Nigerian Modernism

The​ cities most closely associated with modernism – Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich – are all European. A number of recent exhibitions have sought to broaden this geography. Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence, which opened at the V&A in March 2024, considered the incorporation of modernist ideals into the architecture of postcolonial South Asia and West Africa. Also in 2024, the Smithsonian put on Bruce Onobrakpeya: The Mask and the Cross, a retrospective of one of Nigeria’s most celebrated modernist painters, and the Barbican staged The Imaginary Institution of India: Art 1975-98, which included works by more than thirty Indian artists made between the Emergency and the Pokhran nuclear tests. A touring exhibition, African Modernism in America 1947-67, which examined the connections between African artists and American patrons during the Civil Rights era, travelled to various US galleries between 2022 and 2024.

Art historians and curators, including Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Kavita Singh and R. Siva Kumar, have spent decades insisting on the importance of the postcolonial modern, and more broadly on modernism’s vast reach and varied interpretations. Tate Modern reflected this trend in one of its earliest exhibitions, Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis, which considered the art of nine cities during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century (Mumbai 1992-2001, Rio de Janeiro 1955-69, Tokyo 1969-73 etc). Lagos was one of the cities; now, three decades later, Tate Modern revisits that original exploration with Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence (until 10 May).

‘Stateless People: An Artist with Beret’ (1981) by Uzo Egonu

‘Modernism’ in this context means the shift in visual art brought about by colonialism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, during which easel painting and European art history became widely disseminated, and as a reaction to colonial rule and its demise in 1960. Rather than the manifestos and self-conscious rejection of inherited tradition seen in European art, Nigerian modernism – insofar as one can generalise about such a heterogeneous period – saw artists attempting to make sense of the convulsions of the 20th century while variously embracing and subverting traditional forms and those inherited from Europe. The Tate curators set themselves a difficult task: Nigeria is a country of more than three hundred ethnicities and five hundred languages, with a clear divide between the largely Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south. Nigerians often describe their country as an unhappy marriage and refer to unification as the ‘mistake of 1914’. The Tate show tries to navigate this by choosing artists whose work speaks to a shared national identity.

The first room is reserved for art made during the colonial era. Aina Onabolu, born in 1882 in Ijebu Ode, near modern Lagos, learned to draw by copying illustrations of paintings in magazines and religious books. His Christian mission school didn’t teach art, but in his late thirties he travelled to Europe and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and at St John’s Wood art school in London. His portraits of the Lagos upper class – doctors, lawyers, engineers, chiefs and Indigenous rulers – as well as British colonial functionaries show a society keenly aware of the political value of this form of self-representation.

One of his most striking works is Sisi Nurse (Charlotte Sisi Eko Obasa) from 1922. Charlotte Obasa was born into a prominent Yoruba family and went on to found the first motorised transport service in Lagos, the Anfani bus service. Her ‘ladies’ club’ helped to pay for the first training centre for midwives in Nigeria. Onabolu depicts her seated, her gaze fixed on the viewer, and draws our attention to her fine lace collar and gold jewellery. Her dark skin blends into the mahogany background, so that what stands out are the green of her dress and the gleam of her bangles. Even in an understated portrait, the clothing is of central importance.

A similar sensibility animates the paintings of Akinola Lasekan. Born a generation after Onabolu, he is best known now for his portraits of royalty and images of cultural ritual drawn from Yoruba legend. In the 1940s, he established a studio in Lagos with the sculptor Justus Akeredolu, and together they organised exhibitions to raise funds for a trip to London to advance their careers. Both were determined to portray their Yoruba subjects as dignified and autonomous. In Lasekan’s portrait of Chief Akeredolu, the close attention to his agbada, the individually etched geometric patterns of the asoke, the gold chain at his neck and the numbered face of his wristwatch speak not only to Akeredolu’s status but to the mutual respect between the two men. Lasekan’s reputation wasn’t made through his portraits, however, but through his cartoons and illustrations for Nnamdi Azikiwe’s newspaper, the West African Pilot, which critiqued colonial culture and tried to galvanise nationalist sentiment in the lead-up to independence. In one image at the Tate, a man waving a bat inscribed ‘Positive Nationalism’ confronts three men stacked on top of one another (the ‘imperialist’, the ‘African rival’ and the ‘African Quisling’) holding bats that read ‘Victimisation’, ‘Persecution’ and ‘Sabotage’.

It is intriguing to encounter the works of Onabolu and Lasekan on opposing walls. Although both painters favoured a muted naturalism, Onabolu’s portraits are concerned with the social role of the sitter. Lasekan allowed his sitters greater subjectivity, while his cartoons are pointed and necessarily propagandist. In the decade separating his paintings from his cartoons, we see an intensification of national consciousness. An equivalent process was taking place in print: before the launch of the West African Pilot, publications such as the Daily Times used a formal register, imitating British newspapers. The Pilot broke new ground by encouraging its journalists to use colloquial, everyday language.

The show’s largest room is devoted to Ben Enwonwu, perhaps Nigeria’s most famous modernist artist. Unlike Lasekan or Onabolu, he directly engaged with 20th-century European art movements such as Vorticism and Cubism, while also integrating traditional motifs. Although there was no history of easel painting in Nigeria, many ethnic groups have rich decorative and sculptural traditions going back centuries. Enwonwu, who considered himself a sculptor first and foremost, was the son of a traditional Igbo sculptor and first learned to carve in his father’s studio using an adze. The works on view demonstrate his range: The Boxer portrays a crouched figure in a fighting stance, the head featureless and sleek; a colourful self-portrait in oils balances a stern expression against a jaunty tie and speckled brushwork. Most politically significant is Tutu (1974), a painting made in the aftermath of the civil war depicting a young Yoruba woman of Ife lineage. She looks over her shoulder towards the viewer, frowning slightly. Her royal blue robes denote her status, but more important is the fact that Enwonwu, an Igbo artist, chose to represent a Yoruba woman.

The Tate exhibition is alert to the many artistic movements and groups that flourished in Nigeria in the mid-20th century. The Zaria Art Society, which lasted from 1958 to 1962, produced a number of artists who went on to become household names, including Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Uche Okeke. In October 1960, Okeke wrote his ‘natural synthesis’ manifesto, calling on other students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria to reject the curriculums of their mostly British lecturers in favour of local visual traditions, such as Nok sculpture and Uli designs. But in consolidating these moments it becomes easy to overlook those artists outside them. Josephine Osayimwese Omigie studied at Zaria during the short life of the society and made extraordinarily complex and delicate works of textile and pottery, yet her name has largely been written out of Nigerian art history. Women artists have too often been overlooked or dismissed as artisans.

‘“Elemu” Yoruba Palm Wine Seller’ (1963) by Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu.

The exhibition curators have tried to counter this. One room is dedicated to Ladi Kwali, a potter whose image appears on the twenty naira note; her work could be regarded as craft, but here it is elevated to the status of art. Yet the broader issue persists: the excavation of Nigerian modernism has itself become hegemonic, producing a clear view of the mostly male superstars while obscuring women artists whose work was not taken seriously. It is salutary to see Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu’s paintings of Hausa community street scenes, which render the northern city of Kano with almost abstracted precision. And then there is Susanne Wenger, an Austrian artist who settled in Osogbo and made textile works informed by her engagement with Yoruba traditional religion. She is often overshadowed by her husband, Ulli Beier, who founded the Mbari Club, a cultural centre popular with writers including Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo. The famous names that orbit the Mbari Club are, again, mostly male.

The show closes with the artist Uzo Egonu, who spent most of his adult life in London. His distinctive paintings flatten and abstract the human figure in the manner of the Cubo-Futurists while drawing on the visual language of the Nsukka and Zaria artists, another form of ‘natural synthesis’. The titles of his works sometimes allude to his life in his adopted city – Piccadilly Circus; Cup of Coffee in Solitude – while his Stateless People series addresses the failure of the postcolonial state. Egonu began work on the series in the 1980s, a period he described as ‘painting in darkness’, referring to both his failing eyesight (which was later successfully restored) and his sense of hopelessness after the civil war. Each of the paintings shows a single figure engaged in a solitary artistic pursuit – an artist, a musician, a poet and so on. The forms and colours are still those of an optimistic Futurist, but are now turned to a quite different end. The height of Nigerian modernism’s ambitious outward expression, the exhibition seems to say, is also its most inward elegy.