Uzo Egonu, an African Artist in the West 
London: Kala Press, 1995.  175 pp. Illustrations, notes,  
and bibliographical references. No price listed.  
ISBN 0-947753-08-7. 

In this pioneering work Olu Oguibe charts the life and career of Uzo Egonu, from his origins in Africa to his expatriation in Britain. 

Egonu, a remarkable, compassionate and very private artist, has been described as 'perhaps Africa's greatest modern painter', one whose work challenges the impoverished Western myth of the naive African artist. The complexity of Egonu's work is firmly located within the tradition of modernism. What we see is a judicious synthesisof visual languages developed from his critical encounter with Western art and an informed awareness of his African heritage; a synthesis which reaches beyond mere formalist concerns to involve both the experiences of his life in the West and the painful turmoils of his country of origin, post-colonial Nigeria. 

This monograph is a timely intervention in the prevailing debates on the role, position and aesthetic concerns of the African artist in the contemporary world, and offers a unique contribution to the scarce literature on artists of African, Asian or Latin American origin in the West. 

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Reviewed for H-AfriArts 
(Humanities on Line) 
by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, 
Northwestern University 

9 Mar 1997 
 
 

How does one narrate the career of an African artist who spent his lifein the centers of European culture, in the West?  This is the subjectof Oguibe's analysis in Uzo Egonu:  An African Artist in the West. In 1945, the Nigerian-born painter and printmaker, Uzo Egonu, left hishome town of Onitsha for England at the age of thirteen to pursue an educationin the Fine Arts. With the exception of a brief visit to Nigeria in 1977for the Second World Festival of Arts and Culture FESTAC celebrations,during which he was truncated by a virulent flu (the artist's much anticipatedhomecoming lasted all of two days), Egonu lived out his life in Englandas an expatriate.  An intensely private individual, Egonu developeda critically acclaimed personal style in painting and printmaking, receivedthe patronage of highly placed individuals in British society such as theDuchess of Albans, and achieved international recognition for his contributionsto the plastic arts. 

The place and role of non-western artists in the hallowed narrativesof art history remains a point of contention today especially in the sustainedattempts by critics and art historians to overturn the entrenched illusionsof cultural purity on which many twentieth century narratives of art areconstructed.  We are familiar with the achievements and shortcomingsof some of these attempts and the chagrin of a "mainstream" art historywhich collectively defines such endeavors as revisionism, dismissing theoften trenchant tone of interrogative critiques with the rhetorical equivalentof a tartly raised eyebrow. 

These defenders of the status quo recognize in revisionism a transgressionof carefully constructed ideological edifices of art history, and theyare disoriented by its demands for equal consideration of the works ofnon-occidental artists in art historical narratives. Although one may arguethat mainstream art history has made great strides in accommodating theworks of these 'Others,' let us point out here that the pivotal term inthis perception is 'accommodation' --such rights as one extends to thosewho are not worthy, out of one's own desire and noblesse.  The initialeuphoria of postmodernism's interrogation of modernist hegemonies is todaysomewhat muted in a contemporary realization that accommodation has veryspecific limits, beyond which the non-occidental artist exists solely asa marker of art history's indifference to the rigors and contexts of his/herhistory. Within the context of this history, any text which attempts tosituate non-occidental artists as key players in the modernist experienceof art and culture is often categorized as a revisionist enterprise. Such characterization operates as a tacit restatement of the primacy ofoccidental experience of art as the norm by which all other realities aremeasured (preferably as deviations). 

It is a measure of the impoverished state of affairs concerning criticalattention on the practice of modern African art, that texts like Oguibe'swhich focus on the professional practice of modern African artists arefew and very intermittent.  Oguibe's book arrives at an importantjuncture in the historiography and analysis of this practice, especiallyin the face of continued efforts by certain individuals to define modernAfrican artists as later day primitives, a modern incarnation of 'tribal'craftsmen whose works are supposedly informed by undefined intuition ratherthan by intellectual engagement with issues of form and concepts. By its pioneering focus on the career of a significant, yet neglected,African artist whose practice defies this simplistic reading of modernAfrican art, Oguibe's book is a very welcome addition to the sparse literatureon this subject. 

Egonu's career as an artist in England raises a number of cultural andart historical issues which Oguibe attempts to "pull into a critical framedrawing on the artist's works and insights gained through interviews withhim" (p. 9).  He conducts an analysis of Egonu's life and career,especially in terms of his attempts to negotiate the rigid processes ofexclusion by which major British galleries and exhibition spaces were madeinaccessible to artists of non-European descent--thus creating a contextof practice that the author elsewhere describes as a "terrain of difficulty." 

Oguibe's thesis is fairly straightforward:  Egonu synthesizes hisAfrican background with the forms of European modernism and achieves inthe process, a mode of expression which, in its commitment to his Africanroots (specified here as the artist's Igbo origins), and its social vision,defines a modernism different from the nihilistic inclinations of its Europeanvariant.  Political issues of difference and otherness (not to mentionan entrenched racist attitude) result in an effacement of the artist fromart historical discourse while relegating him to a practice on the margins. Oguibe is careful to mention that "Egonu cannot be strictly defined asan artist of the margin, for although he was denied a place in the center,he indeed operated and survived within the boundaries of that center, whichmeant that he lived on a certain level of assured patronage and an, albeitinconsistent, access to the structures of the establishment" (p. 8). Oguibesupports his analysis with over one hundred illustrations, many in color. 

The book is divided into seven main chapters.  Beginning with abiography of the artist, it weaves together specific issues related tothe artist's aesthetic orientation, his emotional and intellectual commitment to his estranged homeland, the emotional turmoil of the Nigerian/Biafrancivil war and its effects on his work, and the artist's struggle with failingeyesight which led to a period of "painting in darkness" compounded inpart by a series of heart attacks in 1986, and dire predictions by hisdoctors that he had less than a year to live. As Oguibe narrates Egonu'scareer, the artist emerges from these ordeals with a noted philosophicalorientation, and renewed commitment to his art.  Oguibe provides reasonabledocumentation of Egonu's development as an artist, the range of influencesfrom which his personal style derived and, most importantly, he asks usto consider Egonu's career as a unique interrogation of modernism by anAfrican artist even as this occurs within a European cultural context. 

Oguibe writes with an awareness of the difficulties raised by his subjectof analysis--Egonu--and his material production. How do we situate thisartist?  Considering his context of practice, is it not more fruitfulto situate Egonu's work within established traditions of European formalismin the twentieth 
century?  Oguibe seems to disagree. Egonu's work, he contends,is informed by concerns larger than mere formalistic excellence althoughhe achieves this as well.  Themes  of domination, racism, andoppression converge in his images and these are related to his status asan African, hence an outsider in British society. 

Through analysis of specific paintings and prints by the artist, Oguibemaps Egonu's indebtedness to European modernism, and his initial recourseto an aesthetics of nostalgia in the genre pictures in which the artistfirst encoded an awareness of his African origins.  He presents theartist as an individual 
engaged in a recontextualization of European modernism, subjectingit to a thematic and conceptual transformation which focuses partly onEgonu's Igbo heritage, and partly on his philosophical perception of humanaffairs.  Through detailed analysis of Egonu's involvement with theworks of European masters (the Flemish School, Caravaggio, and the Post-Impressionists)and his "meticulous recollection" of his Igbo origins and traditions, Oguibe'stext presents Egonu as someone with a keen intellectual and conceptualawareness of his creative medium and his social and cultural experiences. 
 
In Chapters Three (The Egonu Aesthetic) and Four (Community and Commitment)Oguibe makes a claim for Egonu's relevance both to European modernism andhis indigenous Igbo (African) society by postulating concepts of "socialrelevance, community and commitment."  The earlier explains that Egonu'sart is not just derivative of modernism since the artist projected, inhis art, a well articulated notion of social relevance and a commitmentto the postcolonial vicissitudes of his Nigerian nation:  this awarenesscontrasts with modernism's claim of an autonomous universe of form in whichthe artist is answerable solely to his creativity and his art is a reflectionof the genius of its maker/creator.  The latter concept interrogatesEgonu's notion of community and dismisses an essentialist attitude whichholds that social commitment is only possible in terms of an artist's specificlocation within the cultural and geographical parameters of a social context.Oguibe contends that Egonu came to the realization that "to become a properor 'better' part of one's homeland, to know it and to believe in it, oneneeds to escape it and, by acquiring an alternative experience, come toappreciate it and identify with it, to truly claim it" (p. 90). This claim,which Oguibe conveniently attributes to the artist, reiterates a postmodernistdefinition of the contemporary artist as cultural nomad and is worth furtherinvestigation. 

We get few glimpses of the artist's wife, the German artist HiltrudStreicher, who is mentioned mainly in terms of her 1966 interview withEgonu (and her later role as his wife, administrator, representative, andfinancial lifeline in the artist's pre-1970 period of relative obscurity)but not in terms of her possible influences on Egonu's development as anartist. The history of modernism is replete with stories of female 
artists whose association with famous painters effectively truncatedtheir own careers, and such associations have provided locus for feministinterrogation of the careers of these artists.  Did Hiltrud Streichercontinue to function as an 
artist after she met Egonu; do we dare ask if she contributed, in anyway, to his material production especially in the period when his eyesightwas failing between 1980 and 1985?  Some of Egonu's work in this period(for example, The Four Seasons, 1983; illustrated pp. 148-149) fit uneasilyinto the structure of the artist's formalistic and stylistic developmentas one can infer from the illustrations which Oguibe provides to illustratehis analysis.  Unfortunately, these questions are not examined althoughin light of the stated influence of Egonu's wife on all other parts ofhis life, one makes brave to posit these as legitimate issues for any art-historicalanalysis of the 
artist's career. 

Oguibe foregrounds Egonu's Igbo heritage and its relevance as a broadconceptual and formalistic marker for Egonu's interrogation of modernism. Since Oguibe's analysis of Igbo social and aesthetic structures is detailedand sophisticated, are we to accept Egonu's (equally sophisticated?) awarenessof his Igbo heritage as an innate experience which resurfaced in lateryears to reconfigure his art, or as a calculated intellectual responseto museumized specimens of African art forms, or a general adoption ofnotions of African heritage a la Negritude?  An illustration in thebook shows Egonu surrounded by several of his paintings (p. 10): apart from a conspicuous canvas of a black female figure posed againsta luscious landscape, there are two variations on the subject of a manclimbing a palm tree.  Such nostalgic images which operate as visualcodes for "primitive," pre-colonial Africa, have been popular in Londonat least since 1948 when Ben Enwonwu began a spate of public exhibitionswhich made such expressions of Senghorian Negritude familiar to Britishart audiences. 

Oguibe does not quite explain his position on the question of Egonu'sconstitution of artistic identity.  Instead, he stresses the intellectualnature of Egonu's recollection of his Igbo roots although he goes to greatlengths to define how Igbo aesthetic and conceptual structures provideEgonu with the tools he needed for his interrogation of modernism. Considering the fact that Egonu was only thirteen years old when he lefthis homeland, some of Oguibe's arguments appear overdetermined in theirattempt to define the artist as a perceptive observer whose grasp of Igbocultural forms at that age is nothing short of genius. 

The text also glosses over the class implications of Egonu's familybackground by presenting as a norm the unique location of an emergent Nigerianmiddle class for whom the practice of regularly sending their childrento study in foreign institutions persisted even after Nigeria's independencein 1960.  It is among this class, that issues of national and culturalidentity became paramount in analysis of African politics and culture,a point emphasized by Ngugi wa Thiongo in several critiques of this classand their conception of 
identity.  Analysis of this problematic calls into question Oguibe'spremise of colonial domination and resistance, especially those glib polaritieswhich are usually drawn around colonizers and their colonized Other. It also provides a suitable framework for interrogating issues of race,class, and identity within the intertwined history of the British colonialmetropolis and its colonies, especially as this relates to Egonu's career. 

Egonu, who arrived in London in 1945 as a British colonial subject,went through major displacements of political and cultural identity inthis metropolis.  First he defined himself (or was defined) as anAfrican, then with Nigeria's independence as a Nigerian; then as a Biafranduring the failed Biafra secession bid (a defining moment for his Igboidentity), and later as a Nigerian once the threat of secession was quelledby Nigerian military might in a contest in which Britain played a majorrole.  Each of these shifts in self definition played out in Egonu'sthemes and in his efforts to carve out a niche for his practice in theEuropean art establishment.  Is there room for us to postulate a Britishidentity for Egonu in light of his lifelong sojourn in Britain? And ifthere isn't, why not? Indeed, one may ask whether it will ever be possiblefor African artists to transcend the assumption by critics that they arecarriers of an innate characteristic whose sign is ever manifest in theirproduction.  What are we to make of the standard which implies thatthere are artists, then there are African artists? 

The intricate play of multiple identities in Egonu's life and careeris enough to postulate the artist as a quintessential postmodern icon.Oguibe downplays such an interpretation, at least until the end of hisnarrative, when he feels compelled to signal his investment in trendy postmodernistspeak (pp. 
163-166).  His postscript, awash in unadulterated jargon, largelyundermines an otherwise lucid narrative.  It also negates his earlierstated intention not to "apply to Egonu's work the plethora of discursiveframes thrown up by the shattering of the modernist monocle" (p. 9). 

Oguibe makes an effective case for Egonu's significance as an artist.We may better comprehend his claim if we consider that an occidental artistwho has the same length of professional practice and international recognitionas Egonu does would undoubtedly be the subject of several retrospectives,art historical treatises, and coffee table texts.  What is not soclear from his narrative is whether Egonu enjoys much recognition (as theauthor implies) in Nigeria, where he had only two exhibitions-- one soloand one group show--both in Nsukka.  Since his career played itselfout in Europe, his specific contribution(s) to the history and developmentof modern art practice in Nigeria, a context in which he is representedby his conspicuous absence, remains debatable. 

Oguibe's appeal to Egonu's sense of identity and community predicatedon exile is difficult to sustain.  How, for instance, was his "socialvision and commitment" perceived within his Igbo (Nigerian, African) society? The kind of postmodern sense of community espoused for Egonu invests Africanartists "in exile" with the authority to represent and speak for communitiesfrom which they are long estranged.  In Oguibe's text, we are invitedto perceive a sense of community in several paintings in which Egonu sublimatesthe horror and reality of the Nigeria/Biafra conflict.  If these paintingsepitomize social commitment for the artist (according to Oguibe's definitionof the term), one wonders what to make of the commitment of Egonu's compatriot,the poet Christopher Okigbo, who traded in his pen and prodigious versesfor a rifle and a battlefront grave in that same conflict.  Oguibe'sinterpretation of Egonu's "vision and sense of community" is a meta-narrative,a construction of imagined spaces in which the untidiness of actual socialexistence is displaced in favor of elegant abstraction. One recognizesthe importance of such imagined communities for the exiled artist, butnot the author's desire to construct an aesthetics of transcendence aroundit. 

What Egonu's practice demands of art critics and historians is a recognitionof the historical and conceptual links between European conventions ofmodern art with its contexts of practice, and the development of a twentiethcentury tradition 
of modern art by African artists.  An analysis of what makes modernart in Africa (especially the easel painting tradition) unique in relationto European art and indigenous art forms and contexts of practice is sorelyneeded as a conceptual background to subsequent analysis of African artistsboth on the continent and in the West. 

The major weakness of this book lies in Oguibe's determined effortsnot only to reclaim for Egonu that center, which he contends relegatedthe artist to a marginal place on the modernist stage, but to project theartist as the inheritor of both European modernism _and_ an indigenousAfrican (Igbo) conceptual framework of artistic and cultural practice.As it 
maps Egonu's transformation from a struggling, inexperienced artistto a confident, mature artist whose practice is validated by his inductioninto several prestigious international art organizations, Oguibe's textbecomes in essence a retelling of 
modernist narratives which substitutes an African incarnation for thewhite male "master" and surrounds him with all the requisite tropes ofalienation, anguish, exile, and solitude. The Egonu that emerges at theend of the narrative (sans postscript) may as well be Egon Schielle, asolitary hero who conquers the angst of life in the Diaspora.  Bythe standards of Oguibe's own incisive critiques of such modernist myths,his recourse to this kind of narrative is rather regressive: 
however it also emphasizes the difficulties inherent in any analysisof modern art by artists of African descent. 
 
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