Ben Enwonwu valuation
Nigeria's pioneering modernist, who sculpted the Queen from life and painted the lost Tutu portraits.
Ben Enwonwu was born a twin in Onitsha in 1917, the son of a traditional Igbo sculptor whose tools he inherited, and studied art under Kenneth Murray at Government College Ibadan and Umuahia.
What a work by Ben Enwonwu is worth
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Bio
Ben Enwonwu was born a twin in Onitsha in 1917, the son of a traditional Igbo sculptor whose tools he inherited, and studied art under Kenneth Murray at Government College Ibadan and Umuahia. A scholarship took him in 1944 to the Slade School of Fine Art, then evacuated to Oxford, and in the following decades he became the best-known African artist of his time, exhibiting in London, Paris and New York and combining Igbo and Yoruba forms with European modernism in painting and sculpture. He was art adviser to the Nigerian government, made a bronze statue of Queen Elizabeth II from sittings in 1956, and his sculpture Anyanwu stands on the façade of the National Museum in Lagos. He was the first professor of fine art at the University of Ife, from 1971 to 1975, and died in 1994.
One of his three portraits of 1973 of the Ife princess Adetutu Ademiluyi, known as Tutu and missing since 1975, was rediscovered in a London flat in 2017, and the find brought his work wide attention. Paintings, drawings, sculpture and works on paper all appear, and because forgeries exist, provenance and comparison with documented works matter.
Onitsha, the Slade and Tate Modern
In 1961 he made a series of wooden sculptures for the London headquarters of the Daily Mirror; lost for decades, they were found in 2013 at a school in Bethnal Green.
Tate Modern's exhibition Nigerian Modernism, from October 2025 to May 2026, gives him a room of his own, and a crater on Mercury is named after him.
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