The Brooklyn Rail

Timed to coincide with the reopening of the Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum, Urhobo + Abstraction juxtaposes monumental African figures with contemporary works by African and African American artists. Installed in Adam Lindemann’s private residence designed by Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, it extends the efforts of the Met to “decolonize” the presentation of works in its impressively enhanced galleries with expanded attention to specific artists and their work. Lindemann, a collector and dealer involved in planning the Rockefeller wing, collaborated with Bernard de Grunne, a scholar and dealer in non-Western art, to extend this curatorial focus while futhering the trans-Atlantic migration of African formal invention; to lend specificity to the vague concept of “abstraction,” they appeal to the work of Robert Farris Thompson, who chronicled that migration in Flash of the Spirit (1983), a celebration of the cool, self-contained urbanity of West African art. 

The full-scale Urhobo figures, male and female, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, commemorate deified ancestors and are models of self-contained poise with their taut, crouching postures. Compressed bent legs are surmounted by barrel-chested torsos and cylindrical necks that protrude abruptly. These are rhythmically accentuated by horizontal bands of sylized beads and bracelets. The works culminate in heads punctuated with slit-like mouths and pointed hair. The richly worked surfaces of chests and foreheads offer fields for scarification. Two of the five figures also bear tophats, emblems of power inspired by European colonists. De Grunne, in a catalogue essay, refers to Robert Thompson’s suggestion that the overlapping polyrythmic intervals of their composition originate in indigenous music. A separate group of related Igbo figures, more elongated and bearing elaborate, delicately carved scarifications, accompany the Urhobo group like a chorus, as though to reinforce communal order.

This spirit of trans-Atlantic social solidarity informs Lindemann’s contemporary selections, which highlight the Spiral Group, an artists’ collective that emerged just before the March on Washington in 1963, in which Civil Rights activism and the Harlem Renaissance merged with the avant-garde legacy of Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Merton Simpson, a member of the Spiral Group who also founded a gallery, works with a contained energy that links him to the African figures, channeling rage at racial oppression into the formal restraint and communal spirit celebrated by Robert Thompson. His Confrontation (1974), a bifurcated image of contained fury, carves a face into antagonistic halves, with dislocated mouth fragments that echo the slit-like orifices of the Urhobo heads and also recall the Melvin Edwards sculpture nearby, A Sign of X (1984-1994), allied to his “Lynch Fragment” series, in which antagonistic segments of raw and polished steel struggle against one another. Sam Gilliam’s A Glistening (1967) approaches Abstract Expresionism with its drips and splashes but offsets its unrestrained energy by bevelling the edges of the support, subtly establishing a sculptural objectivity that aligns it with the planar clarity of the Urhobo sculptures to either side.

Richard Mayhew, another artist affiliated with the Spiral Group, offers Overture III (2023), his last completed work, a seemingly tranquil memory landscape indebted to the Tahitian pastorals of Gauguin—a pioneer of primitivism—but with submerged forms that reflect his lifelong concern for the hegemonic violence associated with the American landscape. Ed Clark, bodily engaged with his iconic broom, seems to respond with a more aggressive, broadly simplified version of that landscape in Untitled (1995). Norman Lewis, another member of Spiral, contributes Sheaves (1975), a self-contained dance of luminous blue gestures on a dark ground that recalls Matisse’s Dance (2010), which was inspired by dancing fishermen on the Mediterranean coast. Also in a pastoral vein, Alma Thomas works with concentrated, contemplative attention, applying irregular, petal-like strokes of pink over shifting fields of blue and yellow in her Red Rambling Rose Spring Song (1976), a vision of abstraction as a material field from which forms emerge.

The show includes one African artist with international scope, whose work grows by accretion, El Anatsui, whose spectacular tapestry of recycled aluminum, Enlightened (2012), anchors the end wall and suggests a head struck by lightening. It evokes the large-scale acrylic mosaics of Jack Whitten, currently on view in his MoMA retrospective, who’s modestly represented by Third Testing (Slab) (1973), a cryptic acrylic monochrome. Whitten’s mosaics, on the other hand, are “memorials,” like the Urhobo figures, to political and cultural heroes. Whitten also emerged from gestural expressionism in the Civil Rights protests to adopt the restraint advocated by Robert Thompson in his process-based abstractions, informed by photography and a profoundly animistic passion for materials (he once claimed to have spiritually placed Barbara Jordan “in that bucket [of acrylic]”). Whitten’s sculpture, combining carving with found objects, should also stand as a memorial to the power of African sculpture, which provided him spiritual sustenance throughout his life.