Linoleum cut, editions of 48 and 50, 1969.
Museum Purchase: 1970s, Fr. Kevin Scanlan, SMA
through Fr. Kevin Carroll, SMA, Irish Province   

The third in our set of fourteen Stations of the Cross, Jesus Falls the First Time, is signed and dated Bruce P. O. Onobrakpeya Oct 1969  39/48. The numbers 39/48 mean that this particular impression is the 39th print pulled in an edition of 48 . Thirteen of our fourteen prints come from an edition of fifty; III comes from an edition of 48. The medium here is linocut: the image is cut into a sheet of specially prepared linoleum, mounted on a wooden block. More than one block is needed to produce an image of this complexity. These must be perfectly registered (aligned) when printing, to ensure a coherent image. Small editions are typical of linocut because of the fragility of the medium, compared with copper etching or steel engraving.

Our set of fourteen print dates from the late 1960s. In the early 1960s, Onobrakpeya was a member of the ‘ Zaria Rebels' who changed the direction of Nigerian contemporary art away from the influence of ‘European Modernism' toward a more distinctly African aesthetic. Several marks of the African tradition in art may be noted in our Fourteen Stations.

Relative Scale.
In this print ‘Christ Falls for the First Time', Jesus is almost twice as big as the soldier with the club – the figures in the picture are in relative scale. In relative scale, figures are larger or smaller in direct relationship to their importance, intrinsic or narrative. It is a common practice in the traditional arts of sub-Saharan Africa . Absolute scale, in which all figures are the same size despite their relative importance, is more pervasive in the western tradition, dating all the way back to the 5th century BC in ancient Greece .

Narrative.
Our artist is very much at home in pictorial narrative, part of the Nigerian tradition in art dating back hundreds of years. Compare the ‘Fourteen Stations of the Cross' with the four doors by Bandele of Osi Ilorin, Yoruba , Nigeria , installed at either end of the galleries. These are modeled on the type of doors which graced the entrances to the palaces of Yoruba obas (kings).

Distortion.
Observe the exaggeration in the size and shape of the right leg and knee of Christ; this distortion is an example of kinesthesis: ‘the sensation of position, movement, tension of parts of the body': Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 1979. For an excellent example in African art see the Lobi bateba with stretched right arm in CASE IX. In this particular print, however, the influence may be direct and European (this is speculation on my part). Onobrakpeya makes us feel the drag on the leg as Picasso did in the running, weeping woman in his masterpiece ‘ Guernica '. If the artist never saw this monumental painting at MOMA, New York , he probably saw a reproduction of it when he was a student at The Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaire).