African modernists have been unjustly overlooked — until now

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When Ayo Adeyinka, founder and director of London-based Tafeta gallery, visited the Venice Biennale last year, he was thrilled. Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition Foreigners Everywhere promised to “question the boundaries and definitions of modernism”. “I thought there would be a bit of a look-in for the global south,” Adeyinka says. “I counted between the Giardini and the Arsenale at least seven 20th-century African artists we have shown in the past.” For all seven — including the pioneering Nigerian sculptor and painter Ben Enwonwu; Uzo Egonu, a painter and printmaker who moved to Britain from Nigeria in 1945; and the seminal teacher, painter, sculptor and illustrator Uche Okeke — it was the first time their work had ever featured at the Biennale.

African modernism’s overdue recognition may have also reached the art market. At the Tefaf fair in Maastricht, Tafeta’s main presentation (in the company of the gallery’s contemporary stars such as Yinka Shonibare and Nelson Makamo) is comprised of 20th-century African artists. Tefaf has always shown classical African art, alongside the Dutch old masters, Asian antiquities and European fine and decorative arts for which the fair is famous. But those artists who initiated the conversation between Africa’s past and present, and between art movements prevalent in Europe and those indigenous to the African continent, in the context of nation-building and independence movements, have largely been missing. Adeyinka’s presentation seeks to rectify that.

He is showing mostly Nigerian artists, each of whom reflects very different encounters between Igbo, Hausa or Yoruba traditions and European modernist aesthetics, from Okeke, leader of the so-called Zaria rebels, who resisted the colonial art education of the 1950s, to the boldly expressive artist, bandleader and dancer Twins Seven Seven. There will also be prints by the Nigerian master Bruce Onobrakpeya — another Zaria rebel — and work by the Austrian-born artist (and Yoruban priestess) Susanne Wenger, whose hand-painted textile compositions, inspired by Yoruba cosmology, filled a room within the Arsenale last year. Adeyinka hopes to draw European collectors to the field. “There is a lot of demand for 20th-century African art from an African audience — in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and parts of north Africa,” Adeyinka says. “Collecting on the [African] continent never abandoned this market. We are just trying to make it more mainstream.” 

There is a lot of demand for 20th-century African art from an African audience — in Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and parts of north Africa

Adeyinka acknowledges he is one small commercial spearhead riding on a global movement of growing scholarly and institutional acknowledgment. On March 19 the Centre Pompidou in Paris will open Paris Noir: Artistic Movements and Anticolonial Struggles, 1950-2000. October sees London’s Tate Modern opening Nigerian Modernism, celebrating those artists “working before and after the decade of national independence from British colonial rule in 1960”.

Meanwhile, the auction market for these African artists of the modern era (hard to date or define for each different African country) is booming. Strauss & Co, which has long observed huge interest among Black South African collectors for African contemporary art, is now noting a focus “more and more on the generation or two before the contemporary artists”, says the auction house’s senior art specialist Alastair Meredith. Interest is particularly strong in artists such as Gerard Sokoto — whose brooding self-portrait in mustard yellow light (1947) will feature in the Pompidou show. Helene Love-Allotey of Bonhams’ African department in London notes that internationally “the strength is in South African and Nigerian modernist artists”, with Ladi Kwali, the Nigerian potter and ceramic artist, a particular favourite.  

Not everyone of course is thrilled by this burgeoning market. “We are not interested in marketing East African artists for sale,” says Muhunyo Maina, a senior researcher at the Eastern African Museum of Art in Nairobi, who is steering a project, The Short Century, to document pioneers of the 20th century in the region. He notes that the first major retrospective in Nairobi of work from the 1960s and 1970s by Louis Mwaniki, in 2013, saw the exhibition bought wholesale and removed from the country. 

Adeyinka is aware that public art institutions in Africa cannot compete with the growing buying power of African and, increasingly, international collectors. But he believes the artists he shows deserve greater exposure: “It is important to us. Art history is skewed to a western perspective and the timelines are off as well. Speaking for Nigeria, paper and canvas is a 20th-century idea, whereas paper came into Europe in the 12th century. By contrast, performance art, which is considered contemporary, is basically modified masquerade culture from ancient Africa.” It is only by showing these works widely that false chronologies and hierarchies of value will be adjusted.

It is not that these artists have not been acknowledged before. In 1956, Ben Enwonwu was commissioned by Queen Elizabeth II to create her statue. A second cast of his famous work Anyanwu (1954-5) was handed to the United Nations as a gift by the Nigerian government in 1966. But the different wars and upheavals of many countries on the continent during the 1980s and 1990s, and the lack of support for arts education, exhibition making and scholarship have scrubbed their achievements from the record.

Adeyinka is not the only gallerist choosing Tefaf as a platform for renewed focus. New York’s Aicon has historically specialised in artists from South Asia, but has begun showing the work of African and Middle Eastern modern artists. It will be bringing three works by the Martinique-born Serge Hélénon (born in 1934), who has lived and worked mostly in France and West Africa. Hélénon has developed a personal style, which he calls “une figuration Autre”: a form of abstraction in which detritus is mixed with paint and glue to create textured surfaces. The art of Hélénon, included in the Pompidou’s show, gallery director Harry Hutchison suggests, “is deeply rooted in postcolonial thought and diasporic identity, engaging with modernism while asserting a uniquely Caribbean and African diasporic perspective”. He adds, more generally, this “is a rich overlooked section of the market so there is plenty of room to grow. After the institutions show works and collect themselves the market will really come alive.”  

March 15-20, tefaf.com

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