When I lived in Nairobi, Kenya, in the late sixties, art gallery owner Elimo Njau saw it as part of his duty to African art to make known the work of a promising Nigerian painter, with the memorable name Twins Seven-Seven (b. 1944). Already at that time, this young man was calling out to Europeans, “Look: there is such a thing as modern art being created in Africa.” African art was not all ancient bronzes and museum masks; it was as productive and stylistically exciting as the novels of Chinua Achebe and the plays of Wole Soyinka. I lost sight of Twins Seven-Seven until many years later, when I heard he had turned up, penniless, in Philadelphia. How and why one of the few African artists known in Europe and America across more than three decades could have so disappeared from sight, and suffered neglect and poverty, is one small part of the story Henry Glassie—the Americanist who has written the definitive ethnography of an Irish village and the most comprehensive account of the imbrication of art and life in Asia—tells in this wide-ranging, compulsively readable work of biography and criticism. His study of Prince Twins Seven-Seven attests again to his credo “that art is a universal reality, that works of art are the richest expressions of the manifold human experience” (Art and Life in Bangladesh, 459). As in previous work he has sought to demolish the academic classification of “folk” art, so here Henry Glassie defines “African” art as being both contemporary and traditional. Prince Twins Seven-Seven’s classification of his production as “contemporary Yoruba traditional art” was bound to appeal to the author of Turkish Traditional Art Today.
“There is one past but many histories,” Glassie has written. If, as he says, the world’s many histories are independent cultural constructions, your life story is an independent personal construction. Hence the life of an artist—in contrast to Hollywood’s Vincent van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) or Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris)—is to be viewed in its own terms. Those terms can be, often are, articulated in the art itself (Turner, Cézanne), but the intelligence of a John Ruskin or a Meyer Schapiro can shape our view, or rectify our ignorance. Anonymity has beclouded the identity of African painters, musicians, storytellers, in ways that would never be allowed in Europe. Prince Twins Seven-Seven’s fame, disappearance, and re-emergence are a story of more exploitation than anonymity would have been. This book cites William Fagg, a great authority on African art, who “estimated that ninety percent of the anonymous works in Western collections could be attributed to individual creators if scholars would only go into the field and make inquiries” (329). As folklorists know, no artist is anonymous in his or her own community. To answer the question, “Whatever happened to Prince Twins Seven-Seven?,” to write his story and evaluate his art, Henry Glassie went into the field and made inquiries. Surprised to find Prince Twins Seven-Seven in the employ of his Philadelphia business partner George Jevremovi?, he identified him, interviewed him there in 2006-2008, accompanied him to his native Nigeria, and learned to view his art in its own terms. Believing that a primary duty of folklorists is to produce texts, Henry Glassie gives his subject the greatest freedom to tell his own story. Extensive quotations from his subject are his text.
The book is divided into two parts, “Prince’s Life” (sixteen chapters) and “Prince’s Art” (four chapters). Prince’s life comes largely in his own words, edited “tenderly”: "When he composes an artful narrative, his myth of the origin of Osun, for example, what you read is what he said, precisely, word for word. But in the rambling informational passages, I have, without altering words or splicing statements together, omitted disorienting digressions, tightening the text to sharpen his point, while guiding his speech to the page" (7). Thus, in his introduction, Henry Glassie answers a recurring question about method. So lengthy and sizable are the quotations from Prince Twins Seven-Seven that no reader will think anything important has been omitted, and every reader will feel the force of this extraordinary autobiographer. Always the precise ethnographer of material culture, Henry Glassie stands close. At one point he lets us see Prince inventing a hybrid genre, “sculpture’s painting,” which synthesizes Yoruba carved-wood sculpture with the astonishing colors of his palette. Throughout, the author shows us the processes and the products.
The book begins and ends with discussion of the paintings. Chapter 1 bears the title “Kissing Birds”; its twenty-five pages and eighteen photographs describe in detail the creation of one painting by that name, in 2006, which the author observed. “The principles he used in his painting,” the author writes, “are the principles he will use in composing his autobiography” (11). One principle the author calls “sprung symmetry”: if a concept is symmetrical, yet its execution allows “nonchalant, playful, [or] heroic” departures by the artist. In Henry Glassie’s account, Prince’s two main techniques of painting, geometric and figurative, are paralleled by two techniques of autobiography, chronology-plus-examples and narration-plus-explanatory-comments (35). Thus does Prince leave open the door, in both arts, for improvisation, digression, new topics, and new ideas. Building on the findings of Robert Farris Thompson and Robert Plant Armstrong, Henry Glassie presents in chapter 17 a critical history of Yoruba art. An African artist or a Bangla potter is always, for him as ethnographer, a specific individual, studied as lovingly and respectfully as possible. But his portrayal in words is itself an artistic product, which “widens through conceptualization into a generalized human form”; Prince Twins Seven-Seven, ever unique, becomes every artist. The book ends with reproductions of twenty-nine paintings, many of which come from his American period (after 2000). This final, seventy-page chapter, “Dreams of the Abiku Child,” with its extensive comments by the artist and interpretations by the author, could be a triumphal exhibition catalog all on its own. Perhaps curators will adopt a rhetoric of sprung symmetry.
Between these bookends, Prince Twins Seven-Seven’s story is no unbroken progress from benighted, unappreciative Africa to the bright lights and acclaim of American galleries. He was always appreciated in Africa. In America, after a long period of being “blocked” (Prince’s word), he was pushed back into painting by his wife Shola. Repeatedly in the book, the reader is given different quasi-summaries of the protagonist, none final. Evidently Glassie and George Jevremovi? urged him to carry on, produce more, but Prince, with his frequent money troubles, never personified the prosperous, contented immigrant success story. Several times he went back and forth between Philadelphia and Nigeria; in the end (if indeed it is one), he returned “home” on June 9, 2008 (260). His story is not yet finished. As for the author, Africa’s unceasing attention to the spirit world comes in this book to meet what his readers have seen growing through his writings: a passionate concern for the spiritual in art.
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[Review length: 1156 words • Review posted on August 18, 2010]