"New York City's Center for African Art enhances its reputation as one of the nation's premier African art museums with these first-rate exhibition catalogs. The exhibition "Closeup" just completed its three-venue schedule; "Africa Explores" may be seen at the Center through 1991 and then tours to seven major museums into 1993. To Western eyes, African sculpture is unusual, exotic, and challenging. African sculptors are more concerned with surface texture, appearance, and functions of their works. Narrative is seldom depicted. In the narrowly focused Closeup , Thompson's multi-perspective photographs (the duotone images are especially striking) reveal the spectrum of moods that can be embedded in one work. He includes 110 works, the majority from French-speaking West Central Africa. Vogel, executive director of the Center, analyzes the unique geometry inherent in African sculpture. Also included is research information about individual sculptures, taken from the noteworthy collections of Udo Horstmann and an anonymous American collector. The monumental Africa Explores moves from tribal masks and ritual totems to an entirely new and vibrant body of modern sub-Saharan art. Vogel establishes the framework for looking at the multiplicity of 20th-century African artforms by organizing the catalog into five areas: traditional, new functional, urban, international, and extinct. Wide-ranging essays by scholars explore specific instances of these strains. Encyclopedic in scope, the work includes 228 color and 176 black-and-white photos. Africa Explores is the most important publication on modern African art to date. It will long serve as a reference for scholars and as an approachable survey for novices." -- Review in Library Journal by Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young University Library.
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