Product Description

Angna Enters was one of America's most versatile and gifted artists--dancer/mime, painter, sculptor, costume and set designer, musician, screenwriter, and best-selling author. For over forty years, European and American audiences celebrated her unique and brilliant theatre performances as well as the annual exhibits of her paintings in such cities as New York, Los Angeles, and London. Her travels were documented in newspapers on both American coasts, and her image filled the pages of Life and Vogue. The nation's most respected critics acclaimed her books, and her public watched her comings and goings in Hollywood with great interest. But her private life was her own mystery, kept from her audiences and her readers, even from those few luminaries who felt they knew her well.

Angna maintained her friendships with Alfred Stieglitz and Dorothy Norman solely through her elegant and personal letters. And friends such as Judith Anderson, Greer Garson, Fanny Brice, and Albert and Millie Lewin knew only her business address. Enters' home was a Manhattan apartment which she shared with her secret, lifetime companion, the journalist and art critic Louis Kalonyme, who gave up his own career to serve as her secretary, business manager, confidant, and lover. He retained close contacts with only a few of his friends--Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, Eugene O'Neill, and John Marin.

Uncommon Eloquence is a meticulously researched portrait of this complex, elusive, and incredibly talented woman. Dorothy Mandel presents us with glimpses of the behind-the-scenes travails of Angna's cross-country tours of the U.S. and her many appearances in Europe, the poverty of her early years as an artist in Greenwich Village, her churning out chapters of books in crowded hotel lobbies and train stations during World War II, her dramatic escape from her home in Malaga at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and her struggles with the bureaucracy of Hollywood in the 1940s.

Confronted with her diversified and unique talents, critics tried for decades to classify Enters' artistry, but no one ever succeeded. Angna Enters was a loner in the art world, going her own way to create her own special reality in the arts. Mandel has captured the drive, the frustrations, and the strength of this fascinating, solitary performer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2546600 in Books
• Published on: 1986-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

Review
"An eloquent account of the triumphs and tragedies of one of the most extraordinarily gifted and versatile artists of this century. Dorothy Mandel, an eminent artist in her own right, has, with uncommon understanding, produced a first-rate work that goes fathoms deep into the genius that was Angna Enters." -- Richard Huett, former Editor-in-Chief, Dell Publishing Company, 1986

"With Uncommon Eloquence, Enters has emerged from the twilight zone of faded clippings and memory...." -- Dance Magazine, October 1987

From the Back Cover
"With an awesome degree of research, Dorothy Mandel has dared to invade Angna's magic domain. Mandel sensitively scrutinizes Enters' intimate life and keenly captures the features of her complex self. The result is a book of boundless fascination, written with style and fidelity. (Rita Cobler, 1986)

On Angna Enters... The critics: "A brilliant creative genius." --Vanity Fair

"Through the greatness of her art, this single woman is able to suggest the temper of an entire period by a single dance, the complete character of an individual in a few gestures." --New York Herald Tribune

"...A finer pantomimist than Chaplin, she is one of the theatre's greatest artists." --Boston Post

Her Friends in the Arts... "The many faceted talents of Angna Enters have been unique in the theatre of America. The originality of her mime creations, her writing, and her musical talent were equally superb. I know of no American performer/artist who can equal the complex wonder of her gifts." --Dorothy Norman

"She was a genius--dear, wonderful, determined, pig-headed--but she could do anything and everything!" --Dame Judith Anderson

"Anyone who experienced it will never forget the threatre of Angna Enters." --Greer Garson

About the Author
Dorothy Mandel spent years in the study of dance, painting, and mime, and of Angna Enters, and she is herself an internationally recognized woodcut artist. Uncommon Eloquence absorbed her writing energies for seven years. Mandel's writings have appeared in such publications as Frontiers, a journal of women studies.