Kingdom of Ife: British Museum (From The Oxford Times)

Kingdom of Ife: British Museum

10:06am Thursday 8th April 2010

• Print
• Email
• Share

Africa: the forgotten continent. How often have we heard that phrase? Nowadays, we readily accept the influence of Africa on Western art, from Picasso to Matisse, Brancusi to Henry Moore. But how less readily the craftsmanship, the degree of artistic development, that actually existed in parts of ancient Africa?

Times change. Interest in the continent’s past gathered pace through the late 18th and 19th centuries, the result of waves of exploration and eventual colonisation.

But while Africa became the arena for emergent studies of human evolution in late 19th and 20th centuries, the idea of much cultural achievement, away from Egypt and the Mediterranean littoral, lagged way behind.

Foreign attitudes to Africa’s past made it impossible for most to believe that fine works of art when they did appear could have been made by African hands.

The story of the sculptures from the legendary city of Ife (pronounced ee-feh) exemplifies this.

The British Museum’s new exhibition, the Kingdom of Ife: sculptures from West Africa, made in partnership with the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria, the Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander, and the Museum for African Art, New York, tells the story of Ife through some of the most refined and beautiful sculptures ever found in Africa. And that is no hyperbole.

It features almost 100 superb pieces of sculpture from Ife, the spiritual homeland of the Yoruba people, all made during the 300-year period, 1100-1400AD, when this powerful, wealthy city-state in rain-forested West Africa flourished as a result of extensive trade connections.

Most of the items on show have never been seen in the UK before; they are drawn almost entirely from Nigerian collections.

They show a refined and highly naturalistic sculptural tradition — the result of unidentified craftsmen working in stone, terracotta, brass and copper-alloy to create a style unlike any in Africa at the time. The Ife sculptures have been ‘discovered’ twice. Both times they caused quite a stir.

They first came to the attention of the Western art world in 1910 when German explorer Leo Frobenius, who hearing of the wealth of the fabled city of Ife, went in search.

One of his many finds was a famed brass of a god, the ‘Olokun head’ in the show.

Writing up his travels in his book, The Voice of Africa, he assumed initially that such magnificent works of art could not have been made by African artists.

He identified the head as the Greek god Poseidon, and declared he had found traces of the lost city of Atlantis.

This sensational find was followed 30 years later by another, as astonishing.

In 1938, builders unearthed a cache of 18 brass and copper sculptures near the royal palace in Ife. They were mostly cast brass heads, plus a torso of a king in full regalia.

The first head you see as you enter the exhibition is a copper head from this Wunmonije compound. Excited news coverage of the time (displayed), talks about “mysterious bronze heads”, “worthy to rank with finest works of Greece and Italy”.

The British Museum agrees. It points us to a drawing of a female head by Verrocchio, 1475, that will feature in their Italian Renaissance drawings exhibition this April.

A world map gives Ife more art historical context: the Lewis chessmen, 1150-75; Turkish icons, 14th century; the Aztecs later.

I would add the stone faces of Jayavarman VII (1181-1219) from the Bayon, Khmer empire, Cambodia, for the Ife sculptures share much of this god-king’s sublime expression, as well as a forest-dwelling origin.

I didn’t count how many heads there are on show, but there are lots, in cast metal and terracotta.

Typically they are life-sized, or almost, and many wear elaborate headdresses.

They are not portraits, they are too stylised for that, although each is individual. Many have vertical lines etched on their faces, even lips, perhaps suggesting facial scarification, or perhaps shadow lines from strings of beads that would have hung from the perforations at the hairline.

Other holes around the mouth may have attached a beard or some sort of veil: the regal mouth a source of power, even dangerous, thus covered.

Much is unknown about these objects. Who made them? What were they for?

Arguably, they were objects of devotion, placed in shrines. Whatever their purpose, they carry a message of serenity, dignity, patience, balance.

There are a few standing figures too.

One small brass shows an Ooni (king) of Ife, with elaborate regalia and a disproportionate head: seemingly, greatness of mind, kingly qualities, endorsed by greatness of head.

The heads steal the show, certainly. But there’s more than that to see.

A huge mudfish, for instance, with beady eyes, made in granite and iron, and crocodiles, and two nicely worked little terracotta chameleons, representing one version of the Ife creation myth: the lizards sent from Heaven to test the firmness of the newly-created Earth.

Also, monoliths from sacred groves, glass beads, terracotta fragments showing jewellery, gagged captives, even people disfigured by awful ailments.

Although most heads are young (old age not depicted much in African art), one small figure shows an open-mouthed, furrowed-browed old man with receding hair.

The British Museum does African art and culture, and us, a great service with this exhibition.

It is exceptional, in artwork and concept — there has never been an exhibition solely on art from Ife before. This is an Africa we won’t forget.

lThe Kingdom of Ife exhibition runs until June 6.

• Print
• Email
• Share