Footnotes

Provenance
Collection of Colonel Ahmadu Yakubu;
Acquired from Davidson Auctions, 2007;
A private collection.

Professor Sylvester Ogbechie writes that Ben Enwonwu himself credits several of his techniques in creating rhythmical patterns to the studying the aesthetics of Harlem Renaissance artists such as Meta Warwick Fuller and Aaron Douglas. The influence of Aaron Douglas's work is evident in many of Enwonwu's Negritude pieces. Negritude was both a literary and ideological movement led by Francophone black writers and intellectuals such as W.E.B Du Bois and Richard Wright. The movement is marked by its rejection of European colonisation and its role in the African diaspora, pride in "blackness" and traditional African values and culture. The Negritude ideologies extension into art beyond literature can be observed in the present lot. The silhouetted figure represents racial consciousness through black identity and experience.

"In London and Paris, Enwonwu joined African and African Diaspora intellectuals in evaluating the Harlem Renaissance Movement in The United States and defining its implications for Pan-African advancement in literature, music, theatre, dance and the fine arts."

Direct correlations in terms of composition can be echoed between the present work and Aaron Douglas's oil on canvas work Listen Lord (1927). The female depicted in Enwonwu's work holds a similar composition to the silhouette in Douglas's work in which the central figure bends one arm above their head with the other extended below them while looking to their right (the viewer's left). Enwonwu offers the viewer not a copy, but an interpretation of a painting and poem by James Johnson entitled 'Listen Lord: A Prayer' (1927). James Johnson was a civil rights leader who served as a field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and spoke at the 1919 National Conference on Lynching in America before becoming the executive secretary in 1920. An extract of the poem reads:

Lord God, this morning --
Put his eye to the telescope of eternity,
And let him look upon the paper walls of time.
Lord, turpentine his imagination,
Put perpetual motion in his arms,
Fill him full of the dynamite of thy power,
Anoint him all over with the oil of thy salvation,
And set his tongue on fire.

In the present work, the iconic fluid silhouette is set against vivid blues and yellows, a palette symptomatic of Enwonwu's Negritude series. The contrasting palette of the background further accentuates the female form that dominates the board. We get a sense here, through this palette use, of the technical mastery of Ben Enwonwu in defining his subject and directing the viewer's gaze. This contrasting technique can also be seen to be used by other monumental artists such as Vincent van Gogh who famously stated, "there is no blue without yellow and without orange" emphasising the importance of the complimentary colours' combination aesthetic.

While there seems to be a consistent anonymity to the figures presented by Enwonwu in the Negritude paintings, the present work defines itself as a rarity within the series of works. Perhaps this was motivated by Enwonwu's commitment to presenting and accentuating the Igbo concepts of beauty and feminine power. Through palette, composition, and scale, the present work epitomises Enwonwu's commitment to the Negritude ideology and the upholding of African cultural history.

Bibliography
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008).
James Weldon Johnson, "Listen Lord: A Prayer" (1927)