Ben Enwonwu

1.

Beginnings

Enwonwu was born in Onitsha, Nigeria, in 1917. His father, Omenka Odigwe Emeka, was a reputed indigenous Igbo sculptor who carved staffs of office, stools, decorative doors and religious images. Despite his father's death when he was only four, Enwonwu very clearly inherited his father’s talent for sculpture and received all of his carving tools and equipment upon his passing in 1921.

 In 1934 he enrolled at the Government College of Ibadan, where he studied Fine Art under the supervision of the British expatriate Kenneth Murray: this made Enwonwu one of the first Nigerian artists to be trained in the European style and techniques. He soon became Murray’s assistant and was recognised as one of his most gifted students.

In 1944, he won a scholarship to study at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. After graduating with a first-class diploma in sculpture in 1947, he enrolled on a postgraduate course in anthropology at the University of London, with a focus on West African ethnography. The choice of subject was prompted by the racist incidents he experienced in the British capital, which triggered a desire to learn more about African history and race relations. This line of inquiry, paired with his European artistic training, is identifiable throughout his oeuvre.

In 1948, after completing his studies, Enwonwu returned to Nigeria, where he became an art teacher and art advisor for the government and undertook personal commissions.

3.

African Art and European Modernism: A Fusion

Enwonwu’s African heritage and European education granted him a combined cultural experience that allowed him to develop the signature style he would become known for: figurative painting and sculpture in wood and bronze that mixed Modernist traits with traditional African elements.

Enwonwu's African Modernism went hand in hand with his keen support of the Négritude movement, which strove to oppose colonialism and reclaim black identity. As he told the BBC, he was aware that, in the limited scope of Western art history, 'African Art' held associations of the traditional and archaic: “I will not accept an inferior position in the art world. Nor have my art called ‘African’ because I have not correctly and properly given expression to my reality”. In his article Problems of the African Artist Today, he expanded: “European artists like Picasso, Braque, and Vlaminck were influenced by African art. Everybody sees that and is not opposed to it. But when they see African artists who are influenced by their European training and technique, they expect that African to stick to their traditional forms.”

The reputed art historian and critic Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, who in 2008 published a monograph on the artist titled Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist, has described his art as: “[The opening up of] third space in art history whose nature and parameters are at variance with art history's exclusionary narratives of modernity and its inscription of the modern artist-subject as a white, Western European male.”