Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu M.B.E

(Nigerian, 1917-1994)

Ife Men Dancing

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection, UK.

Ben Enwonwu created Ife Men Dancing in 1975 during his final year serving as a Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Ife. The first Nigerian to hold the post, he actively participated in discussions concerning the nature of postcolonial African culture following the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1960. Enwonwu championed the anticolonial ideologies associated with the Negritude movement, particularly the value of a Pan-African aesthetic advocated for by Léopold Sédar Senghor to formulate a black cultural identity rooted in indigenous traditions.

Enwonwu embraced the theme of dance to foreground traditional West-African culture in the emergent canon of postcolonial Nigerian art. His pursuit of the theme encompassed a range of dance forms including masquerade, traditional ceremonies, and modern dance. In the 1970s, contemporaneously to the creation of the present work, he produced a series of Negritude paintings illustrating stylised African women using lyrical lines and punchy colour palettes. The figures were intended, not as portraits, but archetypes that symbolised both the feminine force of the earth in Igbo worship and an image of Mother Africa aligned with Negritude iconography. The 1970s also saw Enwonwu return to his Africa Dances series begun in the 1940s while an art student in London. The series, largely executed between 1972 and 1975, took its name from the title of Geoffrey Gorer's 1935 book which recounts the author's journey through Western Africa with Féral Benga, a Senegalese dancer and sought-after model of the Harlem Renaissance.

Executed in the 1970s, Ife Man Dancing represents another body of work on the dance theme created contemporaneously to the Africa Dances series. During his tenure at the University of Ife, Enwonwu frequently took sketching trips to the rural suburbs of the city. He was particularly interested in capturing local people engaged in the activities of daily life. It was on one of these trips that he first met Adetutu Ademiluyi, the granddaughter of a previous Ooni (king) of Ife, who became the subject of three portraits – the finest of which set the artist's record at auction when offered by Bonhams in 2018. It is likely that the male dancers captured in the lyrical lines of the present work were also encountered during one of the artist's sketching trips.

Enwonwu depicts three figures in dynamic crouched poses. Each dancer raises a single arm which meet towards the upper centre of the watercolour, creating a broadly symmetrical composition that frames the central figure. The movement of the dance is captured through Enwonwu's kinetic mark-making. Overlapping lines articulate the limbs and billowing clothing of the performers, while a sweep of orange-brown pigment to the right of the composition echoes the curved lines established by the dancing bodies.

S. Ogbechie identifies the 1970s as a period of transformation in Enwonwu's practice. It was when the artist first began to 'perceive the essence of dance as a conceptual structure (as opposed to a material form)'. This essence was materialised 'by tracking the body in its motions through space, using fractal surfaces and many figures to convey the idea of vigorous movement which carried the eye in quick jumps to multiple points of focus' (S. Ogbechie, 2008: p. 190). In Ife Men Dancing, Enwonwu semi-abstracts the dancers' environment to focalise the gestural performance of their bodies. The stances of the three figures echo one another, referencing the unison of practiced movement associated with dance or perhaps even illustrating an experimentation with pictorial perspective. Appropriating a Cubist representational strategy, the repetition of form might be interpreted as multiple representations of a single body in motion. The present work consequently offers a conceptual and stylistic investigation of the dance theme at a pivotal moment in Enwonwu's practice.

Bibliography
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008).