Ben Enwonwu

Private Collection, Lagos

The work has surface scratches particularly to the right end of the paper, including some associated surface loss, as visible in the catalogue illustration. The work appears to not be fully laid down, and has not been examined out of its frame. There are watermarks consistent with the medium and likely to be artist intent. There are light brown uneven surface stains to the upper right quadrant.
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Negritude (1978) was painted by Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu, who is highly regarded as one of the great artists of the African modernist movement. Created in his ‘reiteration that postcolonial African art must reflect the aspirations of independent African people’, the painting reflects the ideology of Negritude which began to thrive in the 1960s (S. Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist, Rochester, 2008, p. 187). According to S. Ogbechie, 'this was arguably the most influential among the various interpretations of pan-Africanism that were proffered by African intellectuals as viable modes of cultural practice in the postcolonial era' (ibid., p. 170).

In Negritude, the silhouette of a black female figure forms the foreground of the composition. With its curves, materiality, and form the figure bears similar physical characteristics to Enwonwu’s sculpture Torso of Womanhood (1986-88). Between his sculptures and paintings, Enwonwu transferred an 'abstract orientation through biomorphic representations of male and female torsos' (ibid., pp 196). As a contrast to his other dance themed Negritude paintings which depicted multiple subjects in motion, Negritude depicts the main figure in thoughtful solitude.