Anyanwu (sculpture)

[3] Enwonwu claimed that his vision for the piece came to him in a dream, describing it as a "supple graceful female form arising out of the sun in a brilliant shower of light...she loomed towards him in a wide curvilinear arch...the classic Ethiopianized features of the face and the decorative horizontal slats of the lower torso that receded into the horizon, tapering off to a point...".

[3][4] His biographer Sylvester Ogbechie has perceived parallels between Anyanwu and the central figure in a 1946 painting by Enwonwu from his series Song of the City.

Ogbechie believes that Enwonwu appropriated the visual form of Anyanwu from the 1921 work Ethiopia Awakening by the American sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller.

The foundation describes the piece as "one of Ben Enwonwu's greatest works that best illustrates his pioneering contributions to modern art in Nigeria and Africa through the invention of a new visual language that engaged nationalist and Pan-Africanist ideals" and that "...the sculpture's power derives from [Enwonwu's] successful fusion of indigenous aesthetic traditions drawn from his Edo-Onitsha heritage with Western techniques and modes of representation".

[6] The sculpture was originally created between 1954 and 1955 as a commission from the government of Nigeria to mark the establishment of the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos.

Tried to combine material, crafts and traditions, to express a conception that is based on womanhood – woman, the mother and nourisher of man.

[2] A second full size version of Anyanwu was cast in 1956 by Enwonwu in the London studio of the British sculptor William Reid Dick.

[1] In a 2021 article for The Art Newspaper, Ayodeji Rotinwa wrote that "each time" an edition of Anyanwu appears on the art market "...it is attended by fanfare, only for it to go quietly into the possession of its new owner to be hardly discussed again until the appearance of another example" and that the original sculpture at the National Museum in Lagos "lies on a lawn badly in need of manicuring and is visited infrequently by disinterested [sic] children on school trips".

[1] The President of Nigeria, Shehu Shagari, presented a small edition of Anyanwu to Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, on the occasion of his state visit to the United Kingdom in 1981.