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Kingdom of Ife
British Museum, London
Jonathan Jones
This is an exceptional exhibition,
even by the high standards the British Museum has
established in recent years. It is extraordinary
because it brings together such a large number of
masterpieces that have rarely or never been
exhibited outside
Nigeria before – and when I say masterpieces, I
mean artworks that rank with the Terracotta Army,
the Parthenon or the mask of Tutankhamun as
treasures of the human spirit.
For European artists a century
ago, African
sculpture was powerful precisely because it did
not conform to the smooth idea of beauty that
Picasso's generation had been brought up on – ideas
that went back to classical Greece. But they had not
seen the art of Ife, a medieval city state that
flourished from the 12th to 15th centuries in West
Africa, trading across the Sahara with the Islamic
Mediterranean world.
The superb sculpted heads in this
exhibition – statues of sick people, monuments to
warriors, royal heads whose strange vertical scars
tell of the ceremonies of the court – were first
rediscovered in quantity in an amazing find on a
building site in the modern Nigerian city of Ife in
1938. This art was so different and unexpected, so
"un-African", that one of its first students thought
it must be the lost art of Atlantis.
But these works were not Greek,
let alone from Atlantis. The faces that gaze coolly
past you from these cases are challenging and
formidable in their beauty. And they are disturbing
to anyone who has any lingering belief in the
uniqueness of European art. Sculptors in Ife
imitated the human face as accurately and
sensitively as any Greek, and matched the Greek
feeling for harmony, balance and proportion.
What we see here is an African
classical art – by which I mean an art with a strong
concept of order that gives it a special authority,
whether it comes from Athens, China or Ife. Like
that of ancient Egypt, the art of Ife is perfect,
remote, godlike and yet – as with Egypt – when you
look again it is highly observational, rooted in the
real life of this lost civilisation.
Ife remains mysterious. The
catalogue admits there's so much still to learn
about this art and the world that created it.
Hopefully this exhibition will be the starting point
for new archaeology. It elicits awe. To behold these
royal heads is to travel to a fabled realm far
beyond your imagination, a place richer than
Atlantis.
From the
Guardian, UK
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