Category: Book extracts

‘Primitive Art’ by Leonhard Adam, 1963

As a sculptor, the African has little or nothing to learn from the European. Pl. 40a shows a modern sculpture in iroko wood by B. C. Enwonwu, then a twenty-year-old student of Onitsha and Government College, Umuahia (Nigeria), who was described as the most sophisticated of the five artists who were represented by wood carvings, terracottas, and water-colours at a Nigerian art exhibition, held at the Zwemmer Gallery in London, 1937. The artists had been trained ‘on methods adapted from those made familiar by Miss Richardson of the London County Council’. We see correct proportions according to European academic-naturalistic standards; in fact, this is a work which could have been done by a European. It is true that this sculpture represents an African woman but it cannot be claimed that this is an example of genuine African art. All the spontaneity and vigour of real African art, as we perceive it on Pls. 2 to 7 and elsewhere, is gone, it is obscured by acquired European academic convention. This can hardly be called ‘progress’, although it is interesting as a result of the impact of European vision and technique. Another modern Nigerian artist is Felix Idubor (born as the son of an Edo farmer at Benin City in 1928). Idubor, too, has learned his European lesson; but, in addition to academic statuettes illustrating native life, he has retained, or revived, in some of his works, the true African spirit, as could be seen from carvings like his mask representing a dream, which was on exhibition at the Imperial Institute in 1957.

‘Britain’s Purpose in Africa’ by Sir Kenneth Bradley, 1959