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  • Modernist Art in Ethiopia by Elizabeth W. Giorgis
  • Fiona Siegenthaler (bio)
Modernist Art in Ethiopia by Elizabeth W. Giorgis Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019. 360 pp., 53 color illus., bibliography, index. $39.95, paper

African modernism has been the subject of numerous key publications in the last two decades. Besides surveys such as A Companion to Modern African Art edited by Gitti Salami and Monica Blackmun Visonà (2013), leading journals published special issues such as "Art Historical Perspectives on African Modernism" (African Arts 39 [1], 2006) or "African Modernism" (The South Atlantic Quarterly 109 [3], 2010) edited by Chika Okeke-Agulu and Salah M. Hassan respectively. In addition, Okeke-Agulu's Postcolonial Modernism in Nigeria (2015), Atta Kwami's Kumasi Realism in Ghana (2013), Elizabeth Harney's In Senghor's Shadow (2004), or monographs on modern artists like Ben Enwonwu by Sylvester Ogbechie (2008)—to name just a few—represent fundamental contributions to modern African art scholarship. They variously build on earlier publications since the 1990s (most notably Seven Stories of Modern Art in Africa, ed. Clémentine Deliss [1995] and Elza Miles's monograph on Ernest Mancoba [1994]) to shift notions of modernity and modernisms away from Eurocentric assumptions toward a transcultural and globally entangled conception that is inclusive of Africacentric and diasporic perspectives. Several doctoral dissertations on modernist art in East Africa complement this research, such as Sunanda Sanyal's Imaging Art, Making History (2000) or George Kyeyune's Art in Uganda in the 20th Century (2013). However, East Africa remains underrepresented in the research of African modernism. With Modernist Art in Ethiopia, Elizabeth E. Giorgis offers the first monograph on modernist Ethiopian art, situating it in a complex cultural history of modern experience centered in the capital of Addis Ababa. Her interdisciplinary analysis of the sociopolitical, intellectual, and aesthetic practices and discourses in twentieth and early twenty-first century Ethiopia involves perspectives on urban [End Page 94] life, newspapers, magazines, theater, performance and visual arts, thus framing the latter within a multifaceted sociocultural context.

Giorgis's aim is to develop a theory of "Ethiopian modernity and modernism" (p. xiii) that destabilizes the exceptionalist historiography of Ethiopia and its cultural production that has prevailed in the narrative of colonialism in Africa. She questions established framings of modern Ethiopian history by Semitic orientalism, Marxism, and Black Studies and instead suggests an "alternative thesis on Ethiopian modernity and modernism" by shedding light on "the colonial legacy that noncolonized Ethiopia also shares" (p. xiv).

The five chapters of the book follow a roughly historical line, with accents on schools, fields of public intellectual engagement, individual artist biographies, and political events that shaped Ethiopian modernism. They are preceded by an introduction that leads the reader directly into Skunder Boghossian's apartment in Washington DC in 1999, where he was commissioned with the Wall of Representation at the Ethiopian Embassy. Boghossian remains a leitmotif throughout the book as both the most influential Ethiopian artist for the articulation of African modernism, and as a key conversation partner of Giorgis, along with other prominent artists and cultural producers like Solomon Deressa, Yonas Admassu, or Tsegaye Gebremedhin.

The first chapter describes the beginnings of Ethiopian modernism from ca. 1900 to 1957, taking the foundation of Addis Ababa as Ethiopia's capital in 1881 as a starting point and venturing into the role visual arts played in the formation of an official national history. Even though Giorgis observes a continuity of established traditions in Orthodox church art (especially in formal aspects), she states that "artistic production radically shifted from previous practices of church art" (p. 26) by accommodating both European impulses on the one hand and an engagement in intellectual thought specific to the contemporary urban context of Addis Ababa on the other. She provides comprehensive and insightful resource material to illustrate debates pushed by writers of the Berhanena Selam newspaper between 1925 and 1935. Introducing specific terms that connoted modernism, civilization or Westernization in Ethiopia such as seletane (p. 9), zämänäy (p. 37) or arada (p. 38), this analysis convincingly establishes select tropes and observations of modernism for the specific Ethiopian context. Belachew Yimer is introduced as an "aradan artist" who...

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