Creative reformation of African art traditions: the iconography of Abayomi Barber Art School.

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Since the colonial period, many African artists have been caught in a dilemma (Adepegba 1996) which, up to the 1960s, was phrased as a two-world disposition between tradition and modernity, and reflected in literary works. (1) During this period, the fervor of African nationalism reached a crescendo of expectations and desires for the creation of the new Africa (Vogel 1994). African leaders who had begun to take political control of their nations from colonial administrators vigorously campaigned for anti-Western attitudes among their peoples and raised hopes for nation building through new collective forms of identity that transcended the boundaries of ethnicity; national identity rather than tribal loyalties (Campbell 1997:36-46). Artists followed suit, seeing as their artistic mandate the assertion of African identity and nationhood, as exemplified in Nigeria by the students of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology, Zaria, with their concept and philosophy of natural synthesis, an admixture of tradition and modernism.

Most African artists trained in the style of the Western academy prior to independence considered the media and forms of traditional art as "moribund, perhaps even 'primitive' and void of possibilities for development" (Vogel 1994:179). Nevertheless, they were concerned to express an African identity. They chose to assert themselves artistically by hybridizing their African backgrounds and their Western artistic experiences, often inserting traditional idioms within a contemporary (Western or global) artistic language. This eventually became a feature of most postcolonial art from Africa.

Initially, Western critics were averse to the creative tendency of hybridizing traditional and modern, regarding it as a corruption of the primitive, naive, or authentic Africa. Authors such as Ulli Beier (1960) tended to separate the artist from the reality of his contemporary environment, and to view his formal artistic production as something of a "phenomenon" or "unique occurrence." In contrast, African authors and artists of the same period such as Leopold Senghor (1967) and Yusuf Grillo (Mount 1973) justified the expression of cultural hybridization or recreation in the works of modern African artists in the late colonial and early post-independence period. More recently, Andre Magnin and Jaques Souhillou (Kasfir 1999:134) have suggested that the artistic hybridization of ideas and African tradition and modernity used to be a characteristic of Western academically trained African artists. But that delineation of creativity between the formally trained and the workshop trained artists has disappeared in the postcolonial period.

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In Africa, modern artists may be university trained or workshop trained, as well as self-taught or trained through the apprenticeship method in a local tradition. Before the 1980s, a large number of workshop artists were not formally educated prior to their workshop training and as a consequence were not regarded as "modern" because modernity was linked to the new modern education. However, since the 1980s and 1990s, workshop artists have played critical roles in contemporary African art (Kasfir 1999:134), which places them within the rubric of "modern."

However, artistic developments in the postcolonial period in Africa have proved the futility of artistic categorization by form, content or subject matter. This is because, if the character and forms of the productions of workshop centers such as Osogbo (1963-1966), Frank McEwen's stone carvers in Zimbabwe (1958-1973), or the artists of Ruth Schaffner's Gallery Watatu in Nairobi (1990s) were usually naive, with the artists having little if any Western education (Kasfir 1999), the Abayomi Barber School artists, equally poorly educated, produce super-realistic works described as no different from those of the formally trained (Adepegba 1996). At the same time, some members of those early European-founded workshops, like Osogbo's Jimoh Buraimoh, have since acquired university credentials. Thus an artist's education can no longer shape the form and content of his work, and what different groups of modern African artists hold in common is the idea of reconnecting with the precolonial past, an attitude that pervades all classifications of African artists including those working outside the continent, as part of the perceived Africanization of their art.

It features in the music, theater, film, literature, and visual arts of Africa. Usually, it takes the form of manipulation of materials, subjects, contents, and contexts that are creatively hybridized, reformed, or recreated to make statements about the artist's identity. In art, this attitude is quite visible in West and Central Africa, notably in Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, and the Congo (Kasfir 1999:16-17) where contemporary art creation occurs within a milieu of existing practices, resulting in hybrid images and reflexive content. The situation differs in those areas of Africa not well known for precolonial art, such as Zimbabwe, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. In these areas, which are seldom represented in museum collections of traditional sculptures--such as East Africa and southern Africa, where the precolonial art medium was not recognized as art until recently--the artists often create new forms rather than having recourse to existing ones.

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Even in those places where today's art exists within a surviving historical art tradition, individual artists regularly recreate or reform traditional perceptions in their works by employing diverse techniques. For example, Youssuf Bath from Cote d'Ivoire draws from traditional myths, mysticism, spirituality, and witchcraft to convey the strength and power of Africa in his works, using "chalk and coffee as alternative pigment on paper and tree bark" (Oyelola 1988:24). The Groupe Bogolan Kasobane, a collection of six artists in Bamako, Mali, formed in 1978 with the aim of revitalizing the Bogolanfini textile-dying technique, "use an ancient method to innovate, to create works that will be completely original and even modern." Such paintings as Ba ka Kulushi juru (polygamy; 1989), "draw on motifs from traditional African sculpture, ancient Egyptian art, and futuristic space comic books" (Vogel 1994:180). In Nigeria, Uche Okeke and others of the Nsukka School assert their "Igboness" by using Igbo folklore and women's uli body-painting techniques to inform their painting. In their works, the subjects of their compositions are reduced to lines, thus crystallizing their basic forms or aspects (Ottenburg 1997) as in Uche Okeke's 1962 Head of a Girl and From the Forest (Oja Suite; Dike and Oyelola 1998:135).

Some other artists, such as members of the Osogbo School in Nigeria or Zimbabwean soapstone carvers, resort to weird, grotesque, and ghostly forms to express folkloric or mythological subjects as aspects of their cultural identity. Cornelius Adepegba (1996) referred to such work as "naive abstractions" and saw them as resulting more from lack of representational skill than artistic intention. He insisted that workshop schools in which the student was given materials to produce "master pieces" without any technical instruction or any form of interference, encouraged this approach. In the classification of workshop schools, the Abayomi Barber art group is considered an anomaly because of its founder, who describes himself as self-taught but whose approach and methods have been described as "not different from those of any of the conventional art schools" (Adepegba 1996). His works and those of his students display a disciplined adherence to the adopted mandate of naturalistic tradition of representation and a rendering of African subject matter and themes for both nationalistic and aesthetic reasons.

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This can be seen in comparison between the work of Toyin Alade, The Search (Fig. 2), an adherent of the Abayomi Barber School, and that of Twins Seven-Seven of the Osogbo School (Kennedy 1992:76-77, Mount 1973:150, Magnin and Soulillou 1996:63-64). The Search is a symbolic landscape imbued with meaning, in spite of its realistic forms. It features images of individuals considered to be great philosophers in times past, including the Yoruba political sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo and India's Mahatma Gandhi. Although the painting features a congregation of ideas, forms, and figures surrealistically arranged, the artist's ability to compose within the design space is evident: the work is concerned with the artist's search for ultimate mastery in terms of composition as well as didactic regarding his quest for the truths of the past.

It contrasts markedly with Twins Seven-Seven's Hunters and the Father of Beasts (1991; Magnin and Soulillou 1995:63) with its seemingly untutored realism amid a crowded picture plane, thus reinforcing the ghostly forms typical of the Osogbo group. The work features five caricatured hunters in the forest in pursuit of spirit beasts depicted by two horned animal forms. One actually looks like an elephant with a long trunk. The work appears busy and somewhat naive because of the distortion of forms and use of color applied in the form of geometrified pellets and patterns. This clearly contrasts with the Barber School's manner of rendering that entails command of color scheme and application as well as informed formal arrangements and composition.

Moreover, the Barber School adherents took their approach as an ideological position against Western stereotypes of African art that link African authenticity with the grotesque, weird, or crudely rendered. Barber has struggled against the West's pernicious appetite for "primitive" works for more than three decades. The result has been the emergence of a movement taking its name from the founder and featuring an artistic zeal for pictorial naturalism, magical symbolism, and ethereal conceptualization.

REFORMING/RECREATING TRADITIONAL AFRICAN ICONS: THE BARBER SCHOOL APPROACH

Although Abayomi Barber, the mentor of the school, trained himself rigidly within the highly orthodox style of the academy, he created, in a rather rebellious manner, a style that has come to be considered important. (2) In 1981, the National Art Exhibition brought to the fore some works of the school for the first time. Ben Enwonwu, one of Nigeria's foremost artists, described their efforts as commendable. However, it was not until their maiden art exhibition organized by the National Council for Arts and Culture at the National Theatre, Iganmu, Lagos, in 1984 that the Barber School emerged and became known on the Nigerian art scene.

Abayomi Adebayo Barber (Fig. 1) was born on October 23, 1928, in Ile-Ife (present Osun State, Nigeria). Abayomi is an artistic polymath who, apart from being a painter and sculptor, is also a stage designer, saxophonist, and illustrator. He is also acclaimed as one of Africa's great portraitists (Oloidi 2000). Although he considers himself self-thought, he did acquire some informal or direct art training in Nigeria and eventually in England, where he sojourned for eleven years (1960-1971).

Abayomi's early education began at St. Peter's Anglican School, Iremo, Ife, where his father was a church Lay Reader. His education throughout primary school years was very unstable; Abayomi explains that in those days, "I never liked to go to school" (Ajayi 1987:33). He attended several primary schools as a result of this. The schools included St. Peter and Paul Catholic School, Ejinrin, Abeokuta, and Wasimi African Church School, Ijebu Ode. (3) Other schools attended were Ebenezer African School, Ibadan, and St. Andrews Primary School, Oyo.

In 1946, however, he was at St. Stephen's School, Modakeke, Ife, where he completed school in 1948. By this time, his artistic talents were already apparent. For instance, his ability to play the cornet actually got him into St. Stephen's School even when admissions had already closed in all classes that year. He thereafter had no secondary school education, apart from a stint as a student of Ife Boys High School, 1945-1946.

From his elementary school days, Abayomi worked with clay and produced drawings. For instance, during World War Il, under colonial administration in Nigeria, a week was designated as Education Week for school children. For those in Ile-Ife, it was for familiarization with many historical places and objects round in the area. The school children were often taken on tours visiting shrines and groves as well as to the Ooni's palace, where they were exposed to the relics of ancient Ire art. According to Abayomi, his artistic determination increased after such experience. His interest was particularly arrested by the exquisite beauty and naturalism of the works. Abayomi had not seen art works from other places in Nigeria, and when he was told that ancient Ire craftsmen did the works, he felt challenged to surpass them. The art works, which included the classical bronze and terracotta pieces such as Olokun, Obalufon, Lafogido, and Lajuwa, among others, must have necessarily opened Abayomi's mind for some African aesthetics to make incursion (Anikulapo 1989:B7).

The experiences of Abayomi Barber's life affect his approach to art. Although he eventually passed out of the primary school, all along schooling was drudgery for him. In his formative years, 1949-1957, Abayomi's interest in art was sustained alongside his passion for music. In 1949, Abayomi participated in various art competitions. In fact, his first artwork to be reckoned with dates back to this year. It is one of the earliest art works that the artist can still remember vividly: a carving on a wooden box (Njoegwueni and Egwatu 1989:20-21). By 1952, he came to Lagos from Ife in search of better opportunities on the advice of H.E. Duckworth and Harold Cooper, the Senior Education Officers in Western Region, Nigeria. That year, 1952, Abayomi won an award from the Elder Dempster Lines in Lagos for the best painting exhibited in the all Nigeria Festival of the Arts. Not long after, his art started to gain acknowledgement among colonial administrators in Lagos. He was commissioned to paint a portrait of Harold Cooper, who was also honored as the Balogun of Ikoyi Club, Lagos. Abayomi's craftsmanship impressed the Club and he was assigned to paint a portrait of Milner Haig, who succeeded Cooper as the Balogun.

Again in 1952, Abayomi was introduced to Ben Enwonwu, the Adviser to the Government of Nigeria on Art, who counselled that the only assistance necessary for the young artist was to make art materials available for his practice. Thus, he gave Abayomi five Goya Oil Color tubes of yellow, burnt umber, burnt sienna, veridian green, and Van Dyke brown. Enwonwu later appointed him as a graphic artist in the government public relations office in Enugu. Abayomi declined this offer. Erhabor Emokpae, another important emerging Nigerian artist at the rime, was offered the opportunity and accepted. Abayomi Barber instead took an appointment as a graphic artist with the Nigerian Advertiser, owned by K.O.K. Onyinaha, a Nigerian. The Nigerian Advertiser was situated at 9 Akinwunmi Street, Yaba-Lagos. Here Abayomi produced advertisement illustrations, book illustrations, and comic drawings. He also started drawing for Aworerin, a Yoruba comic magazine owned by an Israeli named Levi, resident in Lagos. (4)

In 1955 Abayomi enrolled as a student in the non-certificated art program facilitated by Paul Mount, a British sculptor, at the Yaba Technical Institute (now Yaba College of Technology, Lagos) with the likes of Yusuf Grillo, Erhabor Emokpae, and Isiaka Osunde among others; after barely two months he became discouraged and discontinued. The artist insists that it was because the training at the art program stressed a painting style that emphasized the application of colors in distinct strokes, unlike the smooth approach which he had been used to.

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Abayomi Barber's artistic career met a major turning point in 1957 due to his contact with Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the Premier of Western Region. Oba Aderemi, Ooni of Ife and Abayomi's maternal uncle, introduced him to Awolowo. Interestingly, Chief Awolowo directed Abayomi to Dr. Saburi O Biobaku (Chief Awolowo's secretary). Through these contacts, the Yoruba Historical Research Scheme, headed by Dr. Biobaku, employed Abayomi and designated him as one of the project assistants. As a result, from 1957 to 1958, Abayomi had the opportunity to accompany renowned scholars such as William Fagg, Frank Willet, Dr. Bradbury, and Reverend Father Kelvin Carroll on research projects intended to establish the origins of the Yoruba.

In 1960, Abayomi was awarded a scholarship by the Yoruba Historical Research Scheme. It was not an academic scholarship, but an eighteen-month sponsorship program with the specific objective of producing a nine-foot-high bronze statue of Chief Obafemi Awolowo to commemorate his years as Western Region Premier. On September 2, 1960, Abayomi arrived in England. In London, he was soon attached to the British Museum to study the preservation of antiquities as well as patination (a glossy surface formed on old bronze or copper). He was also enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, Holborn, for evening lessons. After a few months, Abayomi returned to Nigeria to make the study for Chief Awolowo's statue. However, the chief wanted evidence of his artistic mastery and sent Abayomi to F.R.A. Williams to model him. Abayomi made the study in clay and Chief Awolowo was convinced. He thereafter had several sittings with Chief Awolowo and completed the plaster cast of the head in Nigeria before returning to England (West African Review 1961).

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By February 1961, Abayomi was back in England. Shortly, of his own volition, he discontinued his enrollment at the Holborn Art and Craft School. He insists that it was because he had nothing new to learn at the place. It was there that he began to build the statue of Chief Awolowo in clay (Nwosu 1985:7). No sooner had he began work on this model than the Western Region of Nigeria became engulfed in a political crisis within the Action Group, the political party that formed the Western Regional government of Nigeria. The feud that arose between Chier Obafemi Awolowo, the premier, and his deputy, Chier S.L. Akintola, resulted in the disruption of the proceedings of the Western House of Assembly on May 25, 1962. The consequent upheavals led to the declaration of a police curfew with martial laws in the West, with the Federal Government of Nigeria taking control in the political structure. This and many other crises all over the nation between 1960 and 1966 contributed to the collapse of the first Republic of Nigeria (Kyari 1989:69).

Abayomi's scholarship from the Western Region Government was subsequently terminated in July 1962 and life became more difficult for him in England, as his source of money disappeared. Ironically, the life-size statue of Awolowo which Abayomi had completed in clay never graced the shores of Nigeria. The work was marooned in the rented Mancini and Tozer studios in London, where he had executed the model. Hoping that the crisis at home would be over soon, he preserved the clay model; that winter, frost shattered the clay and the artist worked on it to bring it together again (Nwosu 1981:7). But the trouble back at home in Nigeria escalated. Reluctantly, by 1965 Abayomi had destroyed the Awolowo statue.

The experience gathered in his attempts to fend for himself after these developments acquired him a reputation of proficiency in England. This offered him several artistic jobs and assignments. The first was in 1962, at Nottinghill Gate, the scenic art studio owned by Edward Delaney, a theater art practitioner in England. He also worked at Pinewood and Elmstree Film Studios as a freelance sculptor. He was employed for two weeks to work on a film set assisting Sir M. Lambert, a British sculptor whom Abayomi regarded one of England's premier sculptors. By 1966, Abayomi returned to the Mancini and Tozer studios in Wimbledon, London, but this time to work as assistant sculptor to Fredrick Mancini.

It was while working there that he met Oscar Nemon, a Yugoslav toaster sculptor who had settled in England. Nemon saw in the youthful Abayomi "an already accomplished artist" (Nimbus Gallery Catalogue 1999:10). He worked as the principal artist for Nemon on five sculptures of Winston Churchill, for the House of Commons in London, Brussels, Israel, Oxford, and West Ham. Nemon also produced many portraits of English nobles, including Lady Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth Il, the Queen Mother, and Harold Macmillan. After his initial acquaintance with Oscar Nemon, Abayomi was later employed at Nemon's Immaculate Priory Studio in St. James Palace, which was the Queen Mother's official residence. Between 1967 and 1971, Abayomi was Nemon's assistant. He was also the principal artist for many of the great art commissions at the Priory Studio during that period.

By 1971, Abayomi was persuaded to return to Nigeria by S.O. Biobaku, who had become the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lagos. On home coming Abayomi was employed on the staff of the School of African and Asian studies, University of Lagos, as an Arts Fellow. The wealth of experience Abayomi had gained in England became quite useful for the multitude of artistic functions he was later engaged in within and outside the University of Lagos.

Inspirationally, his sources had been artists such as Akinola Lasekan, Ben Enwonwu, and J.D. Akeredolu. Apparently, the unbridled influence of his Ife artistic backgrounds as well as Yoruba culture and history cannot be trivialized in the development of Abayomi Barber's art. Abayomi believes in hard work and maintains that geniuses are made more out of work than inspiration. In spite of his reticence in staging exhibitions in Nigeria, which he considers often as ego trips, he has featured in some. To date, he has to his credit two solo exhibitions and several group exhibitions. His art works are to be found in the National Gallery of Art, Lagos, the UNICEF and World Bank Headquarters, commissioned works in New York, as well as in private homes and offices within and outside Nigeria. Abayomi made portraits of Lord Alexander of Tunis and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia.

In 1972, soon after joining the University of Lagos, Abayomi was commissioned to paint a portrait of the visiting Ethiopian emperor Haille Sallasie, popularly referred to as the "Lion of Judah". He also made the Olokun Head, which was given as a gift to Senegalese President Leopold Sedar Senghor by General Yakubu Gowon, Nigeria's head of state from 1966 to 1975. His works are on display at the National Gallery of Modern Art; they include the sculptures Ali Maigoro and Yemoja (Fig. 5), a sculpture depicting the Yoruba goddess of fertility. Other sculptural works in the gallery are his bust of Oba Adesoji Aderemi, the late Ooni of Ile-Ife, and that of General Murtala Mohammed, Nigeria's head of state from 1975 to 1996 (Fig. 3). His oil paintings in the National Gallery are Balufon and the portrait of Alhaji Shehu Usman Aliyu Shagari, president of the second republic of Nigeria, 1979-1983.

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When Abayomi arrived Nigeria in 1971, the state of art in contemporary Nigeria was quite disagreeable to him. His disaffection was towards the combination of primitivism and expressionism that dominated the Nigerian art scene at that time. Abayomi's criticism of primitivism in contemporary African art was directed at all categories of artists, not only those who had little or no training before getting into artistic production. Moreover, he expressed his concern about the extent of damage this artistic "misrepresentation" and "falsehood" might have done to Africa in terms of reinforcing stereotypes. As a result, Abayomi has nurtured an artistic style aimed at correcting these impressions.

Like Abayomi Barber, Iba N'Diaye of the Ecole de Daker asserted that authentic creativity in the work of a genuine artist comes only through genuine attention to skill and materials along with sincerity of practice (Harney 2003:18). The Abayomi Barber Art School, like the Ecole de Dakar and unlike that of Osogbo, has a philosophy hinged upon the conviction that only training and practice can bring about artistic maturity. Thus, when Abayomi became a staff member of the Institute of African and Asian studies, University of Lagos, in July 1971, he convinced the authorities to build an art studio for his practice, which was completed by 1972. The artist saw that studio as a chance to realize his dream to "give some youth the benefit of [his] experience in the hope that [his] idea of visual art [would] take root ... that idea being to stress the nobility and importance of fine art as a profession" (Barber 1984:4). Barber has realized his ambition at least to the extent that the Institute of African and Asian studies morphed into the Centre for Cultural Studies, which in turn became the nucleus of what is now the Department of Creative Arts at the University of Lagos.

Indeed, by 1985 the workshop had twenty artist apprentices working with Barber. Students came to him of their own volition and their admission to his workshop was by tacit understanding between master and student. The methods adopted for the training of artists at the workshop was the apprenticeship system. Every student therefore developed according to his physical capacity, mental growth, and convenience. In the workshop there was an absence of the formality that is characteristic of most schools. There was no prearranged program of study, and teaching in the style of formal art institutions was also absent. The apprentices learnt and discovered the secrets of the trade little by little.

The "curriculum" of the workshop was directed towards the personal philosophy of Abayomi Barber. The essentials of the curriculum nonetheless included the inculcation of artistic attitudes in the trainees, guided through painstaking and diligent execution of art works. It also implanted in them the acquisition of expressional dexterity and prowess to photographically reproduce objects in drawing, painting, and sculpture. The (faithful) copying of good works by master artists or from nature is also emphasized and encouraged in the studio. Having mastered this, the trainees are adjudged to have acquired the tool or medium for self-expression. Because of the consistency in the works produced by artists from this studio in terms of ideas, philosophy, and style, it has been recognized as an art school. Its appellation is however a personification of Abayomi Barber, the mentor. The school emphasizes portraiture and landscape as genres, with subjects taken from Yoruba culture. Ideas are usually folk-centred without elitist pretensions. In the works of Barber School artists, flowing rivers and other natural phenomena transmogrify to attain human attributes. Landscapes are often a medley of trees, foliage, shells, hills, feathers, birds, rocks, cowries, fruits, men, and women juxtaposed into compositions to mystifying effect.

The works are mostly philosophical, ritualistic, or magical (mysteriously charming) but infrequently concerned with the political complexities of contemporary Nigerian society. Consider, for instance, Toyin Alade's Igba Irubo or Sacrificial Calabash (Fig. 4). He communicates spirituality in visual terms through his atmospheric treatment of form and color. He takes as his subject Yoruba ritual practice. The work features the head of an Osun priestess and the sacrificial calabash Igba-Irubo, an apparition emerging from a distance and rendered obscure by his use of translucent film of light and colors.

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In the same vein, Abayomi Barber's Yemoja sculpture (Fig. 5). in the National Collection. represents the fertility goddess Yemoja. The work illustrates the fecund imagery of a spirit possessing the ability to bestow children and blissful earthly accomplishments. The Yoruba, like other Africans, attach much importance to such worldly aggrandizement as children and wealth. This makes the worship of Yemoja, the deity mother of all rivers and seas, cut across Yoruba and African cultural horizons, including people of African descent in the Diaspora. In all cases, she is thought to deserve some form of reverence. The sculpture is rendered in a most convincing naturalism, the woman youthfully ageless and of immanent composure. Abayomi clearly restates with this work his claims to the heritage of ancient Ile-Ife's naturalistic art.

A different work, Toyin Alade's Flight of the Ogbanje (Fig. 6), replicates the eerie myth of the Ogbanje or Abiku child. These are children believed by the Yoruba and other African cultures to have a dual personality, earthly and spiritual. Toyin Alade's painting is a visual narrative of this myth. Another work, Landscape by Abayomi Barber himself (Fig. 7) expresses the anthropocentric perspective of Yoruba beliefs about the earth's topography and its spiritual manifestations in the forms of the various animals known to man. It is a sample of the artist's most recent paintings, possessing characteristic deep hues with esoteric images of wild animals such lions, leopards, and birds emerging from the natural forms.

Busari Agbolade's Money and Women (Fig. 8) integrates traditional and modern objects to make coded statements about the Yoruba view of women as associated with the glamorous things of life. The painting displays a subtle gradation of color from primary to tertiary--red, yellow, blue, green, ochre, and mauves are blended to attain their mildest tonal value. The subtle toning of the colours, foggy background, and the mat that dominates the background conjures up objects from the background such as different types of money (manilas, cowries, dollars, and naira notes) along with two femme breasts. Most of the artists of the Barber school are Yoruba, like Abayomi himself, and so have adopted Yoruba symbols, subjects, and themes, justifying their use because of their cultural knowledge. The school's non-Yoruba students initially adopted Yoruba cultural imagery and symbolism too, but abandoned it as they matured professionally. For example, Kent Ideh, an Urhobo artist trained by the school, does not see any justification for Yoruba symbols' inclusion in his work. For many of the Yoruba artists, however, adaptations of the cultural images have become a hallmark.

Busari Agbolade maintains that it was Abayomi who initially introduced them to ideas about cultural subjects and themes. Other artists of the school have their diverse opinions on these cultural subjects. According Muri Adejimi, the events of the 1970s and 1980s were also responsible for the choice and adaptation of Yoruba iconographical symbols in the art of the Barber School. These years, encompassing the Second World Black and African Festival of Art and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977 and the success of performance groups such as that of playwright and producer Herbert Ogunde, stimulated cultural pride in Nigerians. At that period, notes Adejimi, "we were thinking that Africa, particularly Nigeria, was moving towards a kind of self identity ... Unfortunately, nobody had foreseen this 'born-again' [phenomenon] in the country [that is, the wave of fundamentalist Christianity across Nigeria]"--or, in retrospect, the impact of Islamic fundamentalism. (5)

Abayomi insists that the iconographic symbols and images as used by the Barber School are deeply rooted in the African psyche, and he feels they have immense influence on him. (6) Olu Spencer, one of the first-generation artists of the Barber School, however, insists on more intentionality than that. He contends that the desire to establish some measure of African identity is the basis of the Barber School's incorporation of Yoruba iconography. Indeed, Spencer maintains that the use of Yoruba motifs and symbols by the artists of the school has gone a

   long way to reveal that African art works can have elements of
   study, treatment and rule comparable with those that are
   naturalistically rendered by European artists ... Ironically, when
   art work is properly addressed, critics from the West often
   conclude that it is not an African art work; indeed, some art works
   from Africa have been labelled as not being African because their
   naturalism was too obvious.... But now, through the style of the
   Barber School, a statement is established that to be African does
   not necessarily have to be a celebration of kitsch in rendition.
   (7)

Not surprisingly, the interpretations of the cultural and magical iconography used in the works of the school vary with the individual artists. For instance, with kola-nuts, Busari Agbolade explains, "not many people know what we do with kola nuts." He insists, "if in painting, the lobes of the partitions of the kola-nuts are presented with two pieces lying face down and the remaining two facing up, it has its [mystical] meaning." (8) Cowries are also used like kola-nut and palm kernels in Ifa divination. Abayomi insists that Owo eyo (cowries) are symbols of wealth. Busari Agbolade, however, regards cowries as significant paraphernalia of the gods. Eggs are another symbol often seen in the works of the Barber School. Toyin Alade opines that the egg is paradigmatic of life itself. Every idea in life, he maintains, begins in the form of an egg.

Feathers of various kinds also feature in the iconography of the Abayomi Barber School, and have been variously interpreted by the Barber School artists. Toyin Alade, however, is convinced that feather images in his paintings assure him of patronage and sales. Prior to using feather imagery, he was not selling his paintings. On introducing feathers in one of the paintings, customers came. "It works like magic," he says. (9) As regards the images of women or femininity in Barber School Art, Abayomi insists that it is consonant with the perception of women everywhere as mothers, daughters, and wives. His painting of a nude (Fig. 9) reflects the sociocultural, philosophical, and ideological attitudes about women in the artist's creative repertoire. To Muri Adejimi, "women are aesthetic and magical." (10) In depicting female forms, therefore, Adejimi argues that the artists of the Barber School are merely documenting events. Concerning colors used by the school, Adejimi pointed out that basically artists of the school use cool colors.

CONCLUSION

The Abayomi Barber School stands alone within modern Nigerian art as an informal workshop program that promotes rigorous training and development of its members and that is characterized by its emphasis on naturalistic rendering of forms, as seen in such works as Barber's portrait of the late Oni of Ife-Oba Adesoji Aderemi (Fig. 10). Barber and his students assert through their work that African artists can create in a naturalistic idiom as well as European artists and that African subject matter and symbols are intrinsic to an expression of African identity. Both stem from a need to affirm the artist's sense of self and his African identity in the face of European ethnocentrism during the colonial and immediately postcolonial periods. His depictions of African subjects and themes, his apprenticeship program, and the firm stamping of a style on the work of his students show Abayomi Barber as following in the footsteps of such Yoruba artists as Areogun of Osi and Olowe of Ise.

References cited

Adepegba, Cornelius O. 1995. Nigerian Art: Its Tradition and Modern Tendencies. Ibadan: Jodad Publishers.

--. 1996. "Split Identity and the Attendant Perspective Tangle in Postcolonial African Visual Art Forms." Paper presented at "From the Margins: Postcolonial Voices," an international symposium of postcolonial literature and culture. Queens University, Armagh, September 30.

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Freeborn O. Odiboh is a recent Leventis Fellow at the Centre of African Studies, SOAS, University of London. He lectures on art history and is presently Head of Art History, Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. [e-mail]

Notes

Research for this paper was carried out in the context of research for a PhD in Art History (University of Nigeria, Nsukka 2004). An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the Triennial Symposium for African Art, Harvard University, April 2004.

(1) The writings of these authors such as Micheru Gatheru's Child of Two Worlds, Camara Laye's L' Enfant Noir; Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God and Things Fall Apart were cited in Kasfi: 1999:134.

(2) Oloidi Ola, personal communication, 1998.

(3) The artist did not provide the dates he attended these schools

(4) This is as much as Abayomi could remember of this man's name. Levi was the initial publisher of Aworerin, which was later published by the Western Regional Education ministry.

(5) Muri Adejimi, personal communication, Lagos, 2000.

(6) Abayomi Barber, personal communication, Lagos, 2001.

(7) Olu Spencer, personal communications, Lagos, 2000 and 2001.

(8) Busari Agbolade, personal communication, Lagos, 2000.

(9) Toyin Alade, personal communication, Lagos, 2000.

(10) Muri Adejimi, personal communication, Lagos, 2000.