Greatness in the Grain (fwd)

[o. kasirim nwuke]

Subject: Greatness in the Grain

> Greatness in the Grain
> An African Genius Carved Himself a Niche in the Annals
> of Art
>
> By Paul Richard
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Sunday, March 15, 1998; Page G01
>
> Olowe of Ise is anonymous no longer.
>
> In long-ago black Africa among the royal wives, he
> carved images of power from the hardwoods of the forest
> in buildings thatched with grass. With the opening today
> of "Olowe of Ise: A Yoruba Sculptor to Kings" at the
> National Museum of African Art, he steps into the light.
>
> He could look at a tree trunk and see in it a well-armed
> man on horseback, and birds, and kneeling naked women in
> fabulous coiffures. He made tall carved posts like totem
> poles, lidded bowls and boxes, children's dolls and
> masks. At balancing voids and volumes he was just as
> good as Henry Moore and at elongating limbs he was as
> melodious as Modigliani. Often he carved watchers,
> crowds of vague ancestral faces. They're behind him in
> the shadows, indistinct, dissolving, his ancestors in
> art, those legions of lost carvers who down through the
> long centuries have adzed the woods of Africa. Now Olowe
> stands apart.
>
> He's in the crystal palace of accessible, retrievable,
> written-down art history.This important exhibition has
> given to Olowe, alone among that company, , an
> international retrospective, a volume for the library, a
> story and a name.
>
> What is now Nigeria was not yet a British colony when
> Olowe was born there. He was already in his twenties
> when he first saw a white man, or actually a pair of
> them, in Yorubaland, West Africa, a century ago.
>
> The scene -- Olowe depicted it in detail in a carved
> door of iroko wood -- was stereotypically colonial and
> is easily imagined. We've seen it in the movies, and in
> early black-and-white National Geographics, the winding
> lines of porters, the bare-breasted royal wives, the
> pith helmets, the guns. The year is 1897, the setting
> tribal Africa. Two colonial commissioners, Maj. W.R.
> Reeve-Tucker and Capt. W.G. Ambrose, are entering the
> palace. Two worlds are being joined. The appropriate
> sound effects are screeching birds and drums.
>
> Olowe must have been there. He must have seen the
> officers. One of them was wearing a cricket cap. Olowe
> must have seen the seated king, the hovering of the
> ancestors and the crisp colonial troops lined up at
> attention. Olowe, the carver, put all this in his art.
>
> That we know his name today, and something of his life,
> and so much about his art, is something of a miracle.
> The sculptures of Olowe were not meant to last forever.
> More than 30 are on view. Their style is unmistakable.
> No two are alike. Curator Roslyn Adele Walker has
> borrowed them from Oxford and Munich, from the Art
> Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
> and you could call this a theft of the patrimony, but
> some, when first seen by scholars in Africa, were lying
> around in courtyards, disused, in piles. Some have been
> eroded by driving rain and tunneled by insects. In
> equatorial Africa, even hardwood doesn't last.
>
> According to his descendants, there once was a
> photograph of Olowe of Ise. It used to hang in his
> house, but they don't know where it is.
>
> The monograph by Walker, the museum's new director, that
> accompanies the show includes detailed descriptions of
> all known Olowe carvings, many field photographs,
> exhibition histories, a lengthy bibliography, the whole
> scholarly apparatus.
>
> Olowe in some ways has been exceptionally lucky. One
> reason that his name and his clear artistic presence
> have managed to survive is that the monarchs who
> employed him, and Olowe himself, and the colonials who
> ruled them, all believed in kings.
>
> In 1924, an elaborately carved and decorated wooden
> palace door was mounted at the entrance to the timber
> exhibition in the Nigerian Pavilion of the British
> Empire Exhibition held in Wembley, London. The door was
> in England as a kingdom-to-kingdom loan from Ogoga of
> Ikere. We now know Olowe carved it, but no Europeans
> knew that then. The door's beauty was apparent to
> everyone who saw it. One magazine described it as "the
> finest piece of West African carving that has ever
> reached England." The British Museum's specialists, His
> Majesty's key experts in African material, entirely
> concurred.
>
> When the British Empire Exhibition closed in 1925, that
> august institution decided to acquire it. But you don't
> just whip out the old checkbook and buy the art of
> kings. The ensuing negotiations were intricate and
> delicate, the niceties of protocol carefully observed.
> Eventually a trade was made. The museum got its door.
> The Ogoga of Ikere, a being of such distinction that his
> face was veiled lest lesser men look into it, was
> presented in exchange a ceremonial object comparably
> regal -- a specially designed and specially inscribed
> and partially upholstered tall and two-crowned throne.
>
> For the next quarter of a century the door in the museum
> was seen by countless visitors, none of whom was able to
> identify its maker.
>
> It was not until 1950 that Philip A. Allison, a
> sharp-eyed forestry official on home leave from the
> colony, recognized its style and voiced Olowe's name.
>
> Allison may even have met him. In 1937, while visiting
> the palace of the Arinjale of Ise, he'd lost his
> favorite dog. Only later did he learn that the strong
> man who'd found the animal and returned it -- Allison
> would have identified him as a hunter -- was Olowe
> himself. But by the time he heard that story in August
> 1940, his informant told him that Olowe of Ise was "a
> year or two dead."
>
> Allison's identification sparked a little industry in
> African art scholarship. The British Museum's William
> Fagg traveled to Nigeria to see Olowe's works in situ.
> Some he found disused; others were still in place. Once
> you'd identified Olowe's hand, you couldn't mistake it.
> Fagg recognized his works in Ise and Ikere, in Ilesa and
> New Idanre, and photographed them all, and wrote
> articles about them, and spread the artist's fame.
>
> Other scholars followed -- the Englishman John Picton in
> 1964, the American John Pemberton III in 1988, and Roz
> Walker herself in 1995. The story of Olowe's life, what
> small part of it is known, is drawn from what they
> learned.
>
> The life he lived was courtly. Olowe, at first, was a
> kind of servant/slave.
>
> He was born, his descendants said, not in Ise but in
> Efon-Alaiye, where his mother was a captive who'd been
> seized in time of war. When returned to the lands of the
> Arinjale of Ise, Olowe, still a child, was given to the
> palace in service to that king.
>
> His post was elemoso -- royal messenger or page.
> Hundreds of such servants -- most of whom were slaves,
> hostages, captives or else their descendants -- worked
> within the palace. Olowe, like the others, had the right
> half of his head shaved to show his lowly rank.
>
> He was partially self-taught, or at any rate he wasn't
> descended from a family of carvers. Nobody remembered
> how he started to make sculpture, but his gifts were
> soon apparent. Other palace woodworkers carved their
> reliefs shallowly. Olowe, in contrast, cut his figures
> deeply, and put them into motion. The figures he
> depicted -- the pecking birds, the servants, the
> Englishmen in litters, the bearded kings on horseback --
> seemed to turn in space.
>
> The regal cultures of West Africa, at least those near
> the coast, have been permeable for centuries to images
> from elsewhere. Olowe's equestrian rulers, and the
> allegorical female figures who defended them, are in
> spirit not so different from those one sees on pedestals
> in European towns. His most complicated carvings --
> those intricate, non-structural veranda posts -- are
> statues that are columns like the caryatids of Greece.
> How he learned to cut them out of single trunks of
> timber is less easily explained.
>
> The old idea that African sculptors kept repeating the
> same forms is dented by this show. Olowe, the artist,
> innovated constantly, altering proportions and the scale
> of his figures and the look in their eyes. His
> sculptures were commissioned, their themes were set by
> patrons, but within their strict conventions the
> artist's hand was free.
>
> No documents from Africa attest to his importance. But
> we know he worked for many kings and placed his art in
> many palaces and doing so grew rich enough to buy the
> stretch of land on which his family still lives. The
> kingdoms of Yorubaland kept no written records. But
> poems in his memory, and praise songs in his honor, are
> still recalled and sung.
>
> This one was recited in 1988 by his last surviving wife:
>
> Olowe, my excellent husband
>
> Outstanding in war
>
> One with a mighty sword
>
> Outstanding among his peers
>
> One who carves the wood of the hard wood of the iroko
> tree as though it were as soft as a calabash
>
> He must have known his palace doors had been retained in
> London. The Ogoga who had sent them there told Olowe to
> replace them. And he must have known that he had pleased
> the Arinjale of Ise, who, when noble visitors came into
> his palace, summoned Olowe to portray them on the spot.
>
> In 1946, when the monarchs he had served gathered in
> Yorubaland, their conference sent a tribute of flowers
> to his grave.
>
> "My lord, I bow down to you," the praise song continues:
>
> Leader of all carvers
>
> There was a carved lion
>
> That was taken to England.
>
> With his hands he made it . . .
>
> Olowe, the master carver . . .
>
> One who achieves fame.
>
> In the art world of the West, where a Rembrandt is a
> Rembrandt whether good or bad, nothing is more valued
> than the precious name. Olowe of Ise has broken an old
> boundary. He's now positioned in art history as a
> distinctly African and distinctly individual artistic
> personality. His exhibition on the Mall has been
> instructively installed by Alan Knezevich. It closes
> Sept. 7.
>
> FIT FOR A KING
>
> "Olowe of Ise: A Yoruba Sculptor to Kings" opens today
> at the National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence
> Ave. SW. A family day celebrating Yoruba art and culture
> will be held there this afternoon from 12:30 to 4:30.
> The museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. On
> Thursdays between May 28 and Sept. 3 the museum will
> remain open until 8 p.m. Admission is free. The
> exhibition closes Sept. 7. Call 202-357-2700.
>
> © Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
>