Life-enhancing Art

...his explorations are in depth rather than area...

...This Russian has been called "the Giotto of our time," because he found a new, original, pictorial language, fit for an age of atomic fission, a period in which the concept of matter had lost much of its former solidity...

...This encyclopedia's worth is far in excess of its price, for it amply covers all aesthetic expression of man, from the early Stone Age to the 30-year-old French painter, Bernard Buffet, and, unlike other works of its scope, treats the art of Islam, India, the Far East, and pre-Columbian America with the respect and dignity accorded to Western art...

...6.95...

...Now Terisio Pignatti, in a monograph, Carpaccio (Skira...

...Joseph C. Sloane, after noting the far-reaching influence of Courbet's belief in the equality of all subject matter, remarks: "We have come so far from the days when thoughts like these occupied men's minds, we are so accustomed to art with no 'subject' at all, or to art where subjects are never thought of as 'better' or 'worse,' that it is hard to imagine that people ever felt this way about pictures . . ." One who went beyond the boldest thinkers of the last century was Kan-dinsky...

...Many people are still puzzled by his work, with its inherent mysticism, and its close affinity to the unorthodox poetry and music of our time, yet, as Grohmann writes, "We are coming to a more just appreciation of his heroic life, and of his work, the uniqueness and greatness of which were grasped by very few during his lifetime...

...He is the subject of a large volume by Will Grohmann, Kandin-sky (Abrams...

...But this appreciation, and the purchase of one of his oils, came too late to revive the sick man's desire for living...

...For a long time, art historians looked upon him as an undistinguished follower of his famous Venetian compatriot, Giovanni Bellini, and the English-speaking world did not think highly of him before John Ruskin came to extol the imaginative, fanciful qualities of this great story-teller...

...In addition to the large illustrations in color or in black-and-white that are interspersed in the text, the book has an appendix, listing chronologically and illustrating (in stamp-sized miniatures) all of Van Gogh's significant works...

...5.75), all essential facts about the artist's short, tragic life are set down, but whereas many writers limit themselves to straight biography, El-gar speaks with considerable feeling and understanding about each of the major oils...

...The book brings back to life an aristocrat and scholar, reserved and even standoffish, yet possessed of a spirit responsive to every breath of wind, every ray of the sun...

...Anyone eager to understand the painters and sculptors of our time can, with the aid of the five experts who contributed to this attractively illustrated volume, acquaint himself with the strivings of Fueseli, Goya, Delacroix, Re-don, Ensor, and others who, anticipating modern trends, substituted suggestion for copy and representaFill out Coupon and Mail Today tion...

...Nineteenth Century writers like Baudelaire and Stendhal emphasized the artist's freedom of creation, cutting a path for Courbet and the Impressionists who were bold enough to elevate landscape painting to a high-ranking form of art...

...In Frank Elgar's Van Gogh (Praeger...

...5.75), presents us with some of the altar-pieces and pageants painted by this humanist poet who was a superb raconteur as well as a divine colorist...

...Berenson appreciates Carpaccio as a great genre painter, yet Carpaccio is not a household name to us...

...Kandinsky lived to be 78, and, except for his last years that were marred by World War II, enjoyed in his old age the reverence in which he was held by a new generation...

...Romantic Art (Arts Yearbook 2, Doubleday...

...She was only two when her father's life ended in a Paris hospital, and her mother killed herself, but she interviewed all who knew the painter and dug up letters and family diaries shedding new light on her father's enigmatic personality...

...Carpaccio at least did not lack patrons, whereas Van Gogh lived and died without having been understood by more than four or five men...

...He writes here on Picasso and Matisse, and on such general topics as "Painting and National Income" and "Exhibition-itis" (which refers to exhibitions that are either unnecessary or improperly arranged and installed), but he is, of course, at his best when dealing with the Golden Epoch of painting...

...Bernard Berenson has given us no encyclopedias...

...There could be no more fitting epitaph than the line Zborowski included in a letter: "He was a son of the stars for whom reality did not exist...

...It is the English version of a book originally published in Germany...

...Art, we are told, "begins only when we can perceive the realm of pure form beyond the outward manifestation, and only those who pay as much attention to the interpretation as to the object portrayed will truly understand a work of art...

...While his great work on the Italian painters has long been regarded a classic, he reveals himself as a magician of the word and an astute appre-ciator of art even in the 20 short newspaper and magazine articles he penned in his old age and has collected in the volume, Essays in Appreciation (Macmillan...

...Though he received many commissions from churches and guilds, he died in such complete obscurity that no one bothered to record his death...

...4.50) deals mainly with artists and critics who were Van Gogh's contemporaries, or were born a few decades before him...

...One is pleased to meet the little-known Florentine, Zanobi Machiavel-li, to learn for what particular reasons Berenson attributes a certain painting in the Louvre to Domenico Man-cini, and to listen to his shrewd remarks on Tiepolo, Giorgione, Reni, Fra Angelico, and the Carraccis (who, despite their obvious faults, were able to produce some admirable works...

...It took a Romantic like Delacroix to write, "Imagination alone allows us to see where others do not see, and to see differently," or to assert that "it is our imagination which paints the picture...

...Immediately after his death, legends, rumors, and anecdotes, not all of them pleasant, began to be woven around his elegiac figure...

...Eventually Modigliani, too, would have gathered some of the rewards reaped in old age, but he was fated to die at 35, recognized by only a few...

...It is one of the volume's advantages that every major work discussed is reproduced with a clear, large photograph...

...Just as Van Gogh had a brother, Theo, to alleviate his lot, so Modigliani had a close friend, the poet and dealer Zborowski, without whose superhuman efforts he would have perished earlier...

...7.50) makes a brave attempt to free her father's memory of some of the fabrications and distortions concocted by family and friends...

...Among them was the sensitive critic, Aurier, who enthusiastically praised his painting...

...Pignatti is justified in believing that our time is better equipped than any before to do justice to Carpaccio's amazing work: "The poetic painting of Carpaccio diverged into a secret domain of its own where forms tended to develop into images abstract in meaning: symbols which the modern sensibility alone has understood and fully appreciated...

...Pedagogically, the text offers much to those who will read it slowly, for it elaborates on lofty principles cherished by practitioners and lovers of art in all ages...

...For the past 70 years he has been pointing out the spiritual and sensuous qualities in the work of Renaissance masters he knows more thoroughly than anyone else...

...Now his daughter, Jeanne, in Modigliani, Man and Myth (Irion Press-Crown Publishers...

...Each consists of an introductory essay, describing and analyzing the subject matter, and a glossary, clarifying technical terms in a few sentences and summarizing the achievements of individual artists...

...The 580 illustrations (many in color) are well chosen for the beauty and significance of a work rather than for its popularity...