ALL THE GLOSS OF ART
Werner, Alfred
All the Gloss of Art by ALFRED WERNER IN THE weeks before Christmas, many a book lover can sympathize with Buridan's ass, the unfortunate animal that starved to death because it could not decide...
...For the serious reader I would, unhesitatingly, select Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting (Princeton University Press, 2 vols., $20), translated and annotated by A. Philip McMahon...
...hence, one might point out that some periods are more fully and understandingly treated than others, or that, infrequently, the author's preferences adulterated the soundness of his judgment...
...Such a reader, seeking a historical survey of artistic developments in Twentieth Century America, would find a reasonably accurate summing-up of the heroic tale of the last two or three generations in Modern Art USA: Men, Rebellion, Conquest 1900-1956, by Rudi Blesh (Knopf, 295 pp., ill., $5...
...Neither a cheap novel nor a sensation-mongering Hollywood film should blind us to the fact that Lautrec was "one of the most amazing and engaging personalities in the history of art...
...Cheney writes well, knows, and quotes from, the relevance literature of each period, and skill-fully links works of art with the political and religious trends of the time...
...These expanded texts of B.B.C...
...Caravaggio, who, in the following century, initiated the luministic trends...
...he petrified the body's dynamics of which he was the master...
...In the lunatic asylum of Saint-Remy, Zavattini read the entry of 1889, stating that Van Gogh had been discharged as "cured...
...The scholar uses exalted language: "He offered to beauty the ideal settlement, his inherent conflict unified by the character of the marble block...
...In this important volume, some of his gay posters and colored lithographs are included...
...The tale begins with the daring young men of the Ashcan School who, at the turn of the century, defied the smooth and slick traditions of the accepted official art, and battled for years to convince the critics that they were not mere sensation-mongers or lunatics...
...He is currently writing a book on the race situation in the South under a grant from the Fund for the Republic...
...Perhaps the handsomest package under this year's Christmas table is the out-size volume on Toulouse Lautrec introduced by Douglas Cool per and published by Harry N. Abrams ("The Library of Great Painters," 152 pp., many illustrations, $12.50...
...For they tell us a good deal about one of mankind's intrepid pathfinders, and they also offer advice useful to any lover of the beautiful and good...
...In the scholarly introduction, Lud-wig H. Heydenreich says: "No greater man has ever undertaken to speak as a painter to other painters...
...Commentaries facing the oils and pastels explain, in lucid language, the development of his style, from the precocious boy's painting of his father as a falconer to the opera scene he finished shortly before his death at thirty-seven...
...Blesh is a good narrator, but he fails to acquaint us with the philosophical aspects of the new artists' quest for a progressive, up-to-date aesthetics...
...In an essay, "Encounter with Van Gogh," the screen writer Cesare Zavattini reports on a visit he made to the artist's birth-place, Groot-Zundert, to collect material for a projected film on Van Gogh (not identical, of course, with the recent Hollywood movie, Lust for Life...
...lectures contain, indeed, some sharp and profound observations on Hogarth, Reynolds, Blake, and other masters...
...Cheney was prompted to write this ambitious, yet always lucid and levelheaded, book by "a personal enthusiasm that would lead the reader to experience works of art rather than merely to learn about a number of masterpieces...
...Manet, who created the aesthetics of Impressionism...
...Incidentally, $7.50 is an enormous price for this short book whose illustrations are technically poor...
...Giorgione, who THE REVIEWERS HILTON KRAMER writes a monthly critical article for Arts Magazine, of which he is managing editor...
...and Cezanne, who was the real founder of what goes under the name of modern art—all were soldiers in mankind's battle for freedom of vision, of aesthetic expression...
...Michelangelo: A Study in the Nature of Art, by Adrian Stokes (Philosophical Library, 154 pp., ill., $7.50) is a brief, perhaps too brief, evaluation of that other giant of the Italian Renaissance...
...Thus, while a reference shelf could very well be started with this useful tome, this would be only a beginning, and Cheney, in a "Descriptive Bibliography," lists a number of books in English that he can recommend to the general reader...
...HUSTON SMITH is a professor of philosophy at Washington University...
...the second, a discussion of Michelangelo's visual works, and the last an essay on this mysterious man's emotion-laden poems...
...So large is the number of delightful art books fresh from the presses that even an individual wiser than Buridan's ass will welcome some guidance...
...The saga ends with the painters Jackson Pollock, Motherwell, Baziotes, and Kline, and the sculptors Calder, Noguchi, and David Smith, whose abstract creations are now widely appreciated...
...A by-product of this large show is a volume, edited by Andrew Carnduff Ritchie (160 pp., ill., $5.50), starting with William Blake, who died in 1827, and leading up to Francis Bacon, who was born in 1910...
...fathered Venetian painting of the Sixteenth Century...
...Other artists born after 1900 are Victor Pas-more and Graham Sutherland (noted, or if you wish, notorious for his controversial portrait of Churchill...
...Like Sir Herbert, the eminent Italian historian sees progress, at the same time noting a unity in the arts that defies age, race, and locale...
...Compared with these giants, Marc Chagall is, of course, a minor figure, yet Venturi considered this lovable French painter of Russian-Jewish origin worthy of full treatment in a monograph, published in Skira's "Taste of Our Time" series (140 pp., ill., $5.75...
...All the Gloss of Art by ALFRED WERNER IN THE weeks before Christmas, many a book lover can sympathize with Buridan's ass, the unfortunate animal that starved to death because it could not decide which of two bundles of hay to choose...
...Today, no man can hope ever to know equally well each phase in the fascinating story of art, extending as it does over thousands of years, and involving peoples of all races...
...In fact, there are scores of "bundles" to choose from, for presents to one's family, one's friends, or—to oneself...
...Although the Florentine genius meant his notes to serve as an aid to his disciples, they will be read with profit and pleasure even by those who will never touch a brush...
...he edited "The Gandhi Reader...
...Stokes divides his text into three parts: the first, a biography...
...It is a delight to follow Venturi as he traces this most imaginative lyrical colorist from his primitive and bleak start in Tsarist Russia to the rich and very personal Surrealism and Expressionism he developed as a leader of the Ecole de Paris...
...Today's sculptor, however, has set himself goals that were unknown in the Cinquecento...
...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic and editor of the Pocket library of Great Art series...
...Nevertheless, Sir Herbert notices a striking continuity in man's advance, intuitively, beyond the frontiers of mere existence...
...An unusual book is The English-ness of English Art (Praeger, 208 pp., ill., $4.50) insofar as its author, Nikolaus Pevsner, is a German scholar who fled to England twenty years ago...
...Those looking for a one-volume survey of art, covering the field from the pre-historic cave paintings of hunters in the Pyrenees to the abstractions of Hans Hofmann and Mark Tobey should turn to A New World History of Art, by Sheldon Cheney (Viking Press, 676 pp., ill., $8.50...
...Of all the writings on the strange and unhappy deformed aristocrat, rake, and genius that have been published in recent years, Cooper's few pages appear to be the most sober, sympathetic, and serious since Gerstle Mack's substantial volume of 1953...
...and none has ever equalled him in wealth of ideas and information, and in his considered expression of them...
...JAMES McBRIDE DABBS is a Southerner who farms for a living and writes as an avocation...
...in which they originated...
...E. NELSON HAYES is engaged in editorial work for a Boston publisher...
...Discussing sculpture from pre-historic samples to the metal constructions of Milwaukee's Richard Lippold, the learned Britisher dwells at length upon Michelangelo's heroic attempts to solve the problem of realizing a three-dimensional object in space, and of getting away from a pictorial or painterly effect...
...Rossetti was 75 per cent Italian, and Whistler was 100 per cent American...
...he was of the body as magnificently as he was of death and of God . . ." Michelangelo is, of course, frequently mentioned in Sir Herbert Read's profound study, The Art of Sculpture (Pantheon Books, 152 pp., more than 200 ill., $7.50), the published version of the A. W. Mellon lectures delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C...
...HOMER A. JACK has traveled extensively in India...
...He uses new materials that reflect and refract light, which he even makes an integral part of the total sculptural effect...
...Eight large color reproductions precede the text, and there is an adequate half-tone on nearly every page of the text itself...
...Another well-known historian, Lio-nello Venturi, has given us, in Four Steps Toward Modern Art (Columbia University Press, 81 pp., ill., $3) the Hampton Lectures he delivered at Columbia University...
...This interesting article is one of sixteen, contained in the anthology Art and Artists (University of California Press, 240 pp., $3.75...
...But he was more than that—and Cooper does not fail to point it out: he was a sincere artist who made no concessions to popular taste, treated sexual themes frankly yet without coarseness, and in his pictures left us historic monuments that tell us all we want to know about the mind and manners of his time...
...Pevsner points out that quite a few foreigners, Holbein and Van Dyck among them, helped to promote English art...
...DAVID FELLMAN is an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin...
...NORMA RATHBUN and DORIS MOUITON direct the children's book section of the Milwaukee Public Library...
...Thirty-seven was also the age reached by Van Gogh...
...Among the contributors are the artists Rico Lebrun and Henry Moore, the film producer Jean Renoir, and the philosopher Sartre...
...This is an extended and completely revised version of a book first published nineteen years ago...
...In recent months, much has been said about the Renaissance of the visual arts in Great Britain, and the Museum of Modern Art, in a large exhibition, Masters of British Painting 1800-1950, proved Gertrude Stein wrong in her claim that all Nineteenth Century painting had been done only by Frenchmen, while Twentieth Century painting was done in France but by Spaniards...
Vol. 20 • December 1956 • No. 12
