{"id":724,"date":"2010-03-22T11:58:49","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T11:58:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/2010\/03\/surprised.html"},"modified":"2010-03-22T11:58:49","modified_gmt":"2010-03-22T11:58:49","slug":"surprised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2010\/03\/surprised.html","title":{"rendered":"Surprised"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/span>Among the several surprising exhibitions in London at the moment is the British Museum’s Kingdom of Ife: sculptures from West Africa.<\/i>   <\/span>Like many people, I had vaguely seen some of the sculptures – such as the “Ori Olokun” head, because it was used as the logo for an all-African sporting event in 1973, and had managed to impinge on my consciousness.  <\/span>But though I was aware of the Benin bronzes, “Ife” was not even a word I had come across before.<\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/span>Ife is the “spiritual heartland” says the BM
\npublicity, of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the Republic of Benin and the many
\ndescendents of the ancient Yoruba people living all over the world. Ife is
\ntherefore the birthplace of many of the highest achievements in art and culture
\nof the whole of Africa – especially sculpture, carved, modeled and cast – from
\nthe 12th<\/sup> through 15th<\/sup>  <\/span>centuries. Ife was then a thriving city-state in what is now
\nmodern Nigeria, with good communications and trade relations that made the area
\nprosper.<\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>Many
\nof the 100 objects in the show (in the Round Reading Room until 6th June) are
\nportrait sculptures; and this is probably explained by Yoruba religious
\npractices, in which important people – kings, queens, chiefs – were deified at
\ntheir death. This slightly begs the question, as it assumes that these works
\nare likenesses of individuals, which doesn’t somehow seem likely or all of them
\non first inspection.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span>For example, there’s a group of “almost
\nlife-size copper alloy heads which reveal an idealized, naturalistic
\nuniformity” even though each one of them “has notable individual
\ncharacteristics. Their similarities lead scholars to speculate that they “were
\nproduced over a relatively short time, maybe in a single workshop.” To me these
\nseem idealized only in the  <\/span>sense
\nthat, say, Modigliani’s faces are idealized – elongated and stylised, perhaps,
\nbut still recognizably belonging to different human beings. The most celebrated
\nfind of Ife objects was in 1910 by the German Leo Frobenius. Like many of his
\ncontemporaries, he simply could not bring himself to believe that the pieces he
\ncollected were African, so conjectured that he’d stumbled upon the treasures of
\nthe lost continent of Atlantis – and moreover, that the Yoruba deity Olokun was
\nidentical to Poseidon. <\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>One
\nof the reasons for Frobenius’s skepticism was technological: all the
\ncopper-alloy sculptures use lost-wax casting, and it was hard for the explorer
\n(and even those who followed him) to accept that Africans had such
\nsophisticated technology so early – though it is now known that there were
\nseveral iron-working and copper-mining sites in West Africa in the first
\nmillennium BC, and cire perdu<\/i> casting
\nwas used in Ibo-Ukwu (says the splendid catalogue) in the 9th<\/sup> and 10th<\/sup>
\ncenturies AD. These ravishing objects have mostly been loaned by Nigerian
\nmuseums, are scheduled to tour North America through 2012, and shouldn’t be
\nmissed.<\/span><\/p>\n

         <\/span>Another
\nextraordinarily beautiful show is at the National Portrait Gallery until the 20th<\/sup>
\nJune – The Indian Portrait 1560-1860<\/i>.
\nThe NPG claims it’s the first ever exhibition devoted to Indian portraits, and
\nalso that they have found a “lost” lifesize portrait of the Emperor Jahangir
\n(1617) that “is the largest painting to come from the Mughal empire.” Though it
\nappeared in a saleroom catalogue in 1995, it “has never previously been seen.”
\nThe sixty pieces in this show aren’t all masterpieces, but a large number of
\nthem are just that, including a pair of pages from the Padshahnama<\/i> belonging to the queen; a sexually explicit but somehow
\nnot pornographic painting of an act of copulation, owned by the British
\nLibrary; a wonderful picture of a fat Hindu holy man from the collection of
\nSven Gahlin;  <\/span>and two delicious
\npictures from Howard Hodgkin’s great collection – a watercolour portrait (c.
\n1685) of a disproportionately large Raja Bhupat Pal of Basholi smoking a huqqa<\/i>, staring intently at a tiny
\nservant holding the business end of the water-pipe, who is looking back just as
\nhard  <\/span>at his employer, and a
\ngorgeous watercolour and gold portrait  <\/span>by Haider Ali and Ibrahim Khan (c.1645) of a Sultan of
\nBijapur  <\/span>and his most powerful
\nminister, whisking the flies off his master, while riding a charming looking
\nelephant, against a blue background.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 Among the several surprising exhibitions in London at the moment is the British Museum’s Kingdom of Ife: sculptures from West Africa.   Like many people, I had vaguely seen some of the sculptures – such as the “Ori Olokun” head, because it was used as the logo for an all-African sporting event in 1973, and had managed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-724","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-bG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}