BOOKS:

...They are, we are informed, "unvital, aristocratic, European in the fashion-able sense...

...Hunter heartily dislikes, and although he does admit on one page to the "excruciating bore-dom of recent vanguard art forms," the perpetrators are not easily identified...

...But Sargent could do more than imagine ladies with ocean-liner eyes...

...Hunter to pass what may seem like an odd judgment on Sargent and Whistler, who are relegated, having spent too much time abroad, to the refuse heap of the nineteenth century...

...When we come to Walter Gropius, for example, there is not a word said about bis aims at the Bauhaus nor about his convic-tion that "architecture is teamwork...

...Jacobus seems to have taken the trouble to see America first...

...Nor has any effort been taken to suggest all the changes in American society from Theodore Roosevelt to Gerald Ford...

...It should have been de-leted by the editors...

...There are those who feel sculptor Robert Morris is a dreadful bore, but here he is praised for his "ironic, alertly contemporary intelligence...

...Jacobus has ever glanced at a page of John Maynard Keynes...

...The former is a famous Pop artist, one of the group he hails as "genuine and powerful innovators...

...For that matter, a biograph-ical note about Andy Warhol and his mother might have been helpful, but Warhol, like nearly every artist in this book, springs, it seems, out of nowhere...

...The book had begun to impose itself on me, and then, a few pages into the third chapter, an abrupt halt and the editor's "Here the ms...

...Yet it has a morbid fascination all its own...

...Isn't this slightly unfair...

...Pictures and Conversations is an important book for anyone who wants to read Bowen's work seriously...

...Facts, events, circumstances, these could be accurately recorded, Bowen says shortly before the manu-script stops, people are another matter: "Gone, they remain-elusive as ever...

...By the time I reached the third chapter, chronology could not have mattered less...

...but this was only in theorythe virtue of the cake was that it was never to be consumed, neither by you nor by your children after you...

...And if yesterday is just like today, one artist (or architect) is pretty much like the last...

...For all that I had come to the book to read a fragment, I did not want to let Elizabeth Bowen go in mid-thought if not in mid-sentence...

...For Sargent was, so some people think, the most expert portrait painter of his age, with a singular talent for evoking the expectations of a trans-atlantic crossing in the days of the Titanic...

...Hunter must not be accused of poking fun at Warhol and Davis...

...The Nativity play, which Bowen wrote at the request of Limerick Cathe-dral, is uncharacteristic Bowen, relative-ly conventional Nativity...

...Bowen's walk took her along a road she had known sixty years before and slowly-more slowly than usual with a Bowen book-I found my-self drawn into a chapter that was at once an evocation and an essay in aes-thetics, found myself comfortable with a creation shared by the aging novelist and another of her selves, the Anglo-Irish child in an unfamiliar Kent...

...breaks off...

...Russia is doing it under govern-ment...

...Yet the sudden-and deserved-af-fluence of the Abstract Expressionists, many of whom were Chase-owned, is part of the story of American art in our time...

...It tells much, perhaps too much, about what passes in some places for American civilization in 1975...

...But Brecht wanted to do it through Communism, in a way...

...This is a platitude, if Mr...

...I want every-body to think alike...

...Jacobus, who tries so hard to prove that Robert Venturi is not the insipid architect revealed in the illustrations...

...A good patron may come in handy when the going gets rough...

...The impact, for example, of the WPA and the other art projects of the New Deal is dismissed as simply "a new kind of search among American artists for their cultural identity...

...Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we're getting more and more that way...

...the autobiography is incomplete...

...The rewarding book within this dis-turbing one is an account of how fiction is made, both generally and specifically by Elizabeth Bowen...

...The search for "viable native idioms" -to use their own words-is a cause to which they are devoted: this leads Mr...

...The human impulse to give the shape of fiction to life, to see reality through the expectations of the novel, was mixed with the novelist's desire to bring "the sobriety of history" back to her past, to penetrate both her memory and the fictional uses she had made of the people, places and things of her life...

...There is nowhere any hint of the in-finite variety of the American land-scape: one area is just like any other to our authors, who can't seem to dis-tinguish the difference between Omaha, Nebraska and Prides Crossing, Massa-chusetts...

...Saving," he made plain, "was for old age or for your children...

...In his portrait of the Boit chil-dren he had the wit to suggest that four walls might form an infinite space...

...Jacobus will forgive me, the kind of thing an overworked writer may be guilty of after a long stretch at the typewriter...

...Who knows, but for Keynes we might never have witnessed the art collections formed in our time by so many corporations, including that of the Chase Manhattan Bank...

...So is Mr...

...Equally part of the story is the neglect in the 1920s of artists of the rank of Marin, Dove, Demuth and O'Keeffe all of whom might have starved but for their champion the dealer Alfred Stieglitz...

...the novel is simply unfinished...

...This reviewer, who can't get over the idea that American art is some-how part of the art of the western world, isn't exactly the man to appre-ciate the chauvinism that marks so many pages of this encyclopedia with its 988 illustrations, 195 of them in full color...

...When one under-stands the main thrust of Pictures and Conversations one can see why Brown chose to reprint 'The Art of Bergotte," Bowen's essay on Proust's use of his fictional novelist, and "Notes on Writ-ing a Novel" with what remains of the non-autobiography...

...This is too bad, for economists do have their influence and we are still living with the results of the amusing attack on saving that Keynes launched while studying the consequences of the Versailles Treaty...

...Jacobus will have us believe...

...As for Whistler, he did appeal to Charles Baudelaire and Stdphane Mallarme, two poets who may be re-membered long after all of us are forgotten...

...BOOKS Picture and Conversations ELIZABETH BOWEN Knopf, $7.95 GERALD WEALES There is always something fascinat-ing about posthumous volumes of un-finished, previously uncollected, hesi-tantly reprinted work by major writers...

...Reading such a book is a little like sorting through the drawers and closets of a dead friend, expecting neither treasures nor resurrection, but mementos, curios...

...Hunter is desperately loyal to the last word, no matter how dull the last word may be...

...So we are quite unprepared for the teamwork that produced the Pan-Am Building...

...Apparently neither Mr...

...Hunter nor Mr...

...Is California merely "a land of contrasts," as Mr...

...Far from it...

...It is unusual only in its first act, in which the Three Kings "have come to a standstill," wait-ing for an event that will take them beyond the point where learning and magic have brought them, and in one image in the second, the scattered an-emones which Joseph sees as "spilled blood," the promise of Easter in Christ-mas...

...The day this book was begun I went for a walk...

...Hunter does have something to say about Stieglitz, but nothing whatever about Stieglitz's times: we are never told that in that era the wives of prosperous attorneys were content to gaze from their wicker chairs at the madonnas of George DeForest Brush...

...The appeal, however, is to one's curi-osity not to any more exalted aesthetic impulse...

...For the rest-much of it in the words of Luke (King James Version)- the play is adoration rather than art, sentimentally so when the children are brought in to close the play...

...In fact, American Art of the 20th Century rather resembles attending a gigantic cocktail party where the host is too important to introduce any of his guests...

...I was not prepared...

...To which Ron Davis out on the West Coast says amen...

...He speaks," we are told, "for many artists when he laments that a new Chevrolet is more perfect than most art made today...

...Be that as it may, it is dis-appointing to find that neither Mr...

...My initial reluctance to be drawn in stemmed, I suppose, from the word "autobiography" on the book jacket, the expectation-despite Spencer Curtis Brown's foreword-that here was aft-other factual fiction, another remini-scence...

...Assuming, of course, that the editors were on the job...

...Hunter doesn't tell us anything about the dinner, catered by Schrafft's, to which David Rockefeller invited many of the artists in the Chase Collection...

...I prefer her when she is seeing Kent anew, by seeing herself seeing it sixty years earlier...

...It is a novel I would have liked to read, but I am not affected by it as I am by the other fragmentary work...

...It is really hard to find any modern artist whom Mr...

...Even Brown's own foreword, which at first seems almost haphazard ("the uninstructed thoughts of a friend"), touching first one Bowen base, then another, comes to have its own thematic relevance...

...Hunter nor Mr...

...It is a puzzling book, almost as puzzling as a history of modern American litera-ture that would give equal emphasis to Djuna Barnes and Joyce Carol Oates...

...It's happening here all by itself without being under a strict govern-ment, so if it's working without trying, why can't it work without being Com-munist...

...There was not even comfort in the notes of intention -quoted at the beginning of this para-graph-which Brown appends to the selection...

...Mr...

...This is the first sen-tence of "Origins," which was to be the first chapter of an altogether differ-ent Pictures and Conversations, a book that was "not to be an autobiography," but a presentation of "recalls" that em-bodied the relationship "between living and writing...

...Aside from its constant bias in favor of the last word, American Art of the 20th Century could be described as an encyclopedia compiled with no par-ticular point of view in mind...

...Our authors are far from satisfac-tory when it comes to describing the milieu in which our artists and archi-tects have grown up...

...Somebody said that Brecht wanted everybody to think alike," he is quoted...

...The latter is congratulated for having discovered "new sources of sensuous space...

...American Art of the Twentieth Century SAM HUNTER and JOHN JACOBUS Abrams, $20 WAYNE ANDREWS Although Sam Hunter and John Jacobus never get around to telling us what they hoped to accomplish in their survey of twentieth century American art and architecture, it seems fairly obvious that both authors have decided that American art must be American...

...And if you happen to believe that booms and de-pressions play as a great role in artistic history as in our own daily lives, you will wonder why our authors have nothing to say about patronage, or next to nothing...

...The Move-in," the opening chapter of a novel on which Bowen was working when she died, is imme-diately appealing, an arresting situation firmly set in a concrete landscape, peopled with characters who are already beginning to take shape...

...Warhol is, however, allowed to speak for himself...

...No Charles Williams, Bowen could not see the Nativity anew...

...I approached Pic-tures and Conversations in such a spirit, as though its subtitle were "The Liter-ary Leavings of Elizabeth Bowen," and I discovered two books-one disturbing, one rewarding-much richer than a gathering of fragments would suggest...

...The other two items are less central to the concerns of the volume as a whole...