Benin Bronze Mask
The story of Bronze age from the year 1200

The bronzes of Benin are the outcome of a long tradition of bronze casting which can be traced back over more than two millennia to the ancient Nok people, who lived on the plains of Jos and the Yoruba people who flourished between the 10th and the 19th Centuries In the south and west of Nigeria. Among the oldest known African sculptures are terracotta figures created by the Nok people around 500 AD. Superb bronze and terra cotta heads were also made in what is now Ife, Nigeria from the 1200's onwards. The 'Obas' held a monopoly of sculptures in brass - Chiefs were only allowed ancestral figures in terra cotta and metalworkers were the servants of the 'Oba'. Benin art was thus predominantly Royal and so closely tied to the rituals used in service of divine Kingship that it underwent few modifications over the generations. There can be little doubt that this West African art was an indigenous development fuelled by the need for lifelike images of Royalty for funerary rituals and the cult of ancestors from whom the Kings derived their significant power and authority. In the former Kingdom of Benin, Western Nigeria, great artists produced high quality hand made bronze sculptured figures and heads during the 1400's and up to the early part of the 1700's. The art of Benin is close in feeling to contemporary Buddhist art in India and South-east Asia. Few people outside Africa knew about African sculpture until the 1900's when it became a major influence on western art. The designs and simple, dramatic forms of African sculpture are known to have influenced famous artists such as Henry Moore of Great Britain, George Braque of France and even Pablo Picasso of Spain. No sculpture of comparable technical accomplishment or spiritual poise and serenity was produced in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and some centuries after the date of the finest Ife works. There is therefore no doubt that these figurines are unique, special and extremely valuable in their class and entirety - as ancient Benin was home to some of the greatest art ever produced on the Continent. Benin bronzes were the first of the African arts to win widespread acceptance throughout Europe. Most of the bronze heads, were created in honour of Kings (called 'Obas') and were handed down from King to King. The 'Obas' - rarely seen in public - reigned by hereditary succession and had absolute spiritual, political and military power. The 'Obas' traced his Ancestry to the son of an 'Oni' (king of Ife) who was believed to be descended from a God - this tradition set him apart from his subjects. Osei Tutu ruled until 1717 when Opukuware, his grand nephew, became King and ruled the Empire. The proud past of the Benin Kingdom began its rise in the 12th Century AD, when it took its ruling Dynasty from the earlier Yoruba Kingdom of Ife into a highly developed culture flourishing in the 16th and 17th Centuries before the slave trade began a long decline. At the end of the 1800's the Empire grew weak as many wars were fought. Nine battles were fought against the British during 1807 and 1901 after which the British gained control and took over the Empire. In 1897 during the nine-war battle, British expeditionary forces attacked and destroyed the City. They looted the palace of Benin and great numbers of very high quality bronze sculptures were taken - most of which are priceless today and are housed in British and German museums. Some figurines were saved - having been buried with King and Queen Inyang Inyang and later retrieved by the Government and transferred to the main museum in Nigeria.

http://www.vilasart.co.uk/beninbronze.html

India has asked for their diamond, shouldn't Nigeria be asking for the Bronze masks and NoK terracotta?

bump

Queen Mother

15th-16th century: The bronze head date from the creation of the title of Iyoba, awarded to the woman and mother (Uhunmwun-Elao) who literally, gave birth to the future king, Oba Esipie (1504-1550)

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Great art and history. . . . I love that hairdo on the Iyoba.

I m looking for help determined the origin an history of a mask that I have acquired that I am told is an original Benin Bronze

You are a joker like the mask. Right?
Then again I might be wrong.

have no clue what you mean, Mask is real. Have no clue what it is. Can you help?

Mask is real does not make it a Benin mask.

.

hmm, the post i responded to is missing.

ejs:

I m looking for help determined the origin an history of a mask that I have acquired that I am told is an original Benin Bronze

That is probably not even a modern Benin bronze, and definitely not an "original" (pre-1897) Benin bronze.


For a brief outline/overview of the industry in imitation Benin bronzes, you can check out this article:

Art and Science in Benin Bronzes
Author(s): Joseph Nevadomsky
Source: African Arts, Vol. 37, No. 1, Explorations of Origins (Spring, 2004), pp. 1+4+86-88+95-96
Published by: UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3338001


Here's approximately half of the article:

"A famous social scientist once said, "In science as in love, an overemphasis on technique very likely leads to impotence." Good science combines method and intuition, accommodating the objectivity of mathematics and physics that since the Enlightenment has made life synonymous with progress, to the subjectivity of literature and philosophy that since the Ancients has made it worthwhile. Take dating techniques in Benin art. I single out TL (thermoluminescence) because it is a method art historians are most familiar with, if only in that reflexive way of babies startled by a sudden loud noise. Developed in the 1960s and 1970s, TL dating is used to confirm the stratigraphic dating of in situ pottery and terracotta works. It is also routinely used by museums and galleries to verify a plus-or-minus dating of authentic ceramics.


Bronze sculptures with clay-core remnants have also been dated in this way, including the so-called bronze art of the kingdom of Benin in Nigeria. These sculptures are among the most technically proficient works made by the lost- wax casting process. Although in 1897 a British punitive expedition removed objects after sacking the capital (establishing a no-later-than date for "authentic" Benin works), artifacts not part of that booty, and automatically suspected to be more recent in origin, may be authenticated by stylistic methods, by TL testing, or by another method such as metals analysis utilizing laser ablation. While these methods provide an extra comfort level to collectors and museums, they leave something to be desired for reasons I deal with in An Elementary Guide to the Dating of Benin Bronzes (forthcoming; coauthored with Natalie Lawson, California State University, Fullerton). This D ick and Jane-style primer is meant for art historians who failed ninth-grade algebra and/or suffer from social anxiety syndrome. TL is problematic as an accurate chronometric dating procedure and as a certification of authenticity for dealers and their clients. It also poses a challenge to a corps of middlemen adept at faking Benin art. The British punitive expedition against Benin returned with booty consisting of thousands of brass and ivory artifacts that now command premium auction prices. But not all manufactures were confiscated in 1897. In chieftaincy homes in the city, in the palaces of dukes on the outskirts, and in rural communities, one occasionally finds castings that, judging from past experience, might someday enter the market. There are stunning examples. "Traditional Art from the Benin Kingdom," an exhibition at Southern University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, has intriguing pieces. Other examples from the Lower Niger Bronze Industry and the southern fringes of the Edo area pique one's interest. An erstwhile shrine, a serendipitous discovery, brass-castings at the northern boundaries of empire- these excite a scholar's professional gonads and stimulate a collector's salivary glands.

Benin's brass-casting tradition continues, aimed at the venturesome tourist, at diplomats and visitors to Lagos and Abuja, at Nigerians as house decor, at local residents as landscape monuments for keeping up with the Edokpolos, at religious organizations that require bronze apostles with Nigerian embellishments, at the government as civic sculptures that honor its corrupt patriots, and at Hausa runners who artificially antique castings for sale in Europe, the United States, and probably now Japan. Reproductions from South Africa, Cameroon, and Ghana flood the market, too. Bronzes from Cameroon are conspicuous by their bulbous faces and excessive filing, which artificially creates a thinness approaching that of early Benin bronzes. Examples from Johannesburg are inexpensive, aimed at the lower end of the market as curios, and can be found on the Web at <http: / / www.fineafricanarts.com> or in an African arts shop at Notting Hill Gate, London. In a so-so Benin style, they are slightly off, like an Austrian torte made by Eskimos on a very hot day. Others from Jo'burg are cutely rustic, with designs that replicate Zulu/ Swazi /Sotho/Ndebele beadwork and cows with curved horns that are not a part of either the Benin City contemporary casting scene or its historical art. Splinter cells are hidden everywhere. There are Benin-style silver medallions cast in Indonesia, and, adding to the art historical hysteria of Castings of Mass Destruction, one is warned that there are casters in Europe-worse yet, European casters in Europe- producing "Benin" bronzes. As a matter of fact, a casting owned by Chief Inneh of a "bird of disaster," stolen in 1985, may have been made in Europe sometime during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, and there is also the example of the Eresoyen stool. Both are honest historical recastings, maybe, but now globalization brings the postmodern uncertainty of Blade Runner. Replicants hide in artificial fog, disguised as West Africans. Connoisseurs accept simulacra. Art historians struggle for iconographic certainty. No wonder dealers of African art are at wit's end about validation. "The problems of art history in West Africa are almost unique," Paul Craddock tells us in a 1985 essay on dating metals. The Benin bronzes are one of those problems.

That problem is complex. The recent "First Word" in this journal by Skip Cole on African art fakes and the addendum by Barbara Blackmun on recently manufactured Benin pieces are cautionary (African Arts, Spring 2003). Both essays purport that scientifically certified dates from European labs are offered as objective indicators to authenticate Benin bronzes that are not authentic. The manufacture of artificially altered Benin objects with scientific documentation is an international cottage industry. The collusion between Benin's brass-casters and European dealers is a grainy issue, no doubt, with Benin's casters as incidental or indifferent participants. The murky trail leads to Hausa dealers, who purchase raw castings and transform them into "antiquities." These middlemen, their long-distance entrails impervious to national borders and continents, are aided and abetted by international brokers, appraisers, and buyers armed with scientific documentation. Once in a while, historical bronzes do pop up on the market that complicate the researcher's condemnations of casters' infidelities and agents' duplicities. The altar to the hand studied by Bradbury is an on-the-radar bronze and an incontrovertible example. But off radar: owned by Chief Ezomo, one of the hereditary kingmakers, it was stolen in the 1980s by one of the Ezomo's many sons by one of his many wives who buried it in his mom's compound. The police recovered and returned it. Blackmun saw it during her mid-1970s fieldwork, kept on the Ezomo's paternal shrine, and I saw the casting a decade later, after its return. After the Ezomo died, the altar to the hand became part of the estate. Then it disappeared again, to reappear in New Orleans. Charles Davis legitimately acquired it from the inheritors and offered it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it now resides, and I again saw it in 2003 at the Met. Another example, a hip mask, circa sixteenth century, photographed by Fagg (Fagg & Plass 1964) and me (Nevadomsky 1997), is in a Benin City bank vault, with a horde of honest dealers growling at the gate. (Dealers are all honest, just as kids are always bright.) Benin City's museum might have been a magnet for attracting extant pieces in local private hands. But little has happened. With Igun Street - the brass-casters' guild - only a block away from the museum, I hardly go there except to escort visitors, and I was happy to take Barbara Plankensteiner and Gisela Volger there in January 2003. (Plankensteiner and Volger are curating an exhibition of Benin art scheduled for 2006 for the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin; Museum fur Volkerkunde, Vienna; and the Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn.) I was stunned. The museum can't offer a haven for its own collection. Bleak, dusty, and half-empty cases testify to objects on loan, but no one knows where. One is not even sure that displayed objects are the real McCoys. Security for the collection lies with people who harbor a grudge against Benin's historical hegemony, have fallen prey to an evangelical religious fervor, or are simply insouciant. During Joe Eboreime's tenure as Head of Station at the Benin Museum, the Ohenukoni of Ikhuen, a very old man, offered the 100-plus objects from his shrines to the museum at fire-sale prices - as scuttlebutt has it, to prevent his callous senior son (not resident in Benin City) from inheriting and disposing of them. It was a trade-off: the Ohenukoni needed money to redo his palace and silence his chirping wives. Allegedly, some of the objects came in the front door of the Benin Museum and went out the back. Under the usual time-will-tell-or-forget investigation, this incident raised little dust and was chalked up to museum infighting with a division of the spoils. It is typical of museum seepage in Nigeria. Such leaks are endemic."

Hi,

I am looking for some help in establishing the provenance of some masks that I have which I believe may be Benin Guilds masks...Please find attached a scan of pictures taken of three masks that my grandparents, who lived in Nigeria for a while in the 1940s, possessed. There are also several smaller (less intricate) masks. They sent the photos of these masks to Sothebys in the 1970s who contacted the Director of the Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg, Professor Livermermann who replied(written notes by Grandmother) with the following:

"A.W.Fogg, the expert in Nigerian Art and History and probably leader of the British Museum in London wrote a book called African Sculpture(1962-63) Two other books are supposed to be excellent and are written by Frank Willett: 1. African Art(1971) and 2. The tradition of African Art(1967) All of these books are containing bibliographies which give further information about Art and History in Nigeria. Professor Livermermann is not allowed by law to tell anything about the price of pieces. he can only try to find out whether the masks are unalloyed, old and of great value from the point of view of an ethnologist. For this purpose he has to see the masks. Professor Livermermann suggested to contact Mr Fagg. He is sure this gentleman will give the best possible information"

I am in the very early stages of trying to find out about these masks. Could you give me an idea of where you think I could find some more information about them?

Many thanks,
Kind regards,

Sam Scott

sam_scott: Hi,

I am looking for some help in establishing the provenance of some masks that I have which I believe may be Benin Guilds masks...Please find attached a scan of pictures taken of three masks that my grandparents, who lived in Nigeria for a while in the 1940s, possessed. There are also several smaller (less intricate) masks. They sent the photos of these masks to Sothebys in the 1970s who contacted the Director of the Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg, Professor Livermermann who replied(written notes by Grandmother) with the following:

"A.W.Fogg, the expert in Nigerian Art and History and probably leader of the British Museum in London wrote a book called African Sculpture(1962-63) Two other books are supposed to be excellent and are written by Frank Willett: 1. African Art(1971) and 2. The tradition of African Art(1967) All of these books are containing bibliographies which give further information about Art and History in Nigeria. Professor Livermermann is not allowed by law to tell anything about the price of pieces. he can only try to find out whether the masks are unalloyed, old and of great value from the point of view of an ethnologist. For this purpose he has to see the masks. Professor Livermermann suggested to contact Mr Fagg. He is sure this gentleman will give the best possible information"

I am in the very early stages of trying to find out about these masks. Could you give me an idea of where you think I could find some more information about them?

Many thanks,
Kind regards,

Sam Scott

JUST RETURN OUR MASKS BACK TO US OYINBO! THEY ARE NOT YOURS!

Sam Scott, you should probably contact the author of the article I referenced above (Nevadomsky) or contact the author of the following article (Plankensteiner):

http://www.galerie-herrmann.com/arts/art6/Afrika_Szene/Barbara_Plankensteiner_Bilder/Copy_Fake.pdf

Based on articles from them that I've read, they would probably know who to contact to prove whether the art is genuine or not if they can't determine that themselves.

I am personally of the opinion, as a non-expert, that those are not authentic and not from Benin, although I could be wrong.

If this question isn't too nosy, why were your grandparents living in Nigeria in the 1940s?