Ben Enwonwu’s Bronze Sculpture, Anyanwu, Auctions for Record £353,000 at Bonhams

A full-size cast of the bronze sculpture, Anyanwu, by iconic Nigerian painter and sculptor, the late Prof. Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu, was auctioned for a record £353,000 (N138.4 million) at Bonhams, the renowned international auction house, in London yesterday.

Information made available on Bonhams’ website after Anyanwu’s auction showed that the sculpture measuring 236 x 71 x 45cm (6ft 10 inches high) was placed on the block at an estimated price of £150,000 – £200,000, but was auctioned to a new owner for £353,000.

Anyanwu is widely considered an Enwonwu masterpiece. Several smaller versions of the sculpture have passed through Bonhams’ salerooms, most recently in Africa Now: Modern Africa, May 2016.

Another version once sold as the best selling work of Enwonwu at an Arthouse auction in Lagos for a record N21 million.

The current lot auctioned by Bonhams is the first full-size cast to come to market. At 6ft10 high, the sculpture dwarfs the later editions.

Enwonwu sculpted and cast the work in 1956 at the London studios of the acclaimed British sculptor, Sir William Reed Dick. The previous year, Enwonwu had received an MBE from Queen Elizabeth II, raising his international profile to an all-time high.

He sculpted a portrait of the British monarch in the same year the present lot was cast.

The first full-size Anyanwu was commissioned in 1954 by the colonial government of Nigeria to celebrate the establishment of the National Museum at Onikan in Lagos by the acclaimed artist and archaeologist, Kenneth Crosthwaite Murray.

Enwonwu had been one of Murray’s first students in the 1930s and shared his commitment to reviving Nigerian art and craft traditions.

Inspired by the shrine carvings of his sculptor father, Enwonwu’s work represented a return to traditional Igbo aesthetics.

Titled after the Igbo word for ‘the sun’, Anyanwu references the traditional practice of venerating ChiUkwu (the Great Spirit) by saluting the rising sun.

Enwonwu depicts the female deity rising up out of the ground, her lithe body arching towards the sky. This upward trajectory was intended to symbolise the aspirations of the soon-to-be independent nation.

Her noble bearing is underlined by her ‘chicken-beak’ headdress and coral jewellery: the royal regalia of the Bini people.

Such was the symbolic potency of the sculpture that the Nigerian ambassador, Chief Adebo, presented an almost identical cast to the United Nations headquarters on October 5th 1966, a few days after Nigeria’s sixth independence anniversary.

Having studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Enwonwu was highly aware of the debt European Modernism owed to Africa’s artistic traditions.

Anyanwu’s dynamic, semi-abstract form was a clear reminder, and affirmed Nigeria’s position as a leading independent nation, ready to take its place on the world stage.

Source: Thisday