Bruce Onobrakpeya (Nigerian, Born 1932) Negritude (Unframed)
Provenance : [Timeline chronologique]
1960-10-22 | Exhibited Lagos, Nigerian Council for the Advancement of Art and Culture, Nigerian Art Exhibition, 1-22 October 1960
[Propriété non datée]
- A private collection
- Literature Paul Chike Dike and Pat Oyelola, eds., The Zaria Art Society (Lagos: National Gallery of Art, 1998), no. 397, p. 266 (illustrated)
- Painted in oil, Negritude (1960) is an important early example of Bruce Onobrakpeya's painting practice
- Created while the artist was a student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria, it was featured as a key work in the Nigerian Council for the Advancement of Art and Culture's Nigerian Art Exhibition in 1960
- The exhibition brought together work from diverse artists which were presented alongside examples of the cultural and craft traditions practiced across Nigeria to celebrate the country's newly asserted independence from colonial rule
- As the artist and historian David H
- Dale asserts, the exhibition 'opened the eyes of many foreign visitors to the vast array of varied art works [created in Nigeria]
- This was the beginning of Nigeria's Contemporary Art' (Dale, 1998: p. 266)
- Onobrakpeya's role in establishing this new Nigerian art was foregrounded in the presentation of the exhibition
- Working alongside Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, he created large-scale murals that decorated the outside of the arts and crafts pavilion
- Onobrakpeya's brightly coloured designs were a conspicuous presence in the exhibition space and illustrated the creative possibilities opened up by the innovative talents of the new generation of Nigerian artists that formed the Zaria Art Society
- Together, they rejected the centrality of Western artistic traditions in their art education and worked to establish a distinctly modern Nigerian aesthetic by fusing European themes, techniques, and mediums with those indigenous to Nigeria
- As Onobrakpeya explains, 'we re-examined our culture – past and present – and extracted what was relevant to us and then synthesized it with foreign concepts which we believed were useful to us' (Dike & Oyelola, 1998: p. 60)
- The present work depicts a semi-abstracted image of a crow
- The bird's feathers are articulated as a series of black teardrop forms that radiate away from the body
- Together with the explosive red rays of light emitted from the tailfeathers and body of the cockerel, the feathers imbue the work with a dynamic energy fitting to the postcolonial optimism of Nigeria's independence
- An important animal in the religion of Benin, the cockerel itself serves as a potent symbol
- The bird throws its head back as it crows to welcome the rising sun – a metaphor for the new dawn ushered in by the dramatic shifts in the political, social, and cultural life witnessed by Onobrakpeya
- Furthermore, as the symbol of one of Nigeria's foremost nationalistic political parties active in the 1950s and 1960s, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC), the cockerel stands as a political icon of West African independence (see Omojola, 2012: p. 253)
- The title of Onobrakpeya's painting situates the work within wider discourses relating to Negritude – a Pan-African movement which rejected European colonial domination and turned to indigenous African practices to assert a new, empowered notion of Black identity
- Although originating amongst a group of African and Caribbean students in Paris in the 1930s, ideas relating to Negritude were dispersed at the outbreak of the Second World War and informed artists working to construct a Nigerian artistic tradition following the country's independence in 1960: for instance, while Onobrakpeya experimented with abstraction to cast the cockerel as a metaphor for new beginnings, Ben Enwonwu embarked upon his iconic Negritude series which depicted sinuous female figures that embodi
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