Unusual Affinities

While travelling to Britain recently for work, I took the opportunity to visit a number of exhibitions, including Nigerian Modernism (Figure 1), which opened in October 2025 at Tate Modern in London.

Nigerian art and culture have been prominent in recent years in Britain and other European countries. One reason for this is that a "reckoning" has begun to take place with the history of colonial conquest and expropriation that characterizes British relations with Europe. The most egregious example is the collection of 15- and 16-century bronze sculptures that were looted from the Kingdom of Benin by British forces in 1897 as a "punishment" for their challenge to British supremacy. Due to the original circumstances of their acquisition, the Benin bronzes (Figure 2) have remained a global symbol of the despoliation of the culture of the Global South by European imperialism. (1) Central Europe does not stand entirely apart from this process; Benin bronzes can be found in museums in Warsaw, Szczecin and Prague.

Yet even though the Benin bronzes are important, artistically, and as symbols of the impact of European colonialism, the attention to them has arguably been disproportionate and they have overshadowed the diverse artistic output of Nigeria. The exhibition Nigerian Modernism, is an important step in countering this tendency, for it foregrounds the place of Nigeria as a major site for the history of modern art.

The exhibition, which is accompanied with an impressive catalogue, focuses on the period from the late 1940s and the decade or so prior to independence in 1960, and finishes in the 1990s. (2) These are not rigid historical boundaries, though, and the exhibition displays some earlier works, such as a pair of wooden panels (Figure 3) from before the First World War by Olowe of Ise (1875–1938). The exhibition foregrounds the work of some key figures, such as Benedict Enwonwu (1917–1994), Uzo Egonu (1931–1996) and Twins Seven Seven (1944–2011) who shaped what is now a canon of modern Nigerian art, but it goes beyond the mere uncritical celebration of individual artists, to map out the development of an infrastructure of art schools and galleries. This includes a decentered presentation; while Lagos, the capital city at the time (it has been Abuja since 1991), was a focus of artistic activity, other centres were equally significant. The northwestern city of Zaria, for example, gave its name to the Zaria Art Society, one of the most innovative artist groups of the 1960s. The New Sacred Art Movement of the late 1950s was founded in Osogbo, a city in the southwest of Nigeria, with, as one of its collaborators, the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger. 

A number of threads can be seen running through this exhibition. One is the recurrent concern amongst Nigerian artists to execute works that celebrated their cultural heritage, one which, under British colonial rule, had been either suppressed or marginalized. Akinola Lasekan's Yoruba Dance (1963) (Figure 4) or various paintings from the 1960s by Ben Enwonwu of dancing figures (Figure 5) depict aspects of traditional culture and ritual. This cultural recovery also involved a turn to mythic figures.

Uche Okeke's Primeval Beast (1961) (Figure 6) and The Woman with Four Breasts (1960s) (Figure 7) by Asiru Olatunde exemplify this strand in modern Nigerian art. They also indicate an additional preoccupation: the search for an artistic language that would be adequate to the heritage of the many cultures that make up the new state, as well as one that would convey a sense of modern Nigerian identity. Some of these works reveal the impact of European modernism, echoing the rhetoric of primitivism and art brut, but others offer a distinctive voice that cannot be reduced to a sum of different artistic influences from elsewhere.

The works of Nike Davies-Okundaye, including Osun, Goddess of the River (1987) (Figure 8), or Sàngódáre Gbádégesin Àjàlá (Figure 9) or Uzo Egonu (Figure 10), mobilise a syncretic idiom that is unmistakably marked by the encounter with European modernism. But they also draw on West African and Nigerian artistic dialects, without being reducible to visual clichés of "Africanness."

The exhibition can hardly be deemed to be offering a "history" of Nigerian modernism, for while it is possible to infer certain innovations and concerns specific to individual decades, it does not offer a historical narrative. Nevertheless, Nigerian Modernism offers a synoptic view of the diversity of artistic practices that were prevalent during the period in question.

Given the history of deep colonial and post-colonial relations between Nigeria and Britain (Kemi Badenoch, leader of the British Conservative party at the time of speaking, is a Yoruba  of Nigerian parents), there is a clear logic to staging such an exhibition in London. Yet even though Nigerians and Nigerian culture are a familiar presence in Britain (many notable contemporary writers and artists in Britain are of Nigerian descent) the exhibition is a revelation, presenting an artworld and a body of work that will be unknown to most western gallery-visitors.


Nigeria in Prague: Affinities and Interpretations

Given where this essay is published, a pertinent question to ask, perhaps, is how audiences in the Czech Republic might engage with the modern art of a country with which they have minimal contact and certainly no extended social, cultural or political connections. On the one hand, it should be pointed out that there was no shortage of engagement with Africa on the part of Czech artists; the exhibition Enchanted by Africa, staged in Brno in 2019, demonstrates that this was the case throughout the twentieth century, from Josef Čapek to Jiří Anderle. (3)  In the postwar era it was fuelled by the popularity of individuals such as Jiří Hanzelka and Miroslav Zykmund, who famously wrote about and filmed their expedition across Africa in the late 1940s in a Tatra 87 car. (4) However, much of that interest was directed at clichéd primitivizing images of tribal Africa. Nigerian modernism may thus, at first sight, have only a tangential pertinence for Czech audiences. But if we reflect on the exhibition a little, it becomes possible to envisaged ways in which Czech modernism and that of Nigeria can be compared in a productive fashion.

Points of comparison and affinities can be found less in stylistic borrowings or exchanges between the two than in the way that both emerged as a consequence of a similar context, namely, the achievement of political independence and the challenges and opportunities it presented. A useful way to think about this is to approach their place in the wider historiography of modernism. In 2008 the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski wrote a now much-cited essay, "On the Spatial Turn," that analysed and critiqued the fact that in histories of modernism, the modern art of central and eastern Europe had always been relegated to the margins. (5) Major innovative artists and architects from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine, he complained, meet with barely a flicker of recognition in North America and western Europe. He later came to recognize that this was a problem that central and eastern Europe shared with countries across the globe. Czech and Nigerian modernism thus find themselves in a curiously comparable situation, comprising a rich body of artistic work that has struggled to gain the international recognition it deserves. 

One of the main reasons for this marginalization is undoubtedly prejudice and basic lack of curiosity in the galleries, museums and universities of Western Europe and North America, but there are other deeper reasons. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that art historians in Central and Eastern Europe have unintentionally contributed to their own marginalization by relying on stylistic categories and periodical divisions that only confirm the dominant role of cities such as Paris, New York and London, as providing the norms and framework by which the history of modernism is understood. (6) Historians of African art face a similar challenge: how does one write about the subject without relying on concepts that were originally coined to describe the history of art in Europe and North America?

One of the most ambitious attempts to answer this question has been the work of Rowland Abiodun, who has written extensively about Yoruba art, using aesthetic and other cultural terms from the Yoruba language in place of the commonplace vocabulary of English or other European languages. (7) The focus of Abiodun, however, has been pre-modern art, and hence there remains no comparable attempt to formulate a schema for narrating the history of Yoruba, or even Nigerian, modernism. Yet the exhibition Nigerian Modernism indicates some of the paths that might be taken, and here, again, it is possible to see a number of conditions and strategies that recall the Czech situation.

When Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918, it had an immeasurably more developed artistic infrastructure than post-independence Nigeria, with academies of art, galleries, museums and dealerships that had already been in place for nearly a century. Indeed, the very idea of an artworld apparatus was a colonial import. Despite such profound differences, however, certain preoccupations were shared. The project of developing a "national style" in order to bolster ideas of a new "Czechoslovak" identity would have seemed familiar to Nigerians half a century later. The Czechoslovak "national style" was an attempt to construct an architectural and artistic language that could be deemed "modern," yet that also preserved the distinctive traits of vernacular and folk culture. Looking at the paintings and sculptures on display in Nigerian Modernism, it is not difficult to see a similar aspiration being expressed. Artists such as the ceramicist Ladi Kwali (Figure 11) likewise shared with their Czech and Slovak counterparts an interest in revitalizing folklore and traditional crafts. Nigerian artists also tried to create a new iconography for local mythologies and religious legends. Is this very different from the revival of interest, amongst modern Czech and Slovak artists, in historical and legendary figures such as Jan Hus, Jan Žižka and Juraj Jánošík?

It may seem more than a little unorthodox to compare Czech and Slovak modernism with that of Nigeria and, certainly, it should be stressed that the Nigerian Modernism exhibition is to be visited for its own merits. At the same time, as ever more emphasis is given to the need to consider European art – including Czech art – in its global context, so the parallels that can be drawn highlight the possibilities for such a project. This involves not merely seeking direct mutual influences, of which there are sometimes vanishingly few, but rather, identification of common structural conditions and situational logics that help us view global modernisms in new contexts.

References

1. See, for example, Hicks, D. (2020). The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London.

2. Bonsu, O. (Ed.). (2025). Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence. London.

3. Půtová, B. (2019). Oklouzeni Afrikou. Brno. See, too, Winter, T. (2013). Palmy na Vltavě: Primitivismus, mimoevropské kultury a české výtvarné umění 1850–1950. Prague.

4. Hanzelka, J., & Zikmund, M. (1952). Afrika snů a skutečnosti. Prague.

5. Piotrowski, P. (2008). On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History. Umění, 56, pp. 378–383.

6. Rampley, M. (2021). Networks, Horizons, Centres and Hierarchies: The Challenges of Writing on Modernism in Central Europe: Method, Value and the Pragmatics of Scholarship. Umění, 69(2), pp. 145–162.

7. Abiodun, R. (1994). The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts. Washington.; Abiodun, R. (2014). Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art. Cambridge.