Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X

CONTESTED VISION: BEN ENWONWU'S PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie

This essay focuses on the experiences of a colonial subject/artist in the ideological spaces of the British Colonial Empire, and in the art object as a site of contestation between different historical imperatives. In 1957, Elizabeth the Second, Queen of England and monarch of the British Empire, commissioned and sat for a portrait sculpture. The commission was carried out by Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu (1921–1994), Art Adviser to the Colonial Government in Nigeria and foremost Nigerian artist of his period. I use this commission to investigate how an African artist living and working in London during this period was perceived in the critical discourse of art in relation to colonial subjects, and its implications for a reading of that praxis in art historical narratives of the twentieth century.1

The idea for the commission was conceived by Enwonwu who proposed it to Alan Lennox-Boyd, Secretary of State for the Colonies, to commemorate the Queen's visit to Nigeria in January and February, 1956. The actual commission was arranged in consultation with protocol officials at Buckingham Palace. It was intended that the finished bronze statue would be installed in the Nigerian House of Representatives which, at this time, was being constituted in preparation for that country's imminent self rule, and later, independence in 1960.2 The fact that the commission was agreed upon at all is historical in terms of the relation between the British Empire and its colonial domains.

The Queen's commission enables several readings. It signifies shifts in the power relation between the British Empire and its Nigerian colony even though one may argue that the overdetermined independence of Nigeria, like those of many African nations, only removed the colonial yoke without freeing the country from continued imperialist economic control. Since it is a commission between the Queen's representatives and a soon-to-be-independent Nigerian government, the choice of a Nigerian artist to execute this commission may be read as a diplomatic consensus. Besides, it had the added advantage of confirming the British Government's view of the benefits of benevolent tutelage: Enwonwu was a product of the colonial and British educational systems. He was reasonably famous as a modern African artist. In any way one chooses to read this commission however, it is necessary that we further perceive it within the unfolding context of contested historical representations between the British Empire and its colonial "Others."

The Queen's commission thus foregrounds many of the issues inherent in the contentious interaction between the British Empire and its African colonies and marks a point of convergence in the discourse on art in both environments. The individual at this intersection, Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu, was born on July 14, 1921 in Onitsha, Nigeria.3 He was one of the pioneer students of Kenneth C. Murray, colonial officer in charge of art education in the Colonial civil service in Nigeria whose five students represented the beginning of formal art education in Nigeria at the post-primary school level. Of the five initial members of this group, only Ben Enwonwu went on to a substantial career as an artist.4

In July 1937, Kenneth C. Murray exhibited the works of his pioneer students at the Zwemmer Gallery in London and this marked Enwonwu's first representation as an artist in the British Empire. Though not yet a professional, this exhibition earned him favorable recognition in Nigeria and England, as well as encouraging remarks from Rt. Hon. Ormby Gore, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, who performed the opening ceremonies.5 In 1938, Enwonwu took part in the Glasgow Empire exhibition and in 1944, he was awarded a Scholarship to study art in the United Kingdom. The Nigerian Colonial Government, the British Council and the Shell Petroleum jointly sponsored this scholarship which came about through a chance meeting with L. N. Harford, then Director of Shell (West Africa) at a one man exhibition of Enwonwu's works in Lagos in 1943.

Enwonwu attended Goldsmith College, London in 1944, Ruskin College, Oxford from 1944 to 1946, and Slade School of Fine Arts of the University of London, from 1946 to 1948. In these institutions, he studied Drawing, Painting and Sculpture, Aesthetics, and History of Western Art and graduated with distinction in sculpture.6 In 1946, on the invitation of Sir Julian Huxley, Director-General of UNESCO, Enwonwu participated in the Musee d'Art Moderne's International Exhibition of Modern Art held in Paris. Enwonwu's participation in this exhibition indicates a high level of recognition of his art in the Western critical establishment. Such recognition can in part be attributed to the fact that he was perhaps one of the few African artists operating at that professional level in Britain during this period.

Enwonwu carried out postgraduate studies in ethnography and anthropology at the University of London and was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. He was also elected to the Royal Academy of Art, London as well as membership of the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA). In fact, it was at the 1957 annual exhibition of the Royal Society in the RBA galleries at Suffolk Street, London, that Enwonwu first presented his bronze portrait statue of Queen Elizabeth the Second. Enwonwu's career up to this point may be defined in terms of the constitution of a colonial subject whose political and cultural references orient him towards an ideological core (the locale of Empire) as an object of desire. His career as an artist recognizes this background. However, we can also recognize a profound resistance to this kind of circumscribed ordering in the Enwonwu's responses to this background, and in the images and subjects that are central to his self-representation as a Nigerian political and cultural subject.

The British press was rather understated in its announcement of the Queen's commission. The official announcement in the Times of London, (November 24, 1956: 8) simply stated that Her Majesty the Queen has agreed to sit for "a portrait in bronze" to be executed by the Nigerian sculptor Mr. Enwonwu in commemoration of the Queen's visit to Nigeria in January and February of 1956. In contrast to this sobriety, the West African Review carried its announcement of the Queen's commission in the following terms: "the news that Her Majesty the Queen is to give sittings to the Nigerian sculptor, Mr. Ben Enwonwu, sets the royal seal on the renown of West Africa's most famous artist."7 Other publications of the period either mention the commission in their different dispatches concerning the Queen's visit to Nigeria or chose to overlook it altogether. If one considers the constituencies served by these different publications mentioned above, then we can imagine that responses to Enwonwu's commission were already crystallizing along definite ideological lines. In this context, the status of the colonial subject, ideas about "the primitive African" and all other such favored tropes utilized by Empire in its representation of colonial others came into play in a very explicit manner.

Although the official announcement of the commission was made in November 1956 the Queen did not commence sitting for her portrait until later in the following year. Enwonwu began his assignment in March 1957. He was provided with a studio in Buckingham Palace commuting there each day for an hour's worth of clay modeling from sittings by the Queen. A picture of Enwonwu in this studio shows Enwonwu sitting with among sculptures executed in the European classical style. The unfinished head of the queen is shrouded in cloths, in evident justification of a hard day's work.8 As the sculpture progressed however, it became imperative to relocate the context of production. The Queen agreed to complete the sittings at an alternative location, Enwonwu's studio at Hampstead. The Queen visited on several occasions to enable him complete a portrait bust and a sketch model of the entire sculpture. He would eventually work from this sketch to the finished sculpture.

The news that the site of the commission had shifted from Buckingham Palace to Enwonwu's studio was published in several newspapers in throughout the British colonial empire. It elicited different reactions from the British press and also from the different sections of the British populace. Dugal Smith, writing in Drum magazine, notes that palace officials initially tried to keep a secret of the news of the Queen's twice-weekly commute to Enwonwu's studio for her portrait sittings. An illustration in this magazine shows Enwonwu welcoming the Queen on one of her visits to his studio.9 The attempt to keep a secret of the Queen's visits to Enwonwu's studio shows an awareness by palace officials of the not so subtle manner in which the Queen's imperial prerogative was being subverted by her deference to the dictates of Enwonwu's art. The Queen's visits to Enwonwu's studio became a source of pride in the Black communities in London. It was adopted as a stamp of recognition for modern African art, and it served as an inspiration to younger African artists both within and outside Britain.10

In Arts Review, an unidentified "special correspondent" perused the implications of the fact that the Queen granted audience to Enwonwu in his studio, and raised insinuations about the artist's ability to live up to the "exacting standards of British Royal portrait tradition." The Times of London, after its initial announcement, steered clear of the ensuing controversy; its next comment on this commission being an unsigned review of the 1957 RBA annual exhibition in which the finished sculpture was first displayed. Enwonwu's entries in this exhibition were singled out for praise.11

Enwonwu completed his clay model of the Queen's portrait in July 1957 and had it cast in bronze by Guilio Galicie, an Italian bronze caster resident in London, from a plaster cast prepared in the studio of Frederico Mancini.12 A bronze bust was cast for the Queen's private collection and two full-length statues were eventually produced. One copy, made of painted epoxy resin, was exhibited at the RBA galleries in London in 1957; the other was shipped to Nigeria and mounted at the entrance to the Nigerian House of Representatives in Lagos.13 Enwonwu received high praise for this work from his fellow Royal Academicians and a critic singled out his work as one of the highpoints of the 1957 RBA exhibitions.

Enwonwu's sculpture of the Queen received international attention after it was exhibited in 1957. The New York Times published a picture of Enwonwu working on the sculpture, notes that the work was criticized and quotes Daily Mail critic Pierre Jeannerat as follows: "Likeness is there all right, but I personally feel a distinct Africanization of the features." The idea that Enwonwu Africanized the features of course recalls the earlier insinuations that Enwonwu could not possibly produce a likeness of the Queen because he is an African. Another picture published in the same newspaper two days later shows the Queen viewing the epoxy resin cast of the statue at the RBA gallery exhibition. Facilitated by the AP wire network, local American newspapers utilized these images for their own similar reports on Enwonwu's work.14 Criticisms of Enwonwu's abilities as represented in this work thus reflect the ideological perception of colonial subjects as essentially different and inferior to their white male counterparts.

However, Jeannerat's contention that Enwonwu "Africanized" the features of the Queen in his sculpture can also be interrogated from a certain process of contextual configuration that was central to Enwonwu's practice as an artist caught up in the inter-cultural relationships of the colonial order. Enwonwu's perception of a different aesthetic orientation in indigenous Nigerian cultures, different from that he encountered in his studies at the Slade, enabled him reformulate concepts he learned in both environments. This reformulation was already achieved in his art by the middle of the 1950s. Thus at the time he was awarded the commission to sculpt the Queen, Enwonwu's art had achieved conceptual maturity and a distinct stylistic character. A 1949 issue of the Chicago based Ebony magazine referred to him as "Africa's Greatest Artist" and pointed to the favorable reception of his work by the Parisian critical establishment in the Musee d'Art Moderne exhibition in 1946.15 In this text, a perceptive critic notes that Enwonwu's art "wedded the powerful, practical art of ancient Africa with modern Western techniques." This synthesis is best exemplified in Enwonwu's sculptures although they are equally to be found in his paintings.

The bronze sculpture Anyanwu, considered by most critics as the Artist's most accomplished work (and certainly his most enigmatic), was completed and cast in 1957 just before Enwonwu began work on the Queen's portrait. In an interview with the artist in 1957, the West African Review published a picture of the artist in his studio that shows Enwonwu working on Anyanwu.16 This text notes Enwonwu's inclination towards indigenous African symbolism and also mentions the impending Queen's commission. In Anyanwu, Enwonwu reconciles two distinct stylistic directions that dominated his artistic output throughout his entire career. One direction emphasized formal academic realism (obviously a legacy of his formal training at the Slade), the other a more conceptual, semi-abstract style oriented towards themes and images of African social and cultural experiences. This marked contrast of styles evident in Enwonwu's art continues to generate controversy among art historians and commentators since Ulli Beier characterized it as an indication of stylistic ambivalence and attributed it to an identity crisis stemming from the modern African artist and intellectual's alienation from his "traditions."17

Ulli Beier's characterization of Enwonwu's stylistic divergences does not locate the artist at the site of his own creative project. It inscribes the artist as a passive entity swept along on a tide of incomprehensible energies and in effect denies him any agency in the intellectual formulation and conceptual inscription of his own work. Enwonwu's concepts and image in Anyanwu indicates a very conscious and successful attempt to reconfigure the received "wisdom" of his academic training. This enabled him to develop a bank of images capable of speaking to his political and intellectual location within the matrix of colonial power and the indigenous imperatives of his Nigerian cultural background. It indicates Enwonwu's experience of uniqueness as a pioneer modern artist in Africa in the twentieth century. There is a sense in which Enwonwu's Anyanwu fulfils the artist's intention. His images engage the colonial politics of this period without developing into pictorial jeremiads unconcerned with formal or conceptual excellence. In the tradition of symbolic communication, which forms his social and cultural heritage as an Igbo, Enwonwu's Anyanwu, among other notable works, is a masterpiece.18

Enwonwu applied the lessons obtained from Anyanwu to his sculpture of Queen Elizabeth II. In one of the critical responses to this work, a critic for the Times of London (9) notes that the bronze statue "conveys the requisite sense of regal dignity" required of commissions of this nature.19 He notes also that the "boldly semi – abstract treatment of the lower folds of the [Queen's] dress.directs attention upwards, as designed, to the more conventional realism of the head." Anyanwu exhibits the same semi-abstract treatment of the lower areas directing attention to the head although in its case, the lower part of the figure is more completely reconfigured and culminates in a sharp attenuation.

The issue at stake in Enwonwu's representation of the Queen lies more in its existence as a record of an inversion in the usual process whereby the active white gaze represents and inscribes the colonial subject. Couched in the rhetoric of rape, the essence of the colonial gaze is in its assumed `virile' potency, the power to conquer distant territories and subject its inhabitants to domination. The artist works also by utilizing this potent gaze which has the power to inscribe a subject (in this case, a model) and interestingly, this gaze is also couched in the language of domination. Speaking literally, Enwonwu's commission to sculpt the Queen confronted the colonial subject with the potent gaze of the monarch. In turn, it subjected the Queen to the potent gaze of the colonial subject as artist whose "conquest" of the Queen's visage became interpreted in the popular imagination as undue intimacy and filtered through colonial perceptions of the rapacious sexuality of the black male. In other words, it became constituted as rape.

The encounter between Queen and Artist, between the metropolitan center and its colonized "peripheries", reveals intimate relationships engendered in ideological spaces that were suddenly rendered unstable. Enwonwu's portrait of Queen Elizabeth II thus exists as a testament of contested visions, and the configuration of the act of seeing itself through ideologies of racial and cultural purity.

References

"Africa's leading Modern SCULPTOR (sic). Negro Digest (Chicago) 15 (2) December 1965, pp. 42 – 48.

"Nigerian Statue of Queen: Mr. Ben Enwonwu's work exhibited." Times (London), November 16, 1957, p. 10.

"Portrait of an Artist: The Queen to sit for Ben Enwonwu." West African Review. [London] no. 28 [352]: 1957.

Beier, Ulli. Art in Nigeria 1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Cole, Herbert and Chike Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.

Murray, K.C. "Painting in Nigeria." Nigeria Magazine, 14 [1938] pp. 112 - 113.

-------------. Nigeria Wood-Carvings, Terracottas and Water-Colours (sic.). London: Zwemmer Gallery, 1937.

Nzegwu, Nkiru. "Representational Axis: The Cultural Realignment of Ben Enwonwu," Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art, (Nkiru Nzegwu, ed.) (Binghamton: ISSA, 1999); 139-185.

------------. "The Africanized Queen: Metonymy in Transformative Art," African Studies Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 4, (1998), http://www.clas.ufl.edu/africa/asq/v1/v1_i4.htm

Ogbechie, Sylvester "Revolution and Evolution in Modern Nigerian Art: Myths and Realities," Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art, (Nkiru Nzegwu, ed.) (Binghamton: ISSA, 1999); 139-185.

-----------, " The Art of Ben Enwonwu," in Ben Enwonwu Retrospective, Exhibition Catalogue. Lagos: Ben Enwonwu 70th Birthday Anniversary Organizing Committee, 1991: 2-7.

Oloidi, Ola. "Constraints on the Growth and Development of Modern Nigerian Art in the Colonial Period." Nsukka Journal of the Humanities, 5/6 [June / December 1989]. 28 - 51.

Smith, Dugal. "Lonely Boy is becoming a fine sculptor." Drum [Johannesburg] April 1958, 35-37.

Stanley, Janet and Bernice Kelly [eds.] Nigerian Artists: Who's Who and Bibliography. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

© Copyright 2000 Africa Resource Center

Citation Format

Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. (2000). CONTESTED VISION: BEN ENWONWU'S PORTRAIT OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II. Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 1 , 2.