THE BEST IN ART

...Paying little attention to the early work, light and even frivolous as it is, the author, in inspired poetical prose, presents the Spaniard as a revolutionary who broke with the Renaissance tradition and ruthlessly exposed in his work the crimes and follies of his era...

...22.50...

...10) Andre Malraux uses the large reproductions, all but a few in black and white, to serve his theses...

...Unlike Malraux, H. W. and Dora Jane Jansons do not address themselves to the small band of sophisticates familiar with the intimate details of art history, but endeavor to reach the broad public who may be introduced to the field of art by their book, The Picture History of Painting (Abrams...

...From those still dazzling embers they would retain only the advent of the individual, the metamorphosis of the world in pictures...

...field of endeavor as art, it is hard -to find a common denominator for r American art beyond the fact that its practitioners have spent at least some ¦ of their time within the United States...

...We now look with delight, or at least sympathetic interest, at the 50 color plates and 177 black-and-white illus...

...but when these artists first began, nearly each had an up-hill fight before him...

...Written by Glackens' son, Ira, it lovingly reconstructs, drawing on many private fetters and newspaper clippings, an America that disappeared even before the Depression...

...Its 112 reproductions in full color are breathtakingly beautiful...

...While the title is rather far-fetched, and many a statement in the volume is fuzzy despite rhetorical brilliance, the reading will stimulate further study of this unique master...

...Many of the artists, such as Weber, Kuniyoshi, or de Kooning, were born abroad, and these fifty contributed to various trends in modern art from Impressionism to Abstract-Impressionism...

...Do not expect great revelations, but enjoy the | anecdotes, gossip, epigrams dished up by one who, in his youth, met the \ ogre Degas ("He may eat you alive," ', the author had been warned), and 5 saw the dwarf Toulouse-Lautrec r ("Although he was deformed, his whole being radiated a sense of purpose and a natural distinction which was entirely devoid of affectation...

...Even the social realists had been greeted as apostles ^ of ugliness in a country still dominated by an academic art of polite ; conventions...

...The book's title is derived from a painting: Saturn devouring one of his own children...

...M While it is permissible to speak of typically German traits even in such an unparochial, international...

...trations in this book...

...Was it a clever maneuver of dealers to re-introduce the almost forgotten German "Expressionismus" after the stock of much-coveted and overpriced French pioneers had been exhausted that is responsible for the current American enthusiasm for Heckel, Kirchner, and Nolde...

...9.50) lucidly explains and evaluates the achievement of this . sharply distinct movement...

...I do not accept this cynical explanation, for I believe that the tragic overtones in the work of these masters and their colleagues, their restless search in the realm of the Infinite, and their metaphysical thirst call forth an echo in the psyche of the more sensitive American, repelled by the general smugness of a boom era and unsatisfied by the meager emotional fare of the extreme Abstractionists...

...Mercilessly realistic portraits of Fifteenth Century men and women, superb textiles, household goods, and windows looking out into medieval streets overwhelm us with their subtle charm...

...Those eager to learn more about a single phase of art than a one-volume work can cover in a brief chapter will welcome the numerous works on Twentieth Century German art that have recently appeared...

...and Mrs...

...the abstract and express fst painters were 'madmen' or charlatans.'" Of the dissidents labeled "Ashcan School," only Sloan, Glackens, and Prendergast are included...

...As John I. H. Baur reminds us: "For the most part the Americans* had to fight a piecemeal battle against public indifference, general-' misunderstanding, and violent professional hostility...

...Thousands of years, from the cave paintings of the Old Stone Age, to the work of such living artists as Picasso, De Chirico, Chagall, Miro, Ernst, Dali, and the American, Ben Shahn, are spanned...

...Louis acquainted us with paintings, graphic art, and sculptures by more than forty masters...

...Compar-ing a painting by Matisse with one by Kirchner, one of the contributors to the volume, the noted historian, Werner Haftmann, writes: "The mood of this painting (by Kirchner) . . . exhibits a psychic restlessness contrasting strangely with the Arcadian calm of Matisse's painting...

...Whereas the French picture is characterized by the self-sufficiency of its harmonious architecture, the resonant decor, the German painting exhibits the forcing of the pictorial means toward enhanced expression, more profound content, psychic illustration...

...There are 103 color reproductions, and a text so lively that it is not likely to be skipped...

...Books of this scope usually treat the work of the Old Masters at great length, but, after reaching the year 1900, rush through the art of our time in a few pages, condescendingly treating the creators of post-Impressionist and abstract art as Lilliputians, impostors, or freaks...

...Goya lived his last years in complete isolation, as a voluntary exile, in France: "Soon painters would forget at the cost of what anguish this man had ranged his solitary and hopeless art against the entire civilization into which he had been born...

...What the younger Glackens has done for the revolutionaries among Ibis compatriots, the aged Michel-Georges Michel has done for French art in From Renoir to Picasso (Houghton Mifflin...

...Skira, more than any other publisher, has made it possible that details from some of the world's most celebrated paintings—especially altarpieces by van Eyck, van der Weyden, van der Goes, Memling, and Gerard David— can be studied in the leisure, silence, and, above all, the good light tourists never find in European churches and museums...

...Malraux makes most of the fact that his hero, following a grave illness, turned from a charming Eighteenth Century producer of fragile genre pictures into a fervent Expressionist, the father of much—though not the whole, as Malraux claims—of modern art...

...Referring to Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," they write: "The tingling staccato rhythm of the design captures the very qualities suggested by the musical title...

...The text is by Jacques Lassaigne who gives us the latest findings on such enigmatic figures as Hubert van Eyck (unlike his brother, Jan, he is still a mystery to scholars) or Roger Campin...

...The book of the same title, which also serves as catalogue (distributed by Simon and Schuster...

...The pictures of Kan-dinsky "convey a sensation or a state of mind through freely combined shapes and colors without having to represent anything at all...

...Wisely, the five scholars selecting fifty painters who worked here between 1900 and 1955 call their excellent and handsome anthology New Art in America (New York Graphic Society & Frederick A. Praeger, Inc...

...To meet the others, especially Davies, Henri, Lawson, Luks, and Shinn, read William Glackens and the Ashcan Group (Crown...

...15...

...By contrast, Dr...

...Janson take the modern masters as seriously as they deserve, and their comments are illuminating...

...In the German Art of the 20th Century exhibition, the Museum of Modern Art and the City Art Museum of St...

...The earlier ones deserve special praise for having turned to such "ugly" subjects as elevated subways, prize fights, saloons, and harbors that were taboo for the Academicians...

...While in Flemish Painting the scholarly text humbly serves the gloss and glory of the pictures, in Saturn: An Essay on Goya (Phaidon...

...Lassaigne is fully aware of the greatness of the art he discusses: "Each of these works is instinct with a deeper, spiritual significance, underlying the surface virtuosity, and a message that has lost nothing of its appeal for those who in the unrest and confusion of modern times feel a nostalgic yearning for that sense of tranquil certitude and communion with an absolute so tellingly conveyed by early Flemish art...