Boydell & Brewer

Ben Enwonwu; the making of an African modernist.

Exploring the work of Nigerian artist Ben Enwonwu (1917-94), Ogbechie (art history, U. of California at Santa Barbara) analyzes the cultural, political, and aesthetic factors that framed Enwonwu's pursuit of a modernist aesthetics and his role in the development of a specific discourse of modernity in 20th century Nigerian art. Ultimately, this intellectual biography of Enwonwu is concerned with the framing of a colonial subject as a modern artist and Enwonwu's struggle to escape the limitation of his colonially assigned roles in order to define a culturally relevant mode of modernist representation for his community, the emergent Nigerian nation, modern African art, and the global African Diaspora. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Dane Rudhyar; his music, thought, and art.

This thoroughly researched and richly presented biography of French-born Rudhyar — many excerpts from his published and unpublished poems, autobiographies, personal papers, and musical compositions are included in the text — fills a gap in the scholarship of 20th-century music and culture. Astonishingly prolific and peripatetic through his long life, Rudhyar exemplifies a creative urge of his time to question the status quo, explore radically new ideas and express them. Ertan's analysis of his thought, writings, paintings, and musical compositions shows how they synthesize and reflect Rudhyar's broad interests, which included modern dance, theosophy, astrology (it is as an astrologer that he is best known), philosophy, music history and criticism, art, and modern music. She also traces the events of his personal life, noting his friendships to significant players in all these fields. The volume includes a section of color plates of Rudhyar's paintings. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Young Rilke and his time.

In this literary and psychological biography, Schoolfield (German and Scandinavian literature, Yale, emeritus) relies heavily on diaries and letters to develop a portrait of the early years of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. The forces that went into the work of the young poet are detailed, both the private matters of his family and voluminous love life and the outside influences of a Europe about to be fractured. Schoolfield presents the major literary figures of the time at their most unguarded, through Rilke's eyes. He also gives serious attention to Rilke's work as a literary reviewer. The reviews not only show Rilke's perceptiveness in analysis but also give clues as to opinions not always expressed in the poetry. Schoolfield concludes with a careful examination of several early poems, chosen more for their revelatory nature than literary importance. His clear, literal translations, following the original German, are very useful and make the study more accessible to non-German readers who may have only met Rilke in creative translations. Both in format and content, this is an excellent work. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)