By Yulia Tulegenova

So the Tate has discovered Nigeria.

There’s a big, serious show on at the moment. “Nigerian Modernism.” It’s full of incredible work, over 250 pieces from the 1940s through to the 80s. The kind of show that makes you feel the weight of the institution, the grand statement being made. And the statement, on the surface, is a simple one: modern art wasn’t just something that happened in Paris and New York.

You read the press release, and it’s full of the right kind of language. The curator talks about “multiple contexts within which the language of modern art developed.” Which is a very polite, academic way of saying that the story we’ve all been told for the last century, the one that starts with Picasso and ends with Warhol, is missing a few rather large chapters.

And that’s all true. And it’s all very worthy.

But the question that hangs in the air, the one that the wall texts don’t quite answer, is a much simpler one.

Why now?

At first, you think, well, it’s just a necessary correction. A rebalancing of the history books. And it is. You walk through the rooms and see the work of artists like Ben Enwonwu or Ladi Kwali, and you feel a sense of profound injustice that these names aren’t as familiar as their European counterparts. Enwonwu was a global star in his day. He was commissioned to sculpt the Queen in the 1950s. Famed critics put him in the same league as the modern masters. Henry Moore was a fan. This isn’t a story of some unknown artist being plucked from obscurity. This is a story of a major figure being, somehow, quietly written out of the main narrative.

And Ladi Kwali, the potter and ceramicist. She’s on the 20 Naira note in Nigeria. A national icon. Her work is this incredible fusion of traditional Gwari techniques and a modern studio sensibility. So the question isn’t, “Is this work any good?” That’s not up for debate. The question is, “Why has it taken a place like the Tate so long to give it this kind of space?”

Is this an apology? A gesture of post-colonial goodwill?

Maybe. But I’m always a bit sceptical of the art world’s sudden bursts of conscience.

The whole thing feels a bit like finding a box of incredible old records in your attic. You’ve known for years they were there, gathering dust. You just didn’t think they were particularly important. Then, suddenly, everyone’s buying vinyl again. Those obscure records are now selling for a fortune online. So you bring the box downstairs, clean them up, put them in pride of place by the stereo and tell all your friends what a visionary you were for holding on to them for so long. The timing is just a little too convenient.

Because you can’t look at this show without looking at what’s been happening in the auction houses for the last few years. In 2018, an Enwonwu painting sold for over a million pounds. Last year, Ladi Kwali’s work set new records at Bonhams. The market has woken up. Collectors are hungry for new stories, for new territories. And where the market goes, the museums, eventually, follow. They have to. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just gravity.

So is this show just the Tate catching up? Acknowledging a market reality that has become too big to ignore?

I remember a decade ago, you’d be lucky to see one or two of these names in a group show, usually under some unhelpful, ghettoizing banner like ‘World Art’ or ‘Art from Africa’. This feels different. The focus, the depth, the seriousness of it is undeniable.

And the art itself. It fights back against any simple narrative you try to put on it. It’s not just one thing. You have artists like Uzo Egonu, who spent most of his life in Britain, making these beautiful, melancholic paintings about migration and feeling stateless. His work is steeped in a European modernist tradition, but the soul of it is somewhere else entirely.

Then you have artists who are blending techniques, taking the uli body painting of the Igbo people and finding the modernist principles of improvisation and harmony within it. They weren't just copying Europe. They were in conversation with it, arguing with it, and forging something new in the process. Enwonwu insisted that if Monet could be considered a modern artist for painting haystacks, then he could be a modern artist for painting Igbo masquerades. And he was right.

Actually, scrap that. The most important thing here isn’t the institution’s motives, or the market forces, or the post-colonial guilt.

The most important thing is that you can walk into a gallery in London in 2025 and be confronted with a body of work this powerful, this rich, and this shamefully overlooked. The tragedy is not that these artists weren’t great. The tragedy is that for so long, we weren’t looking.

So what does this show really tell us? It tells us that our idea of modernism was too small, too narrow, too white. It tells us that the art world is slowly, reluctantly, being forced to admit that its map of the world was wrong. And it tells us that great art has a habit of surviving, even when it’s ignored. It waits patiently in the attic, knowing that one day, someone will finally come looking for it. Let’s hope they don’t put it back in the box when the trend moves on.