Benin and Me.

I can't remember the exact year, but I know I was quite young and I was not allowed to stay up late. But on this occasion I had somehow slipped through the dragnet of home discipline and found myself watching TV late at night. Alone.

Though this seemed like a treat, this was the 70's and way before all night television had been sanctioned by the milk snatcher, Thatcher.

There was the testcard. That strange surreal image of a young girl with some form of a puppet in her hand. If you fell asleep there was a piercing sound that was suppose to wake you up.

 Or there was, late nights on BBC2, and as I swept the...dial around, to change channels, I found the Open University. Wow, exciting I thought.

It was not quite the contra band that I was looking for. The last time I had escaped the sleep shackles I had watched 'The Invisible Shrinking Man' in black and white. 

It had scared the life out of me. 

The giant spider hunting the slowly diminishing character left a particular impression.

I may as well go to bed I though as the novelty of being up late had worn off. 

Then a programme started.

 In black and white, but immediately I was captured by an image that may well have changed my life. 

It was a bronze head with striated lines incised into it, lines that rolled down the contours of the cheeks. 

It was a dark colour and had overall shape that was different. Made of metal. 

It was a Benin bronze bust. 

I was transfixed as the black and white screen seemed as if by magic to turn to technicolour as my imagination tripped in on what I was seeing.

Or what seemed to be seeing me. Staring back at me from the tiny monochrome screen.

The glare from the wonder with those scarifications woke me up. I was going nowhere. 

The filmaker had the camera pan around this wonderous object, while the narrator told the story in that typical colonial BBC plum in mouth language. Stating that “When they were 'found' it. It was thought that a ancient greek civilisation had been discovered”. 

Well what they were trying to say is that the people of Africa were not clever enough to make objects that scrap up to western art.

But I saw something more. I felt a power that was not like the ornementation around me. Those strange Capi demonte style porcelain things in peoples houses that I saw on sideboards.

I did not know why, at this early morning time. Nor did I understand how these images described, as if they were “lost castings by Donatello” the great Florentine Renaissance scupltor. But they hooked me in.

The admiratation through gritted teeth, was taken away by the overarching slur that at the time they were found, that no African was capable of producing, or understanding the lost wax process.

How the BBC loved to demean. David Attenborough just about got away with it.

In the bush, finding pygmies, to make himself look and sound clever with his BBC speak.

But I saw something else from the spot on the floor, in front of that box of images. That night, that changed my life. I did not understand then, just what it was that pulled me out of my armchair. Whether it was the story of the intrepid explorers who had “found” them. 

Or how they made a measured encroachment into my soul as if they were talking to me. 

I was looking at the image of a past being who wanted to engage my stare.

The Oba, of whose face this was a lifelike cast.

This ancient ruler of Ife would have no idea that I would be peering through the medium of the 20^th century. 

Through that box in the living room, that transported you to places in the past. 

To distant lands.

And at this point in my life I hardly ever saw a black person. My mind was full of stereotypical juxtapositions. Of Black and White Minstrels. Of natives in grass skirts, Micheal Caine and Stanley Baker taking on the Zulus.

This would be decades before I discovered the genius of Louis Armstrong and The Duke of Ellington.

But those images stayed with me as I sometimes caught sight of them again. 

Over the years they became familiar to me.

I would eventually see some of them in the British museum. Where I would not be impressed with all. But several of the busts would help me understand that art is emotion and most of the icons of the 20^th century were directly or maybe indirectly inspired by 'primitive work' such as these bronzes. More than I had first thought.

Greek art, above Roman would be created, to attempt to capture the spirit of a being, rather than just the likeness.

Felix von Luschan, a curator at the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, explained to an audience more familiar with European art, famously comparing them to the work of celebrated Italian Renaissance sculptor, stating, ‘Benvenuto Cellini could not have made a better cast himself, and no one has before or since, even to the present day. These bronzes stand even at the summit of what can be technically achieved.’ he added.

Well there you go!

We say bronzes but more accuratly they were cast from brass, copper and sometimes bronze. 

The tradition began in Benin before the 13th century, and large-scale artworks were first commissioned under Oba Ewuare I (1440-70s). Commemorative heads made for royal altars date back to the 16th century, maybe earlier. From the 18th century onwards, artists carved scenes into the ivory tusks that had always surmounted the bronze heads, providing even greater visual reference to the memory of the life’s work of the honoured Oba. 

Craftsmen also cast sculptures of messengers, vanquished foe, and foreign allies to celebrate the lives of past kings through tableaux for the altar.

In the Edo language, the verb sa-e-y-ama means ‘to remember’, but its literal translation is ‘to cast a motif in bronze’. 

At the courts of Benin, art in bronze perpetuates memory; and the first commissions of every Benin king were, and are sculptures, in bronze and ivory, for his father’s altar. To remember him.

Benin bronzes went into some of the most prestigous European collections. 

After the British occupation of Benin City in 1897, during the reign of Oba Ovonramwen (1888–97). By August 1898, most of the ivory and bronze artworks seized by the British from the royal treasury had been sold in large public auctions.

This was the age when colonials thought they could go round looting the heritage of ancient civilisations.

By the early 1900's, nearly all of the bronzes were in public and private collections in the United Kingdom, Germany and Austria. The Obas of Benin have been asking for their return for decades.

National Museum of Nigeria and Lagos houses the collection of Ife art.

Ile Ife as it is known was a city in Nigeria and was ruled by The Oba.

Yoruba, the ethnic group in the region describe Ife as their spiritual capital. The current inhabitants have decided that it is where the civilisation came from. 

And all will return for re-incarnation.

Ife sculptures have a unparalled realism. 

Crowns of glass beads encrusted the sculptures.

Usually you would not see the face of the Oni and there are holes that hold beads which cover the face. They may have been worn.

Yoruba polyrythyms would mix with Portuguese as early as the 16th century and become european music. 

Fandango's and the like, played in some of the most prestigious courts. Syncopated by african drums.

Several more sculptures were found in 1938 when builders were remodelling a house.

Leo Frobenius a German archeologist took pictures of them and the villages from where they came.

 He contacted the New York Times and declared that they came from the lost city of Atlantis. 

Claiming he had found a lost colony of Greeks.

It would be during the search for modern art that this looted 'tribal art' from ancient worlds would shape the 20^th century. 

Picasso and others would help it along.

I know how it shaped my understanding of art and I will never forget my introduction into the captured majesty of those ancient Oba sculptures that now mean more to me than the slush of Victoriana I see in most collections.

I sincerely hope, that I now can begin to understand the imagery of Polynesian art and some of the beautiful First Nation American work.

The often overlooked art that my good friend and fellow specialist Ronnie Archer Morgan has brought into the living rooms of those watching the Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday evening.

I so admire how he has slowly introduced art lovers to the history of modern art through cultures past. I love how he explains the figurative meanings within, simple art that has a complicated past.

I hope I may now understand a little more about those geometric patterns associated with modernity that were often looted from kingdoms past, in Africa. And in ancient Egypt.

When Tutenkhamun was discovered the world went crazy for those geometric hieroglyphs and these images that were sewn into society along with ancient rythmic syncopations from deep dark and distant worlds that originated not far from the River Niger. From the Yoruba. Jazz was created in Congo square, and is the biggest cultural contribution that America has contributed to the world.

But it came from Africa. Where the Oba ruled. Ife. In the delta that shaped the world. 

That took Vodun across a ocean. 

From Dahomey.

Though its only recently that we paid it due, to acknowledge the debt in an honest and constructive manner.

I studied for my pottery sculpture.

I decided decades later, without thinking and subconsiously that I would burnish hand thrown pots with the tone of 'skin'. And I would decorate them with markings from where I did not know.  http://www.classicartdeco.co.uk/my-own-work.php

I do now.

Modern art, for me, started when the Oba stared back at me one dark night when my eyes met his ancient face. 

When I was young.

I have never forgotten that face.

Alexander Archipenko-Master of Modernism?

Alexander Archipenko's work at first glance and to fresh eyes of the 21^st century seems cliched and old hat.

This is because, like many artists such as Mondrian and numerous others that we thought of as modern, it has been copied over and over again by plagiarists.

So why does his name stand the test of time and be linked with some of the greats?

And where from where did his inspiration occur, was it original?

But in asking this question, we must remember that in the age it was made, there was a seed change that reflected a modernity, before the word had been invented.

Nobody was aware what would last at the time.

And this environment was fighting with the old.

Put in context of the Glasgow school with its entrallic and linear forms of new art or Art Nouveau, it is as if from another planet.

The Vienna Secessionists were moving the art nouveau of old and making the link to the Bauhaus.

Early in the century there were several experimentalists such as Picasso and Braque who were adopting new styles and these along with other modernists fed into each other and inspired all those who came around them.

Paris was the hub of the impressionists, but almost nothing could have seen this coming if you look at art from a decade earlier.

Much has been written about how they all may have tried to capture the primitive art of tribal masks and oceanic totem, with or without knowing what they were doing.

Picasso collage of 1912 “Still Life With Chair Caning” is tipped in, as the first time collage on paper was used.

The multi layered use of collage may have inspired Archipenko. Will we ever know?

Alexander Archipenko was born in Kiev in 1887. He died in 1964.

He studied in Kiev Art School from 1902 to 1905 but in 1906 he went to Moscow.

Archipenko left for Paris in 1908 where he visited the great museums.

He studied for a year in the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris where he started exhibiting, but his first one man Exhibition which was held in Hagen in 1910.

He also exhibited in Berlin and several other German cities.

Archipenko's work, it is said was a form of constructivism based on cubist forms and the parring down and streamlining of shape and form. His sculpto painting shows us a understanding of the inner phsyce. So it has been said.

Archipenko's grandfather was a Icon painter.

By inspiration he used a brilliance of colour, in his work. Deep reds, orange and gold which are dominant colours of the Novgorod School from where his inner inspiration probably came. His interpretation of these ancient forms into the secular makes his work seem even more provocative.

But also this shows us that it is those who believe, in image and who absorb the image of an icon, whether it be religious or secular are possibly accepting something similar in reflection.

Like his contemporaries such as Brancusi, who preceded him to Paris and Jacques Lipchitz who left Lithuania to study in Paris, but returned to Russia for Military service in 1912, he entered adventurous paths that had opened up for budding artists with the desire and dedication to succeed.

He replaced form with hollows and concave materials in these sculpto paintings that it was said he invented in the early twenties worked by incorporating and using metal and glass.

His use of cut conical shapes made the concavity that he desired.

This also worked in convex and his use of perspective was sometimes made simply with painted lines.

In 1914 he travelled to Nice where he saw out the war.

During this time his work was entrusted in storage to his friend Ferdinand Leger who was conscipted.

Though with his absence and lack of care for them, moisture entered the shed in Paris and his paper mache constructions were ruined.

In a separate storage some of his work that had been exhibited in America at the Royal Armoury show in New York were destroyed by long range German bombardment.

He was often ridiculed in France, as were quite a lot of the adventurists who we now see as pioneers of modern art.

Though when hostilities ceased he sent a lot of this accumulation of work to Germany and Switzerland.

He opened a school in Paris and taught others how to interpret his use of the experimental.

In the 1920's his work in Germany was thought akin to that of Picasso's, and his work entered numerous museum and gallery collections such as Essen, Mannheim, Frankfurt and Berlin.

His execution of a series of brilliantly coloured lithographs were produced by the Ernst Wasmuth publishing house.

In 1921 he closed down the Paris Atelier and moved to Berlin marryng a German sculptor Angelica Bruno-Schmitz.

In the same year Kandinsky arrived to the new 'hub' from Moscow and Chagall from Paris.

His work was amassed by collectors such as G. Falk from Geneva inculding polychromed plasters and terracotta sculptures along with work in Bronze.

Another misfortune destroyed a lot more of his work the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition of 1936 opened by Hitler and Goebbels that triggered a vast confiscation of works deemed degenerate. Thousands of works of art during this period were destroyed and lucrative works made auctions. Not many of Archopenko's work found its way onto the market and was lost.

He had moved to America in 1923 with his wife and on the voyage on the S.S Mongolia, with them were trunks laden with his work.

A lot of this work would be acquired by the Gugginheim Museum in 1956.

A second fortunate act was kind to his work when his patrons Mr and Mrs Goeritz who had bought a huge amount of his work, when new, sent it to Tel Aviv then in Palestine and thus it escaped the ravages of World war II. So did Archipenko, as there is no doubt what fate he would have met if he was still living in Germany when the Nazis came to power.

In 1955 and upto the death of Goeritz it was held in almost obscurity in vaults awaiting the family to gift most of the collection to Tel Aviv museum and in 1971 it finally opened with these works going on display.

In 1970 a retrospective of Archipenko's work was organised by Alfred Barr Jr and was held in the Museum of Modern Art. This cemented his role in modern sculpture.

I feel you have to look at the works in a different place inside your mind and take out all those works which have subliminally copied his, to see if it has any worth.

Yes I know art, like music is a culmination of what has gone before it and Archipenko himself absorbed much around him either by stealth or by default, but we still need to ask questions.

It is obvious that he believed in himself and needed to make a name for himself, either during his lifetime or at a later date.

So is he one of the most important artists of the first half of the twentieth century?

Or only one of the pieces in giant jigsaw?

That we are only still piecing together and will not understand the full picture for some time but in the meantime the Tel Aviv museum continues to display his work from the period 1910 to 1921 having over 30 pieces. So he is assured the continued attention, and maybe its fitting. 

This month February 2015 sees a pair of his paintings go on sale in New York.
 Portrait of a Woman with an estimate of $75,000 to $90,000, and Nude Torso,with a $75,000 to $225,000.

I myself look at these in image form in the catalogue and think, well its all in the name. And that name is Archipenko, and someone or some institution will probably pay the money.
Maybe the Tel Aviv institution may add them to their collection.

One think is certain, that his name will continue to be around for a long time.

But Modern Master......well I am not sure too about that.