Victoria Walther

2.21.11
AD 390
Leuthold
Review of an exhibition

Ife Art: Nigeria’s newly discovered talent

Dynasty and Divinity: Ife Art in Ancient Nigeria, an exhibition at the Museum

of African Art in New York devotes itself to the art of Ife. Ife is the ancient city-state

of the Yoruba people of West Africa, in present-day southwestern Nigeria. Dynasty

and Divinity has been co-organized by the Fundació n Marcelino Botín and the

Museum, in collaboration with the Nigerian National Commission for Museums and

Monuments. It is on view through June 6, 2010, at the British Museum, London.

Following its presentation there, it will travel to the U.S., opening at The Museum of

Fine Arts, Houston, on September 19, 2010, and concluding its tour in November

2011 at the Museum for African Art, where it will be among the inaugural

exhibitions in the Museum’s new building, which opens in April of that year.

Dynasty and Divinity reveals the creative range of Ife art through a diversity

of objects that includes idealized portrait heads, miniatures, expressive caricatures

of old age, lively animals, and sculptures showing the regalia worn by Ife's kings and

queens. It paints a vivid culture of the ancient Yoruba city-state that was trading

across the Sahara with the Islamic Mediterranean world.1 Together, these illuminate

1
Jay Levenson, Circa 1492: Are In The Age of Exploration (National Gallery of Art,
1991), 65.
one of the world's greatest art centers and demonstrate the technological

sophistication of Ife artists, as well as the rich aesthetic language they developed in

order to convey ideas about their power. Viewers can gain knowledge of a culture

that left behind no written history.

The sculptures in the exhibition demonstrate the dignity and self-assurance

readily associated with the idea of dynasty and the violence and misfortune that

could befall human beings. Several superbly crafted copper alloy and terra-cotta

heads and figures, for example, are expressive representations of the notion of

authority. Startling representations of disease and deformity, rendered in stone and

terra cotta by creating diagonal lines down the face2, show the status one could hold

by scarification. These sculptures prove that African art was not a simplistic and

primitive, or naïve folk art but equivalent of medieval sculptures found today. This

exhibition highlights the highly detailed features by the use of spotlights and red

and orange tones, significant of Ife’s tribal colors.

Between 700 and 900 A.D., Ife began to develop as a major artistic center.

Important people were often depicted with large heads because the artists believed

that the Ase was held in the head, the Ase being the inner power and energy of a

person. Their rulers were also often depicted with their mouths covered so that the

power of their speech would not be too great. They did not idealize individual

people, but they tended rather to idealize the office of the king. A sense of authority

lies in the faces of the sculptures.

It baffled Western critics, who resorted to citing Egyptian or Greek influences

2
Douglas Fraser and Herbert M. Cole, African Art and Leadership (Madison, The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 262
to explain this gracefully naturalistic art form that was quite unlike any of the

examples so far discovered on the African continent. Subsequent finds at Ife

revealed some decidedly African features, such as the accentuation of the size of the

head in relation to the rest of the body, and demonstrated how far removed Ife

naturalism was from the classic European tradition. The people of Yoruba were

masters of their craft. When Europeans arrived in Yoruba, they did not believe that

the sculptures were African, for African art was abstract. It forced them to rethink

the Africa’s place in the history of the world

It seems every generation of Westerners has to “discover” the extraordinary

beauty and sophistication of African culture even though Europe and Africa have

been in contact, at the latest, since 15th century when the Portuguese sailed along

the West Coast of Africa. It is true though that since then much of the relations

between the two neighboring continents has been taken up with the Slave Trade

and the hateful racist colonialism. These two determining factors do not make for

honest appreciation of the arts of Africa. Thus in all areas of culture Africans have

been depicted as primitive and savage by Westerners who should have recognized

at first glance that the achievements of the African peoples compare very well with

those of others, including those of the Romans and the Greeks which are held in

highest esteem by Westerners.

Instead the label “primitive” has been attached to all things African –

language, religion, music, dance and art. Westerners have denied to Africans the

basic qualities that make us human: ability to express ourselves and reflect on our

environment. Thus, there is hardly a respectable museum in the Western world that
does not have many African artifacts, the best having been stolen in the colonial

days.

The art of Ife reflects the dynasties that ruled. They were highly

observational and rooted in real life of the lost civilization. It is extraordinary

because it brings together such a large number of masterpieces that have rarely or

never been exhibited outside Nigeria. Most of what we think of as “African art” is the

types of abstracts made from wood and influenced those like Picasso in the 20 th

century. To see these objects presented in a classical way, more like the sculptures

Greece and Rome could forever change the way you think about African art.
(left) Head with crown. Wunmonije Compound, Ife. 14th-early 15th century C.E. Copper alloy

(Right) Torso of a king. Wunmonije Compound, Ife. Early-mid-16th century C.E. Copper alloy.
© National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.
Photo courtesy Museum for African Art/Fundación Botín. . © National Commission for
Museums and Monuments, Nigeria. Photo courtesy Museum for African Art/Fundación Botín.
(Photos: Karin L. Willis)