MORE ART, MORE BEAUTY

...Intelligent boys and girls, who can behold abstract paintings everywhere, may wonder why not a single one is reproduced here, and may question a statement that Picasso had "given the youth of the world...

...After a tumultuous and successful but also tragic life, the artist was buried in the same church of San Antonio de la Florida at Madrid which, in 1798, he had adorned with religous frescoes so "modern" as to remind Gassier of Daumier, Delacroix, even Bonnard: "Each figure, each form, each color-patch attains the optimum point of expressive power with an economy of means so natural and effortless that we forget about technique or artifice...

...Granted that some of the complicated and even morbid samples of dadaist or surrealist art need not be shown to those of tender years, it can be argued that Soutine and Miro, not mentioned at all, are more interesting artists than Hopper or Benton...

...Malraux spoke for all when, dubbing them "Museum without Walls," he predicted that these glorious art books would "carry infinitely farther that revelation of the world of art . . . which the 'real' museums offer us within their walls...

...The venerable Wright built his first houses about the time Craven was born—which was quite a while ago...

...They mirror the world "firmly in the grip of the devil and his demonic helpers, mankind having the barest chance of escape...

...It is also difficult to see why the impression is created that with the great Frank Lloyd Wright modern architecture has stopped...

...To the critic Gassier these frescoes "sum up everything painting had achieved in the past and anticipate everything it was to achieve in years to come...

...The book gives some good information to young readers (whose parents might also enjoy it), and the choice of pictures is very satisfactory—until we reach about 1900...

...To the most remarkable of the latter, Allan Temko devoted his efforts to produce the finest volume (Notre-Dame of Paris, Viking, 341 pp., ill., $6.75) on medieval life and architecture since Henry Adams' work on Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres...

...More Art, More Beauty By ALFRED WERNER NOT ENOUGH Americans realize how much their lives have been enriched, during the last decade, by adventurous publishers, who have made available well-illustrated works on about every major phase of art, and on the more important painters, sculptors, and architects...

...Where Twentieth Century art is concerned, Craven has not changed his views in the two decades since his Men of Art was published...

...While not an art book, The Secret of the Hittites, by C. W. Ceram (Knopf, 281 pp., ill., $5) devotes many pages to the powerful and original architecture and sculpture of an ancient people in Asia Minor, an art dismissed in such a respectable standard work as Gardner's Art Through the Ages with a short paragraph...

...is a highly realistic, immense, and inexhaustible art . . . Our art has to deal with . what one used to call, simply, the soul...

...No less an artist, Neutra is more concerned than Wright with the physical and psychological well-being of his clients, who can be found all over this planet...

...It is astonishing how eager Neutra has been throughout his busy life to make science serve the needs of man...

...As Lotte Brand Philip points out in her introduction to the latest Bosch portfolio (Harry N. Abrams, 24 reproductions, 10 in color, $1.50), his works reflect the new wordly tendencies of the Church...

...a substitute for art that will have to do until a better world is born...

...text by Pierre Courthion, 64 color reproductions, $6.50) which looks at the famous "Hill" through the eyes of artists, from Eighteenth Century Georges Michel, a precursor of Impressionism, who painted it as the rural paradise it then was, to Maurice Utrillo who, as a boy, observed the last remaining windmills in what had meanwhile become the artist quarter of the capital...

...Any of the artists mentioned so far can, of course, be found in The Rainbow Book of Art, by Thomas Craven (World...

...There can be no doubt that Goya prepared the way for Manet, and that the Frenchman's "The Execution of Maximilian" (1867) could not have been painted had Manet not seen Goya's "Shooting of May Third" in the Prado...

...Rome of the Caesars (introduction by Pierre Grimal, Phaidon, 70 ill., some in color, $5.75) offers no revelations...

...Looking for a home remains basically searching for lasting happiness...

...A student of art should not only compare these two key canvases, but also read the excellent pages, devoted to the similarities and dissimilarities, by Georges Bataille (Manet, Skira, 135 pp., 53 ill., $4.95...

...One of the modern builders whose name should not have been omitted is Richard J. Neutra, author of Life and Human Habitat, published with a German and English text by Alexander Koch, Stuttgart, and distributed here by Wittenborn (318 pp., richly illustrated, $18...

...There can be no greater leap than that from the earth-bound, sybaritic edifices dedicated to Jupiter and his colleagues, to the soaring, spiritualized cathedrals of the Christian Middle Ages...

...So is a smaller book, Montmartre (Skira...

...An artist, he does not work in an impersonal style: "Architecture for habitation...

...But it is a perennial pleasure to renew acquaintance, through superb reproductions of frescoes, mosaics, sculptures, arches, theatres, and temples, with the undimmed glory of the Eternal City at its first peak of power...

...Curiously, even a free-thinker like Goya wavered between Voltaireanism and mystic leanings, as can be learned from Pierre Gassier's text to the Goya volume in Skira's "Taste of Our Time" series (139 pp., 57 plates, $4.95...

...In Ceram's book, we can view the imposing remnants of tremendous temples and palaces, richly adorned with relief sculpture representations of gods, royal personages, warriors, and beasts, real or mythological...

...Ceram is a gifted journalist who skillfully translates for the layman the findings of indefatigable explorers, digging, during the last century, into the rocky wasteland of easternmost Turkey...

...Scholarly and well written (with a warmth often lacking in monographs on architecture), the book is a "must" for tourists planning to visit France...

...256 pp., 400 ill., 32 in color, $4.95) which reproduces Bruegel's "Wedding Dance" on the dust jacket...

...The more an architect knows about man's nature, about all the functions and requirements of his body and soul, the better will he be able to make his clients happy—by giving them the optimum of light, warmth, and shade, and making cooking, eating, playing, and sleeping facilities reflect the latest acquisitions of knowledge in the fields of biology, hygiene, and medicine...

...Jerome Bosch, born about 1450 in what is now Holland, belonged to the Middle Ages, yet his paintings herald the coming of a new era...