His father named him Bamidele. His grandmother named him Olaniyi. When he left home and took to the road, he named himself Twins Seven-Seven. Seven times he came into the world, each time as one in a set of twins. Six times he returned to the spirits who sent him, but after his seventh birth his mother managed, with the water of the goddess Osun, to keep him on the earth.

A boy from the bush, Twins Seven-Seven came to town as the dancer in a traveling medicine show. Crashing the gate at a literary event, he astounded the crowd with his spectacular moves, and Ulli Beier, a man dedicated to the advancement of African art, invited him to stay. At the time, Beier was organizing a series of workshops for young artists. In the third of them, as Ulli Beier put it in a letter to me, Twins Seven-Seven “found himself.”

The town was Osogbo, in the Yorubaland of southwestern Nigeria, the year was 1964. Twins was twenty-one. He wandered into the workshop conducted by Georgina Beier. The others were painting, but Twins called for pen and ink. His first picture, The Devil’s Dog, the first he had ever drawn, already displayed the style—imaginative, decorative, and ripped from within—that would carry him to sudden renown.

The artists discovered in the workshops made up the Osogbo school. In Nigerian published opinion, it was “the most important art movement in contemporary Nigeria,” and Twins Seven-Seven was “undoubtedly the most talented” of the Osogbo artists. Within a year his works had been exhibited in Nigeria, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. International exhibitions followed at the rate of better than two a year. While he mastered new media and his fame as an artist spread, Twins was also the lead singer in a band, an actor in films. He threw himself into the turmoil of Nigerian politics, learning by accident that he was the descendant of a king, and deserved to be addressed as Prince.

Like all of his friends, I call him Twins, but he prefers the formal title, so from now on in this book Prince it will be.

Prince courageously tests himself in diverse spheres, excited to have several unfinished projects going at once. But art is the base and frame of his fame, his pleasure and consolation. When we got to Osogbo, in 2006, Victor Akpan, an official of tourism development, told me, “Twins Seven-Seven is the number one artist of Nigeria. He is an icon.”

An icon:
We are sitting in a roadside restaurant outside of Lakoja, eating pounded yam and egusi, a savory soup of greens and ground melon seeds. A tall, slim girl, maybe twelve, walks slowly from the back and sits at the edge of a bench across from Prince, staring at him, thinking hard. Then she breaks into a sunburst of a smile, claps, stamps her feet, and names the character he played in a film she had seen. She waits, fidgeting with excitement, until we are done—the egusi is excellent—then she assembles her friends for a photograph with the great man. Laughing, Prince hands CDs of his music through the crowd, and we are gone.

The back country roads are lined with wrecks, crushed cars and battered trucks, dragged to the verge and rusting into a long, silent warning to careless drivers. Our road is rutted and gullied, interrupted by temporary barricades thrown up by the police. Not wanting to waste time in pointless interrogation, Prince directs Sunday, his driver, to slow down so he can hand a few naira to the armed men who stand back and smile, pleasantly waving us on. Near Kabba, we downshift through another checkpoint, money passes from hand to hand, but a young man, burdened with a rifle, runs along beside us, panting and calling out, “Kabiyesi, Kabiyesi.” It is the proper greeting for a high chief, meaning, Prince says, “Nobody has the power to challenge your authority.” We pull off the road, so the policemen can gather and have their picture taken with Prince Twins Seven-Seven, attired all in white and carrying the horsetail whisk of chiefly authority.

At the edge of Sekona, we sit with old friends in the shade. There is a bowl of bony, tangy bush meat on the table and many black bottles of stout (Nigeria has surpassed Ireland as a consumer of Guinness). A young man walks by, touches the ground with both hands, thrusting one leg back in honorific semi-prostration, and saying, “Seven-Seven in the number.” Then he stands, steadies himself, and turns to join his pals in the red-eyed haze of an afternoon of palm wine.

In the parking lot of the sleek government buildings outside of Osogbo, young men cluster at the car, asking for a blessing. They kneel around him, and Prince improvises a prayer, advising them to shun fashionable, foreign materialism and hold to the noble culture of their ancestors.

We enter a dimly lit nightclub in Ibadan. Beyond the tables of the drinkers, across the floor swaying with dancers, a tight band plays in the spotlight. We skirt the rim of darkness, and without a change of tempo or melody, the singer’s song segues into praise of Twins Seven-Seven, artist, musician, and hero to his people.

An icon at home, Prince rose to the top of public life when, in 1996, he was awarded chieftaincy titles in Ibadan and Ogidi, the places of his parents. As an artist abroad, his fame crested at the end of the nineteen-eighties with exhibitions in France, Finland, and Japan. All that success came coupled with troubles, troubles in politics, troubles with the police, with women, with jealous friends, with wild armed robbers—troubles that heaped into such a burden that he fled Nigeria in 2000, crossed the black ocean, and settled in Philadelphia where he had been garlanded with honors in the past.

He arrived with an immigrant’s hope. He met with an immigrant’s defeat. Beaten down by repetitive failures, he drifted toward despair, feeling, he said, as though he were tied up in a sack and sinking in the sea. At this lowest of low points, with all hope gone, his funds exhausted, George Jevremovic and his business partner, Neslihan  Jevremovic, appeared in his life, much as Ulli Beier had forty years before. Co-proprietors of a vast emporium called Material Culture, overflowing with select artifacts from throughout the world—furniture from China, textiles from Ghana, ceramics from Romania, carvings from India, splendid carpets from Turkey—George and Neslihan bought what Prince had to sell and offered him a job.

So, Prince came to Material Culture. Strangely enough, he had been there before he had been hired as the security guard of the parking lot that served the store, then fired for sleeping on the job. Now Material Culture paid him, and he worked, doing menial tasks at first, then applying his tremendous talent to small tasks: decorating old Turkish pots, painting pictures on brown paper bags that Material Culture gave to good customers. Prince was relieved, but hardly happy, and George, who cares deeply about artists and art, gave me a call.

We have been best friends, George and I, bound together like brothers, for a quarter of a century. When George told me that he had hired a mercurial character named Twins Seven-Seven, I was shocked. How could this man be down and out in Philly? I had admired his work since the early nineteen-seventies when colleagues and friends who were experts in African art—Roy Sieber, Robert Farris Thompson, and Robert Plant Armstrong—told me about a young artist who was reshaping the Yoruba tradition into modern masterpieces. With Bob Armstrong I was especially close. An anthropologist and phenomenologist, Bob wrote a brilliant trilogy on the nature of art, guided by close study of Yoruba creations. The first volume, The Affecting Presence, had claimed my admiration before we met. The third volume, The Powers of Presence, he dedicated to me. Wellspring, the book in the middle, about which I published a laudatory essay, opens with a painting by Twins Seven-Seven and offers a superb analysis of his work. Bob’s home in Dallas was filled with a lifetime’s collection of Yoruba art, the most exquisite masks, the most refined figures, and, passing through the front door, the first thing you saw was a huge painting by Twins Seven-Seven. Bob left us too suddenly, too soon, but he bequeathed to me a deep appreciation of Prince’s art.

In verbose excitement, I told George what I knew. George and Neslihan gave Prince a space on the second floor of Material Culture, among the pots and rugs, freeing him to paint what he wanted, and Prince entered a period of intense productivity. His is not the kind of work that gets done nine to five. He retreats through the fissures in time, closing his eyes to make contact with his spirit. He chats constantly on the cell phone, maintaining connection with Nigeria. He appears, disappears, reappears. His coworkers groused, complaining that he was being given special treatment, so, eventually, Material Culture struck a deal with Prince about profits and cleared out a small, well-lit room by the carpenters’ shop, allowing him to come and go at will. Prince now had a studio, supplied by Material Culture without cost. And that is how it remains, but when they hired him first, knowing nearly nothing about him, but trusting his instincts, it marked the beginning of a fresh and hopeful phase in Prince’s turbulent life.

That was late in the fall of 2004. A new deal had been made and Prince was on a roll. At Paris, on May 25, 2005, nominated by Olusegun Obasanjo, the president of Nigeria, Prince was named the UNESCO Artist for Peace, “in recognition of his artistic contribution to the promotion of dialogue, tolerance and understanding among peoples, particularly in Africa and its diaspora.”  Those were the words on the certificate signed by Koichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO. Matsuura had written to Prince, saying, “Your ability to shape new artistic paradigms and your capacity to move beyond conventional forms of proportion and perspective have been hallmarks of your genuine artistic approach.” After half a decade of misery, Prince had a victory at last.

His international stature as an original and important artist had been reaffirmed. Soon the UNESCO Artist for Peace sold a major work to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in the autumn of 2005 George and Neslihan mounted a joint exhibition in the new gallery at Material Culture for Prince Twins Seven-Seven and Mister Imagination. A star within the class of creation called outsider art, Mister Imagination assembles industrial detritus into figurative sculpture, often tangential self-portraits depicting a handsome, bearded black king, picked from his dreams and ornamented with bottlecaps. Mister Imagination had his throne and statues on one side of the gallery. Prince had sixty-four paintings, most of them brand new, on the other. Wanting to meet both of these men, I flew to Philadelphia. Both artists had good shows, selling much, and the night ended with Prince’s band playing and all of us dancing, Mister I in a cowboy hat made out of bottlecaps, Prince’s women in lush Yoruba dress, moving in subtle, startling excellence.

Over the next nine months, Prince once came to Indiana, giving a gallery talk at Indiana University where I teach, and I got to Philadelphia several times. Who had the idea first no one remembers, but as we talked, George, Prince, and I, it became my responsibility to write this book.

We all had our motives. As the producer of the world’s finest new carpets and the co-owners of Material Culture, George and Neslihan had no screaming need for money, but they wanted to help, a book would announce that Prince was alive and well in Philadelphia, and they had no objection to selling the paintings they had bought to keep Prince afloat. Material Culture had supported the publication of scholarly books before, believing it is an obligation of the firm to increase general understanding of the abounding art of the world. Prince, for his part, had given hundreds of quick interviews, leading to hundreds of notices in print, all much alike, and he already had a book. As he describes it, he visited Ulli Beier in Australia, where he now lives, and read to him from his diaries. Beier edited his reminiscences into an excellent book, A Dreaming Life. But time had passed, things had changed. Prince had seen thick books of mine lying around he attended a lecture I gave about Ireland on Saint Patrick’s Day in 2006. He was anxious to tell the whole story, to describe his life as he views it now. He wanted to create a permanent record for the future, and he felt that a new book would bring him new admirers, new buyers: an artist has to live. As for me, I was in the midst of a project on Japanese figurative ceramics, not looking for work, but I had learned from my writings and the writings of friends—the fine books on Southern pottery, for example, by Ralph Rinzler, John Burrison, Terry Zug, Mark Hewitt, and Nancy Sweezy—that scholarly books can benefit their subjects, encouraging them to keep at it and bringing them, through serious attention, financial gain. Understanding something of Prince’s predicament, I suspended my project (my Japanese friends are doing well, fortunate to live in a nation where tradition and art are valued), and I took up this task, hoping it would help Prince during his struggle in my difficult country, knowing it would help me.

Money was not at issue: if this book earns royalties, they will go to Prince. My profit lies in the writing. By writing I would get to learn about him, to learn more about Africa and African art, and I could demonstrate how I think vital arts should be studied. I had written about great masters of traditional art from the United States and Ireland, Turkey and Bangladesh. Prince offered me a challenge and a chance.

The challenge was to learn enough to write with confidence. The chance was to show how living artists ought to be approached for understanding. My work is founded on the conviction that famed painters in big Western cities, unknown potters in small Eastern towns, old farming men who sing in the pubs on the border, young women who weave in the far mountain villages . . . all artists should be brought into the record by means of the same method. My method, refined through more than four decades of practice, requires time. It requires observing the process of creation and participating in the unfolding of events, sharing intimately in the lives of the artists. It requires many long and unfettered interviews about art and life. It requires exacting formal analysis of the objects—the works, the texts—through which artists express at once themselves and their cultures. As the poet Seamus Heaney said of poetry, all art is simultaneously “a revelation of the self to the self” and a “restoration of the culture to itself.” And things like poems and paintings are all we have. People cannot be studied directly there is no hole in the head through which we can enter and poke about. Known only through their communications, people are rigorously, courteously, compassionately understood by study of the sensate things they offer through bodily motion into the world: their postures and gestures, the clothes they wear, the words they speak, the artifacts they shape out of mundane substances, clay, wood, wool, apples, ink. Such things are all we have to know about other people.

My purpose then was to learn about Prince. My purpose now is to get enough of what I learned into prose so you can meet him. Prince is not an example of some force or process or condition. He is a man. Real, complex with contradiction, ultimately unknowable, he is, for me, a man, as George Gudger was a man for James Agee. I am not an Africanist with a need to reconcile the conflicting authorities and make of Prince a representative African man—though he is a man of Africa who offers glimpses through a slim aperture of Nigerian history and Yoruba culture. Nor am I an art historian with a need to fit his works into some scheme, reducing them to examples of African art or Yoruba art or traditional art or heritage art or self-taught art or outsider art or folk art or fine art or modern art—though they are, in part, all of those things, calling us to consider our categories of inclusion and exclusion while encountering creativity, unblinkered by academical convention. I do not intend a historian’s biography, testing his statements against ostensibly objective evidence for their veracity. A folklorist, an ethnographer, I am after a subjective revelation. The truth I seek is the truth as Prince sees it.

Inspired long ago by autobiographies of Native Americans elicited by anthropologists, books like Sun Chief and Two Leggings, I believe it is a sufficient achievement to meet another individual, a fellow traveler on the long road. Study will expand to groups, movements, communities, societies, whole nations, but all understanding begins with real people, with individuals and their acts of creative will.

This, then, is how one man—extraordinary like everyone—talks about things, conducts his life, practices his religion, and makes his marvelous art.

The author of the future who composes a full biography, like Ellmann’s on Joyce, will find useful Ulli Beier’s book and mine. That author will be glad that we talked with the man at length and published our divergent versions of his life, incorporating facts to be found in no other document. I write out of three sources: the garrulous notes I took while I watched Prince work and traveled with him through Nigeria the tape recordings I made of his story during ten long sessions in July of 2006, four during October of 2007 and two more in April of 2008 and the hundreds of prints and paintings I have seen, some in books, others in Prince’s homes and the homes of his collectors, most of them at Material Culture in Philadelphia, where George Jevremovic has assembled a collection of his works that spans the whole of Prince’s career. The key texts are of his contriving: his pictures and his story of his life. Represented in photographs and transcripts, they provide us a shared basis for interpretation, the means for a patient approach.

In writing, I will probe Prince’s art for his creative principles, then I will present his life as he told it, as much as possible in his own words. I asked few questions, and let him talk on. What he said I transcribed exactly from tape, spelling names and Yoruba words as he told me they should be spelled. Then I edited tenderly. When he composes an artful narrative, his myth of the origin of Osun, for example, what you read is what he said, precisely, word for word. But in the rambling informational passages, I have, without altering words or splicing statements together, omitted disorienting digressions, tightening the text to sharpen his point, while guiding his speech to the page. He deserves to be heard, read, understood.

This book’s first part carries the story of Prince’s life, which I analyzed and arranged, directed by his priorities, to make his order and emphasis clear. It is his truth, I repeat, that I am after. Next I consider his works to capture the patterns and connections of his personal style. Last comes a gallery of his creations accompanied by his explanations. In them, Prince will get the last word.

All of it is designed to get the two things together—his words and his works, his life and his art, so you can gain some feel for the man, a signal artist of our time.