Shows of Surprise

 Among the several surprising exhibitions in London at the moment is the British Museum’s Kingdom of Ife: sculptures from West Africa.   Like many people, I had vaguely seen some of the sculptures – such as the “Ori Olokun” head, because it was used as the logo for an all-African sporting event in 1973, and had managed to impinge on my consciousness.  But though I was aware of the Benin bronzes, “Ife” was not even a word I had come across before.

Ife is the “spiritual heartland” says the BM
publicity, of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, the Republic of Benin and the many
descendents of the ancient Yoruba people living all over the world. Ife is
therefore the birthplace of many of the highest achievements in art and culture
of the whole of Africa – especially sculpture, carved, modeled and cast – from
the 12^th through 15^th  centuries. Ife was then a thriving city-state in what is now
modern Nigeria, with good communications and trade relations that made the area
prosper.

         Many
of the 100 objects in the show (in the Round Reading Room until 6th June) are
portrait sculptures; and this is probably explained by Yoruba religious
practices, in which important people – kings, queens, chiefs – were deified at
their death. This slightly begs the question, as it assumes that these works
are likenesses of individuals, which doesn’t somehow seem likely or all of them
on first inspection.

        For example, there’s a group of “almost
life-size copper alloy heads which reveal an idealized, naturalistic
uniformity” even though each one of them “has notable individual
characteristics. Their similarities lead scholars to speculate that they “were
produced over a relatively short time, maybe in a single workshop.” To me these
seem idealized only in the  sense
that, say, Modigliani’s faces are idealized – elongated and stylised, perhaps,
but still recognizably belonging to different human beings. The most celebrated
find of Ife objects was in 1910 by the German Leo Frobenius. Like many of his
contemporaries, he simply could not bring himself to believe that the pieces he
collected were African, so conjectured that he’d stumbled upon the treasures of
the lost continent of Atlantis – and moreover, that the Yoruba deity Olokun was
identical to Poseidon.

         One
of the reasons for Frobenius’s skepticism was technological: all the
copper-alloy sculptures use lost-wax casting, and it was hard for the explorer
(and even those who followed him) to accept that Africans had such
sophisticated technology so early – though it is now known that there were
several iron-working and copper-mining sites in West Africa in the first
millennium BC, and cire perdu casting
was used in Ibo-Ukwu (says the splendid catalogue) in the 9^th and 10^th
centuries AD. These ravishing objects have mostly been loaned by Nigerian
museums, are scheduled to tour North America through 2012, and shouldn’t be
missed.

         Another
extraordinarily beautiful show is at the National Portrait Gallery until the 20^th
June – The Indian Portrait 1560-1860.
The NPG claims it’s the first ever exhibition devoted to Indian portraits, and
also that they have found a “lost” lifesize portrait of the Emperor Jahangir
(1617) that “is the largest painting to come from the Mughal empire.” Though it
appeared in a saleroom catalogue in 1995, it “has never previously been seen.”
The sixty pieces in this show aren’t all masterpieces, but a large number of
them are just that, including a pair of pages from the Padshahnama belonging to the queen; a sexually explicit but somehow
not pornographic painting of an act of copulation, owned by the British
Library; a wonderful picture of a fat Hindu holy man from the collection of
Sven Gahlin;  and two delicious
pictures from Howard Hodgkin’s great collection – a watercolour portrait (c.
1685) of a disproportionately large Raja Bhupat Pal of Basholi smoking a huqqa, staring intently at a tiny
servant holding the business end of the water-pipe, who is looking back just as
hard  at his employer, and a
gorgeous watercolour and gold portrait  by Haider Ali and Ibrahim Khan (c.1645) of a Sultan of
Bijapur  and his most powerful
minister, whisking the flies off his master, while riding a charming looking
elephant, against a blue background.