文章基本信息

标题：An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century. - book review
作者：Edward M. Gomez
期刊名称：Black Issues Book Review
印刷版ISSN：1522-0524
出版年度：2002
卷号：July-August 2002
出版社：Target Market News

An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century. - book review

Edward M. Gomez

edited by N'Gone Fall and Jean Loup Pivin D.A.P./Editions Revue Noire, May 2002 $80.00, ISBN 1-891-02438-8

To understand modern art is to appreciate intellectually, if not emotionally, the profound influence that African art has had on an aesthetic outlook that, formally and stylistically, has found diverse expression around the world.

Early 20th-century, European Cubism was only the most obvious chapter of modern-art history in which African influences figured prominently. More recently, multi-culturalist perspectives on the visual arts, derived from postmodernist theory, have examined African artists' creations on their own terms, with special attention to the distinctive traditions and historical settings in which they have evolved.

In such a spirit of inquiry, An Anthology of African Art: The Twentieth Century was conceived and originally published two years ago, in French, by the Paris-based magazine Revue Noire, which focuses on African art. This English-language version is an equally hefty tome.

Ambitious in its critical aims and comprehensive in its scope, it examines everything from the weather patterns and urban-growth trends that shape the environments in which African artists work to some of the more unusual applications of their inventive talents. Among them: exquisitely crafted coffins in the shapes of freight trucks and giant roosters in Ghana, and the mixed-media constructions--made of dirt mounds, hand-painted signs and potted plants--that the Cameroonian artist Gabriel Tatsinkou sets up in public squares.

Contributors to the book include its two editors and numerous other writers, many of whom are African and may be better known to European than to American readers through the pages of Revue Noire. Although the translation sometimes reads awkwardly, the information and insights that this encyclopedic, lavishly illustrated volume offers are worth considering--and often savoring--as they knowledgeably illuminate the social attitudes, cultural values and political aspirations that distinguish the modern arts of Africa.