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 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 articulated his modern paintings from the tradition of Orthodox Church paintings, as opposed to a younger generation of artists like Agegenhu Engida, Abebe Wolde Giorgis, Afewok Tekle, Yigezu Bisrat, Boghossian, or Desta, who underwent their art education abroad. Giorgis insightfully shows how new perspectives from artists returning from abroad on the one hand, and continuity granted by artists who stayed in Ethiopia, on the other, resulted in the formation and specific identity of the Fine Art School in 1957.This historical narration is followed by a chapter that focuses on the 1960s, a decade described by Giorgis as “the Prime of Ethiopian Modernism” (p. 80). Similar to the preceding chapter, it offers a wealth of material that reflects the prominent intellectual and artistic engagement with independence and liberation movements on the continent and the role of Ethiopian cultural production therein. With a focus on poetry and novels as well as theater, Giorgis sources primarily from Addis Reporter, the most important art and culture magazine at that time, and highlights the relevance of Kine Tebebat Wetheatre at Haile Selassie I University in engaging artists, writers, and student activists in political and cultural debates. The chapter spotlights several fields of contestation and contradiction typical for modernism, such as between elite lifestyles and anti-Western attitudes, pertaining patriarchal ideas of womanhood, or the role of the media in the construction of societal hierarchies. Providing a critical analysis of concurrent and contradicting ideologies and political discourses especially with regard to Africanism and exceptionalism, nationalism and monarchism, class struggle and ethnicism, Giorgis convincingly questions claims of Ethiopian exceptionalism while concurrently offering to the reader the specific context for an Ethiopian narrative of modernism.Chapter 3 presents the lives and work of Gebre Kristos Desta, Skunder Boghossian, and their students, among them also Desta Hagos, one of very few women artists in Ethiopia's patriarchal art historiography. This chapter provides a deeper insight in the working conditions, artistic interests, markets, and audiences of visual arts in the 1960s. Most importantly, it shows that although the visual arts had a marginal position compared to literature and theater in terms of reception and audiences, visual artists were “intimately linked to the militant intellectual thought of student activists” in the struggle for participatory democracy (p. 119). Giorgis also elucidates the modernist entanglement of nationalist ideas and transnational flows, of indigenous reorientations and cosmopolitan intellectual life, and especially of the significant impact of diasporic experience in the making of Ethiopian high modernism, its (pan-)African context, and in the spiritual life of artists like Skunder Boghossian. Giorgis's discussion of the latter's life and work demonstrates a familiarity with the artist and his artistic and social agency unachieved with any of the other artists featuring in the book. She also discusses the influence of transcultural aesthetics in church art and how it in turn influenced Boghossian's work and teaching. Both Boghossian and Kristos developed an art pedagogy at the Fine Art School that was informed by their respective studies in France and Germany.In chapter 4, the author dedicates considerable research and space to highlight the gaps in the national archives and the silenced aspects of art production during the socialist regime of the Derg (1974–1991), including the “invented amnesia” of artists in the aftermath of this era of revolution, famine, and oppressive nationalism. She traces the evolution of artistic expression from idealized national symbols such as Afewerk Tekle's Mother Ethiopia (1963) to critical representations of the victims of the 1973 famine, for instance in Eshetu Tiruneh's Rehab Yefetaw (1974) or Gebre Kristos Desta's Untitled (1975). Her intriguing analysis of paintings by Bekele Haile and Esseye Gabrenedhin from the '80s shows both, the consistency of social and political criticism and the transformation it adopted in the symbolic representation of Ethiopia during the cold war. With the formal abolition of the monarchy after Emperor Haile Selassie's death in 1975, a military junta took over the control of the visual arts in the service of their socialist propaganda. Elaborating the complexity of that new regime and the abdication of several artists from practicing or exhibiting art, Giorgis also discusses “practices that were elusively articulated outside the prescriptive identity of propagandist aesthetics” (p. 185) by means of “simulacra and pretense” (p. 227). Giorgis offers a welcome corrective to perpetuated ideas of resistance and provocation as modernist features, providing an understanding also for artistic agency that adapts to and sometimes is coopted directly or indirectly by state ideology and oppression. However, a more elaborate discussion of this special form of “avant-garde” (p. 227) within Ethiopian modernism and how the era of the Derg exactly relates to Giorgis's concept of modernism would have been helpful to better understand her theoretical argument.Chapter 5 presents the role of artist collectives and women artists in the transition from the junta regime to a democratizing but authoritarian nation. With limited space for the arts to burgeon, collectives such as the Dimension Group and NAS Gedam paved the way for an artist generation that explored new avenues in artistic media, concepts, and exhibition opportunities. More recent groups such as the Netsa Art Village increasingly take to the streets and public space, introducing art genres that seek a critical negotiation of state developmentalism. The work of performance artist Mulugeta Gebrekidan and photographer Michael Tsegaye feature as examples for the critical negotiation of notions of modernity and developmentalism in the EPRDF's drive toward corporate privatization of public space and the threat of neoliberal “development” to cultural heritage. With examples like Bisrat Shebabaw, Mihret Kebede, and Helen Zeru, Giorgis also emphasizes the artistic imagination and subjectivity of contemporary female artists who explore opportunities and markets outside the state-sanctioned structures in private art patronage and the international art world. The number of women artists in Ethiopia remains low, and Giorgis's selection suggests that the few notable women artists follow a feminist agenda. Similar to the other artists presented, they adopt disrupting strategies, new artistic languages, and a critical perspective on contemporary politics and society. By selecting artists who are globally connected while scrutinizing contemporary Ethiopian politics and subjectivities, Giorgis brings contemporary art full circle with the beginnings of modernism in the early twentieth century.The conclusion takes a step back from historical account and instead highlights some points of connection among the various topics reflected in the book. It traces and frames some aspects that have been insufficiently elaborated and thereby offers a perspective for future research. Pointing especially to language and translation as essential points of access and misunderstanding in the writing of Ethiopian art history, it makes a case for art historiographies that liberate themselves from dominant Western narratives and instead take local and national cultural values, forms of expression and languages to center stage. However, as Giorgis herself observes, there is a challenge in the attempt to translate and mediate local languages, expressive traditions, and symbolism to audiences unfamiliar with that specific context.Modernist Art in Ethiopia is the first fully fledged monograph dedicated to modern Ethiopian art and it therefore not only complements various existing essays and book chapters on the topic, but also proposes a longue durée of modernist expression in a nation that cultivates a certain denial of its involvement in the colonial matrix. The author sources from archives and personal contacts accessible to her in her leadership positions at the College of Performing and Visual Art, at the Modern Art Museum Gebre Kristos Desta Center, and at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES) at Addis Ababa University. At the same time, she reflectively problematizes established narratives and the gaps in Ethiopia's (art) historiography and contributes to a revision of the history of Ethiopian modernism “behind the politics of silence” (p. xiii). A particular strength of the book is its outlook on a broader field of cultural production and discourse that helps the reader to understand the position of visual arts within Ethiopian modernity and modernism. Visual arts, and modernist aesthetics in particular, for a long time were a reserved field of interest among the urban elites, occupying a marginal or even unnoticed place in the perception and cultural self-understanding of the majority of the population.Nevertheless, more references to theories of modernism and a more internationally oriented outlook would have helped to carve out the specificities of Ethiopian modernism and also would have allowed for a more differentiated treatment of what Giorgis summarizes as the “Western” colonial hegemony. Generally, the book omits comparative perspectives on modern art movements and practices in other urban centers on the continent and beyond, with only very few and rather allusive exceptions. Giorgis only mentions in the conclusion that “artists have begun to collaborate with other African institutions” (p. 298), but the book as a whole barely discusses transnational partnerships, relations and exchange between Fine Art Schools and artists within the continent. This gap may be due to Giorgis's declared Ethiopia-centered and decolonial perspective, but at the same time offers an interesting starting point for future studies on institutional networks, creative exchange, and diasporic life within Africa.Giorgis demonstrates a strong sensibility for gender inequality in Ethiopia's art world. Including female artists early in her analysis, she offers a perspective on female participation in modernist Ethiopian art that has been neglected in research so far. However, this feminist agenda somewhat is also the selective filter of Giorgis's analysis of several works by women artists and tends to occlude aspects beyond female subjectivity. As an example, Mihret Kebede's use of menstrual blood in her installation The Red Diary (2011) is presented as “provocative and audacious” (p. 286) because it challenges the negative connotation of menstruation in Orthodox theology. Although there is value in reading the work primarily against the backdrop of the artist's own statement and the symbolic order specific to the Ethiopian context, Giorgis's reading of the work also provokes questions such as, do—and if yes, how do—contemporary Ethiopian art practices relate to international and globally accessible art histories? How does Kebede's use of menstrual blood relate to and distinguish itself from Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta's aims and aesthetics, for instance? What are the symbolic relations and differences especially with regard to the articulation of feminism in different places, times and cultural contexts? In my understanding, a decolonial perspective should not blind out such questions but take into consideration the global flow of information and the influence of dominant art historical narratives on situated contemporary art practices.Giorgis is acutely aware of such openings toward future studies, and her book, in fact, seeks to trigger further research and new approaches in art history. It is an invaluable contribution to contemporary scholarship on African modernisms and is suitable for a diverse audience of experts, students, and amateurs alike. Including color reproductions that facilitate a better understanding of the descriptions and interpretations of selected art works, it offers crucial insights into modern history, historiography and modernist art in Ethiopia down to the present day.