Footnotes

Provenance
Purchased from the artist in Nigeria in 1960;
Bonhams sale, 5th October 2017, lot 117;
A private collection.

This is an unusual variant of Enwonwu's most famous subject, Anyanwu. It was most likely executed in the early 1950s, a prototype for the later small-scale cast. Larger versions of Anyanwu are on view at the United Nations in New York and The Nigerian National Museum in Lagos.

Anyanwu is one of the artist's most accomplished and recognizable works. The word 'Anyanwu' ('eye of the sun'), refers to the Igbo practice of saluting the rising sun in honour of Chukwu, the Great Spirit. The female figure is the powerful Igbo earth goddess Ani. For Enwonwu, the sculpture was a way of expressing his hopes for a nation on its way towards independence:

"My aim was to symbolise our rising nation. I have tried to combine material, crafts, and traditions, to express a conception that is based on womanhood – woman, the mother and nourisher of man. In our rising nation, I see the forces embodied in womanhood; the beginning, and then, the development and flowering into the fullest stature of a nation – a people! This sculpture is spiritual in conception, rhythmical in movement, and three dimensional in its architectural setting – these qualities are characteristic of the sculpture of my ancestors."

Enwonwu's depiction of the goddess, with her elongated body and stylised head, demonstrates his appreciation for Igbo artistic traditions, drawing on ancient wood carvings and Edo Queen Mother portraits. Enwonwu's father was a spiritual man, and had frequently carved images for the shrines at Onitsha. Memories of these shrines left an indelible mark on the young Benedict, and shaped his view that art and religion were inextricably linked. In Igbo tradition, sculptors were viewed as intermediaries between the human and spirit world. They worked in a trance-like state, inspired by intense surges of mental energy.

Bibliography
N. Nzegwu, 'Representational Axis: A Cultural Realignment of Enwonwu', Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art, ed. N. Nzegwu (New York, 1999) p.163.
S. Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist, (Rochester, 2008), pp.128-131.