Ben Enwonwu

A sculptor's son from Onitsha

Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu was born in Onitsha in 1917. His father was a carver, and he grew up around Igbo sculpture before training as an artist at school in Nigeria. In 1944 a scholarship took him to Britain, where he studied art — including at the Slade School of Fine Art in London — and anthropology.

He returned to Nigeria with a clear ambition: to make modern art that was neither a copy of European models nor a souvenir of "tradition". In 1948 he became art adviser to the colonial government of Nigeria, a post that made him the most visible artist in the country.

Anyanwu and the Queen

Two commissions in the 1950s fixed his reputation.

Anyanwu, an elongated bronze figure drawing on Igbo cosmology, was made in 1954–55 for the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos, which opened in 1957 as the country moved towards independence. Anyanwu is the Igbo word for the sun. It became a symbol of the new nation and still stands outside the museum. In 1966 the Nigerian government presented a cast of it to the United Nations in New York.

During her 1956 visit to Nigeria, Queen Elizabeth II commissioned a portrait sculpture from Enwonwu. The sittings began at Buckingham Palace in March 1957, and she sat for him twelve times in all; he completed the work in London and showed it at the Royal Society of British Artists in November 1957. He was also appointed MBE.

Tutu, the "African Mona Lisa"

In 1973–74, after the Nigerian civil war, Enwonwu painted three portraits of Adetutu Ademiluyi, a princess of the royal family of Ife. Because she was Yoruba and he was Igbo, the paintings were read as an image of reconciliation, and prints made them famous across Nigeria.

The originals disappeared from view for decades; accounts differ on whether the first was stolen shortly before his death in 1994, and one version is said to have been last shown in 1975 at the Italian embassy in Lagos. Prints made in the 1970s kept the image in circulation. The second version was rediscovered in a north London home in late 2017, when a family who had inherited it asked Bonhams' Giles Peppiatt to look at it, and it sold at Bonhams on 28 February 2018, at the house's first evening sale of contemporary African art, for £1,205,000 — four times its high estimate of £300,000. The novelist Ben Okri called it the most significant discovery in contemporary African art in more than fifty years.

More of the work

His previous auction record, £361,250 at Bonhams in May 2013, was for a set of seven wooden sculptures he made in 1960 on commission for the Daily Mirror newspaper. In 1977 he was artistic adviser to FESTAC '77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, in Lagos.

Where to see the work

Anyanwu stands outside the National Museum in Lagos, and the cast presented to the United Nations is at its headquarters in New York. Google Arts & Culture shows Anyanwu and a first live sketch of the Queen by Enwonwu, which makes it a good place to start from home.

Why he matters

Enwonwu made the case, decades before the art market caught up, that an African artist could be fully modern on his own terms. The artists of the Zaria Art Society argued with his generation's choices, but they were arguing on ground he had cleared. Later artists such as El Anatsui and Njideka Akunyili Crosby work in a world where his question — what is modern African art? — no longer needs defending.

If you are thinking of collecting work from this period, read our guide on how to buy African art: Enwonwu's success means the market has seen copies and misattributions. See our lists of Nigerian artists and Nigerian painters.