Creative Reformation of Existing African Tradition:: The Abayomi Barber Art School and Modern Nigeri

This book on the creative reformation of existing African art tradition contextualizes the Abayomi Barber Art School in Nigeria within modern African artistic ideas and practices. Abayomi Barber and his students assert through their work that African artists can create in a naturalistic idiom just as European artists and that African subject matter and symbols are intrinsic to an expression of African identity. The depiction of African subjects and themes, his apprenticeship programme, and the firm stamping of a style on the work of his students show him as following in the footsteps of such Yoruba artists as Areogun of Osi or Olowe of Ise. His emphasis on the metaphysical is an extension of a traditional African preoccupation with religious forms and values. The Abayomi Barber art school stands within modern Nigerian art as an informal workshop programme that promotes rigorous training and development of its members and that is characterized by its emphasis on naturalistic rendering of forms. It combines an emphatic rejection of formal exoticism with a frank embrace of cultural symbols and considers the osogbo art school, a wrong paradigm for modern African art.