modern techniques of expressionistic touches, graphic clarity, collage, formalism, and futurist effects with riotous color Enwonwu variously applies to his paintings and occasional sculptures revives--enlivens--the traditional characteristics in ways older artistic techniques could not. However, Enwonwu does not embrace the techniques or style of modernist art to the point where he can be seen as a modernist artist concerned primarily with stylistic experimentations or fascinations practically disregarding a subject.
This perspective or interpretation of Enwonwu immediately evident in his paintings is the one Ogbechie pursues in the book. The book is not a biography nor simply an introduction to this major African artist. An associate professor of art at the U. of California-Santa Barbara and founder and editor of a journal on African art, Ogbechie relates, "I investigate the search for a modernist idiom in twentieth-century African art seen through the international career of a premier African modernist." Going into the cultural, political, and aesthetic background of the artist, Ogbechie tracks his "pursuit of modernist aesthetics [and expounds on] his role in the development of a specific discourse of modernity is twentieth-century Nigerian art."
Enwonwu brought a new status to African art. He turned the focus from antique tribal art of interest for its ethnographic connection as much as its workmanship to the possibilities of contemporary African art. But few African visual artists followed in his footsteps. For the possibilities were closed off with the tribal and ethnic hostilities and oligarchical rulership throughout much of Africa after the optimism of the first years of the postcolonial era wore away. African writers have come to lasting international attention in this unstable environment threatening and dispiriting to many artists, but few visual artists have. Thus, Enwonwu is seen as an artist of international standing rooted in a particular moment of African history rather than the model and seminal visionary he might otherwise have been seen as had history gone differently.
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The history of world art has long neglected the work of modern African artists and their search for forms of modernist expression as either irrelevant to the discourse of modern art or as fundamentally subservient to the established narrative of Western European modernist practice. With this engaging new volume, Sylvester Ogbechie refutes this approach by examining the life and work of Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), a premier African modernist and pioneer whose career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of African art. In the decades between Enwonwu's birth and death, modernization produced new political structures and new forms of expression in African cultures, inspiring important developments in modern African art. Within this context, Ogbechie evaluates important issues such as the role of Anglo-Nigerian colonial culture in the development of modern Nigerian art, and Enwonwu's involvement with international discourses of modernism in Europe, Africa, and the United States over a period of five decades. The author also interrogates Enwonwu's use of the radical politics of Negritude ideology to define modern African art against canonical interpretations of Euro-modernism; and the artist's visual and critical contributions to Pan Africanism, Nigerian nationalism, and postcolonial interpretations of African modernity. First and foremost an intellectual biography of Ben Enwonwu as a modern African artist, rather than an exhaustive critical exploration of the discourse of modernism in African art history or in modern art in general, Ben Enwonwu situates the artist historically and interprets his work in ways that surpass traditional discourse around the canon of modern art.
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