This is the first critical biography of Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), one of the most remarkable scholar-artists in British cultural history. Binyon is best remembered today for his 1914 Great War elegy 'For the Fallen', carved on countless war graves and recited annually at Remembrance Sunday services, but his importance extends well beyond this one famous poem. In fact, Binyon was a poet, dramatist, translator, art historian, and critic, whose influence in a wide range of fields is only now beginning to be recognized. During his forty-year career at the British Museum, he built a world reputation as a pioneering scholar and interpreter of Eastern art, one of the first to challenge the West's myopic assumption that it held a monopoly on beauty and truth. Revealing the subtle continuities between the poet and East West mediator, this fascinating study of his life and work restores Binyon to his rightful place in British cultural history, as one of the most benign and quietly influential voices of the early twentieth century.
THE MAGICIAN'S BOOK is the story of one reader's long, tumultuous relationship with C.S. Lewis'The Chronicles of Narnia. Enchanted by its fantastic world as a child, prominent critic Laura Miller returns to the series as an adult to uncover the source of these small books' mysterious power by looking at their creator, Clive Staples Lewis. What she discovers is not the familiar, idealized image of the author, but a more interesting and ambiguous truth: Lewis's tragic and troubled childhood, his unconventional love life, and his intense but ultimately doomed friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien. Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination.
"Although modern African literature and music have become well known in the West, through the contributions of such famous authors as Chinua Achebe and Bessie Head and such popular musicians as King Sunny Ade and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the continent's vast body of modern visual arts has been little explored." "In New Currents, Ancient Rivers Jean Kennedy surveys African art of the last fifty years, offering an expansive perspective on the visual arts of the continent. Just as ancient rivers flow through the modern African landscape, so too do the rituals and traditions of the past run deeply through modern African art. The past is able to coexist in vibrant synthesis with the present largely because of a critical constant in African culture, the acceptance of change." "The culmination of twenty years' research, New Currents, Ancient Rivers is the largest survey of contemporary African art, presenting nearly 150 artists of sub-Saharan Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and South Africa--painters, sculptors, fiber artists, printmakers, and filmmakers. As Kennedy examines their artistic development, she shows the many ways the artists meld elements from modern life, the legacy of colonialism, foreign technology, the natural world, and the past to create art that may be divorced from the original purposes of ritual but that still embraces traditional rhythms. The author also briefly discusses the influence of the oral and literary traditions on the visual arts." "New Currents, Ancient Rivers is a tribute to the vitality and diversity of a continent and its peoples. This progressive book recognizes individual artists, many of whom are virtually unknown in Europe and the United States."--Jacket.
Im August 1889 kehren die befreundeten Maler Otto Modersohn und Fritz Mackensen dem Akademiebetrieb den Rücken. Sie lassen sich in dem niedersächsischen Dorf Worpswede am Rande des Teufelsmoors nieder, einem Flecken in der Nähe von Bremen, den in dieser Zeit kaum jemand in Deutschland kennt. Die Kollegen Heinrich Vogeler, Hans am Ende und Fritz Overbeck folgen ihrem Beispiel. »Der Erlolg, den die Maler von Worpswede auf der Jahresausstellung im Münchner Glaspalast errangen, hat in der Geschichte der neueren Kunst nicht seinesgleichen«, befand danach ein Kritiker. Ein Bauerndorf wurde zu einem Begriff der Kunstgeschichte. Vollends zum Mythos wurde Worpswede dann, als Rainer Maria Rilke sein Buch über die Künstlerkolonie veröffentlichte. Selbst um die Jahrhundertwende sporadisch in Worpswede lebend, heiratete der Dichter 1901 die Bildhauerin und Malerin Clara Westhoff. Zentrum des künstlerischen Lebens war in jenen Jahren der von Heinrich Vogeler erworbene und umgebaute Barkenhoff. Waren die «Alten Worpsweder noch von den französichen Landschaftsmalern der Schule von Barbizon beeinflußt, gelangte mit Paula Modersohn-Becker die Moderne nach Worpswede. Nach 1945 erlangte der Surrealist Richard Oelze internationale Anerkennung. Heute beeindrucken Künstler wie Waldemar Otto, Frauke Migge und Fritz Meckseper mit Werken, die das Wissen um die Gefährdung des Menschen und der Natur reflektieren. Hundert Jahre nach Ihrer Gründung legt Hans-Christian Kirsch mit diesem Buch eine sich auf exakte Recherchen und bisher unbekannte Aufzeichnungen stützende Darstellung der Künstlerkolonie vor.
