Where is ‘Tutu’?

Tutu

The long search for the original ‘Tutu’, a Ben Enwonwu oil on canvas painting, by a Lagos-based collector has so far drawn a blank. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke chronicles the efforts to find this masterpiece

Something about her regal features had caught his interest. Why, with her straight narrow nose and thin lips, she almost didn’t look Negroid! Couldn’t she indeed easily have passed for a Fulani girl! But Ben Enwonwu, of course, knew she was, or had to be, Yoruba. Her name, Adetutu Ademiluyi, attested as much.  So that made her a member of the Ile-Ife royal family. She was, he later discovered, the granddaughter of the then O’oni of Ife.

Fate decreed their meeting during one of his regular trips to Ile-Ife. The aim of these trips, according to Professor Sylvester Okwuonodu Ogbechie (a University of California, Santa Barbara-based expert on Enwonwu), was “to document cultural activities and produce sketches of the Ife countryside.” Enwonwu couldn’t help stoking his interest in the damsel. What if he asked her to sit for a portrait?

The artist in him urged him to swing into action. But the girl’s family did not initially warm up to the idea. What did this Igbo man really want from their daughter? When tongues began to wag, what would the people think about an amorous liaison developing between an Ife princess and an Igbo man? This was the early 1970s and ethnic mistrust that boiled over from the civil war was still prevalent. Besides, the historic town Ile-Ife – known as the cradle of Yoruba civilisation – was still very provincial in outlook.

“Enwonwu finally got her parent’s approval and painted three portraits of the young woman,” revealed Professor Ogbechie in his PhD dissertation. “He considered the principal version (Tutu, oil on canvas, 1973) one of his most prized possessions. In these works, he depicted Tutu (short for Adetutu) looking over her shoulder into space dressed in formal Yoruba attire. Details of the costume were subsumed; swift brushwork and a diaphanous treatment of forms impart a haunting quality to the regal pose of the young woman.”

Professor Ogbechie also affirmed that Enwonwu explored his new stylistic direction in his portraits of the then Ife monarch’s granddaughter, which could pass for the works of a Western or Western-influenced artist. The artist himself refused to adhere to the Western notions of what African art should look like. “I will not accept an inferior position in the art world,” he wrote in 1950. “Nor have my art called African because I have not correctly and properly given expression to my reality. I have consistently fought against that kind of philosophy because it is bogus.

European artists like Picasso, Braque and Vlaminck were influenced by African art. Everybody sees that and is not opposed to it. But when they see African artists who are influenced by their European training and technique, they expect that African to stick to their traditional forms even if he bends down to copying them. I do not copy traditional art...”

Ben Enwonwu The Marketplace

Decades later and 13 years after Enwonwu’s passage into the great beyond, one of his avid collectors stood contemplating a copy of the oil on canvas painting, “Tutu”, in his living-room with his guest, an art journalist.

“They can’t find the original ‘Tutu’!” the collector, Rasheed Gbadamosi, told the journalist. Many copies of this Ben Enwonwu’s masterpiece –“Our own ‘Mona Lisa’,” he called it – have circulated among collectors. But no one knows where the original “Tutu” is.

A source at the Ben Enwonwu Foundation offices in the upscale Ikoyi neighbourhood of Lagos corroborated this assertion. The work, indeed, is not in its collection nor is its whereabouts officially known in art circles.

This was a painting, Norma Jackson-Steele, a Guyanese-born collector, recalled, the artist was so attached to that he wouldn’t even be persuaded to show it to collectors, let alone part with it. This account is consistent with that of another collector, Sammy Olagbaju, who recalled Enwonwu’s reluctance to part with even works he had promised buyers.

During Enwonwu’s funeral in 1994, the original of the painting was seen among the works featured in an exhibition. Meanwhile, its print versions continued to circulate among drooling collectors. Not even the National Gallery of Modern Art in the National Theatre, Lagos building in Iganmu,  can boast of being in possession of the original version. 

Parallels have also been drawn between the painting and Pablo Picasso’s “Blue Nude”, “La Celestina” and “Woman with Crossed Arms”. Enwonwu, buoyed by his adherence to the Negritude ideology, venerated the ideal image of African womanhood. 

Indeed, Professor Ogbechie, in his book Ben Enwonwu: the Making of an African Modernist, affirmed that the ideology’s “veneration of the image of the black woman as an embodiment of African ideals coincided with his (Enwonwu’s) deployment of his indigenous Igbo concepts of beauty and feminine power.” 

Something emotive about this painting of a young Yoruba lady harks back at Enwonwu’s fascination with royalty. Professor Ogbechie noted the artist’s exaltation of Bini royal traditions in his art and believed this could have been a factor that urged him to produce a portrait of the princess called Adetutu or Tutu for short.

In his quest for the elusive “Tutu” original, Gbadamosi had reached out to the Enwonwu estate. He also initiated a thread of inquiry through prominent collectors, which ended in a cul-de-sac. He now believes there is a possibility the work is no longer in Nigeria.

Perhaps, some expatriate collector has taken it along with him or her. His most recent quest was instigated by a tip-off by a Lagos-based female artist, which eventually turned out to be false.  

The original “Tutu”, he was informed, wasadorning the residence of University of Ife’s vice chancellor. “The rumour came through to us last year (2010) and we set up a team of three people under the auspices of the Grillo Pavilion,” he narrated. “The team got to the vice chancellor’s residence and found nothing.”

Pavilion

The Grillo Pavilion, based in Gbadamosi’s country home, plans to hold a seminar called “The Search for Tutu”. Gbadamosi, the founder of the pavilion, thinks the work deserves a seminar. It is, after all, a masterpiece of one of Nigeria’s art icons.

But his search continues... He once offered close to a million naira bounty to anyone who could reveal where the work is. During his recent interactions with the Ademiluyis in the Ikeja Country Club, he had made a few enquiries on the subject but drew a blank.

So, where is “Tutu”? 

source: www.thisdaylive.com