Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text ed. by Chika Okeke-Agulu (review)

Over two decades ago, Simon Ottenberg made a passionate appeal in his book, New Traditions from Nigeria: Seven Artists of the Nsukka Group, stating that: “There is a need for detailed analyses of individual artists and their art and of African artistic schools and groups, which are often regionally and culturally sited. Scholarly work on the history of contemporary African art is urgent while some of its pioneers are still alive” (1997:13).

Many scholars have responded to this appeal, with notable examples including Chika Okeke-Agulu’s book Obiora Udechukwu: Line, Image, Text, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie’s monograph Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (2008), Salah M. Hassan’s book Ibrahim el Salahi: A Visionary Modernist (2012), and Susan Vogel’s book El Anatsui: Art and Life (2012). These are very apt responses to the urgent need to examine and situate the lives and work of important African artists in the historical evolution of contemporary African art. Okeke-Agulu’s recent book also fits in this category as he focuses on the drawings of Udechukwu, an influential Nigerian artist and former professor in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Professor Udechukwu now teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

This compilation of Udechukwu’s drawings is important in and of itself, for it serves as confirmation his mastery of the art form and his creative approach to drawing. The Nsukka School is noted for projecting creative drawing as an autonomous art mode and for producing socially committed art. Udechukwu is one of its foremost disciples.

The book is made up of two parts: drawings and texts. The drawings in the book are compiled under the title “works,” which is divided into “pictures,” “world,” and “self portraits.” “Pictures” is composed of imaginative sketches, drawings, and thumbnails which Udechukwu made as preparations for paintings, poster designs, and stand-alone drawings. They consist of landscapes, still lifes, figure studies, fauna, and flora that denote him as a deft draughtsman. These drawings span his freshman year at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, through the Biafra–Nigeria civil war years (1965–1970).¹ “Self” are portraits that span between 1965, when he was admitted as an undergraduate, and 1975, five years after the Nigerian civil war. These portraits, in different media, record his physical development and his psychosocial experiences during those momentous years. The drawings are accompanied by text in the form of essays, interviews, timeline, bibliography, and index, which provide appropriate background for the appreciation of the drawings.

In the essay “Drawing and the Poetic Imagination,” Okeke-Agulu situates Udechukwu’s work in the history of contemporary Nigerian art. He insists that Udechukwu provided “sustained rigorous formalism” that was lacking in the work of Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, and Bruce Onobrakpeya, Nigeria’s artist patriarchs, in their bid to push their modernist artistic orientation forward, anchored on Nigerian and African artistic formalism (Okeke-Agulu 2006). Okeke-Agulu points at the exemplar of Ibrahim el Salahi, who succeeded in forming a new aesthetic in the light of postcolonial realities by conjoining Arabic calligraphy with Sudanese craft and art forms using formal rigor.² Okeke-Agulu places Udechukwu on the same pedestal as el Salahi because Udechukwu was able to combine the ethos of the cultural nationalists and the formalists to provide significant work that is comparable to el Salahi’s. This Udechukwu did by exploring uli and nsibidi as formal resources for his work. He, however, went beyond cultural aesthetics to the realm of conceptual art by researching the relationship between uli and music, between drawing and poetry, and the formal relationship among line, space, and text.

Udechukwu was also inspired by Christopher Okigbo’s poetry, which he discovered about the same time as Uche Okeke’s uli-inspired drawings, in 1964.³Okigbo’s lyrical, postsymbolist poetry urged Udechukwu to push his lines towards achieving poetic utterances by paring away...