A Joy Forever
Werner, Alfred
A Joy Forever by Alfred Werner As in previous years, publications on art continue to cover a wide range. This season's harvest extends from the attractive little pocket guides, issued by...
...On Art and Connoisseurship, by Max J. Friedlaender (Beacon...
...The Sculpture of This Century by Michel Seuphor (Braziller...
...The black and white illustrations are much superior to those in color, which are sometimes utterly misleading...
...The first section is a general introduction to sculpture in many countries, the second a biographical dictionary...
...But the master's life is so shrouded in mystery that the author feels compelled to resort, time and again, to such cautious phrases as "it is believed" or "legend has it . . ." Marcel Brion's German Painting (Universe Books...
...15) is concerned with the development of painting from the Byzantines to Picasso...
...Leonardo da Vinci by Ludwig Gold-scheider (Phaidon...
...One is Klee, with the text by Nello Ponente (Skira...
...4.95 each...
...The Pageant of Painting by D'Es-pezel and Fosca (Abrams...
...Useful paperbacks in the field are: Approach to Greek Art, by Charles Seltman (Dutton...
...included are such Old Masters as Gruenewald and Bosch as well as the Nineteenth Century Manet, the recently deceased Derain and Dufy, and the still living Braque...
...Louis Post-Dispatch...
...ROBERT G. LEWIS is special agricultural coordinator for Wisconsin's Governor Gaylord A. Nelson...
...New, too, is the "Phaidon Alpha Book" series ($3.95 each...
...Each work is introduced by a specialist, and each plate is faced by a commentary, explaining icono-graphic and historical peculiarities...
...These slim books enable us to view leisurely the loveliest pages in old manuscripts that are kept in rare book rooms of great libraries...
...Compared to Dali, howTHE REVIEWERS ROBERT LASCH is the editor of the editorial page for the St...
...ever, he is a recluse, for Dali has exploited all avenues of publicity with a shrewdness and lack of inhibition that makes him rather than Picasso the most talked about artist of our time...
...The terrible impact Nazism had on German art is barely mentioned...
...While few people have the energy and patience to plow through all of the thirty-eight massive volumes of his collected works, many serious students will be glad to learn what he had to say about the Renaissance masters, about Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Venetian architecture, art education, and similar topics, for Ruskin had a nimble and unorthodox mind...
...Masters of the last century have been issued, chronologically by Crown Publishers in these handsome volumes: Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Lautrec...
...Instead of art history or aesthetics, here is an attempt to assemble pictures of every object and person that Leonardo encountered during his long, restless life in Italy and France...
...3.50...
...The Parisian Miniaturist, Honore...
...Fleur Cowles' biography, The Case of Salvador Dali (Little, Brown...
...ROBERT J. LAMPMAN is a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin...
...15) is a comprehensive survey which includes even works by artists under thirty...
...Here one meets such exciting medieval religious painters as Meister Bertram, Meister Francke, and the Master of the Wittingau Altar, as well as such Baroque and Rococo men as Elsheimer, Baumgartner, and Maul-pertsch...
...5.75...
...1.65...
...The Lamp of Beauty (Phaidon...
...10) will be a revelation to people who assume that German art began with Duerer and ended with Cranach the Younger a century later, only to re-emerge, in our days, with the Expressionists...
...it contains the text of A. W. Mellon lectures the scholar delivered at Washington's National Gallery of Art...
...He wrote a commentary on the press, "I See by the Papers," for The Progressive for several years...
...Unfortunately, there are several mistakes (for instance, Zoffany was born in Frankfort, not in Regens-burg, and, having migrated to England as a young man, belongs entirely to British art...
...he wrote "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy...
...6.95) contains selections from writings by John Ruskin...
...The texts are vividly written and devoid of stereotype...
...In a few paragraphs the author discusses the work of artists who have come to the fore since the last war...
...The most touching pages are those in which the French poet describes his meeting with the aged, crotchety, near-blind Degas who retained to the end his biting wit and gift for making unforgettably pungent statements...
...Whereas we know pitifully little about the Quattrocento Florentine, nearly every day in Picasso's seventy-nine years is known to us through the master's well publicized extroversion...
...The Rohan Book of Hours...
...Quite different in character is Leonardo da Vinci: A Pictorial Biography by Richard Friedenthal (Studio-Viking...
...The Vienna Genesis...
...Outside these groups three moderns have been presented recently...
...The series can be warmly recommended to students who cannot afford the higher-priced books, for they have authoritative texts and numerous illustrations (inevitably, the majority are in black and white...
...As a child prodigy Klee displayed a marvelous gift of fantasy, which he retained to his last days...
...and An Italian Plutarch...
...A new venture is the series, "The Library of Illuminated Manuscripts," edited by Walter Oakeshott (Yoseloff...
...DON PERETZ wrote "Israel and the Palestine Arabs," published by the Middle East Institute...
...It includes The Benedic-tional of St...
...There is no common denominator here...
...Lothar-Guenther Buchheim has contributed a "pictorial biography" of Picasso in the same format as Fried-enthal's Leonardo (Studio-Viking...
...Art and Illusion by E. H. Gombrich (Pantheon...
...10) is subtitled "A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation...
...6.50) unfortunately apes her eccentric hero by presenting, uncritically, every wisecrack attributed to him, and by pumping up his already highly inflated ego, without making any real attempt to mark out his place in the history of modern art...
...Today, everybody will agree with Ponente that Klee opened fresh vistas to mankind: "The significance of his experience transcends the limitations of time and place...
...The compilers deserve praise for including works by artists who are not widely known, especially among the moderns (such as Friedrich, Spitzweg, Bazille, Menzel, Corinth, Leibl, Liebermann, Hodler, Vallotton, Denis, Gleizes, and Lhote), and for selecting from celebrated artists' works that have not become hackneyed by constant reproduction...
...To those interested in aesthetics and art history, several volumes can be recommended...
...6.50...
...it has its justification in the perennial history of humanity, whose loftiest manifestations it reflects...
...Ethelwold...
...Degas, Manet, Morisot is the twelfth volume of Paul Valery's "Collected Works in English" (Bollingen Foundation, Pantheon Books...
...ALFRED WERNER is a Vienna-born art critic who has written and lectured in both the United States and Europe...
...IX, Indian Miniatures, is a thing of beauty...
...Much space is given to Leonardo's contributions to the progress of technology and science...
...4.50...
...WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS teaches history at the University of Wisconsin...
...The Dilemma of Being Modern, by J. P. Hodin (Noonday...
...1.65), and the Evergreen Gallery books ($1.95 each) on modern art...
...The charming illustrations, half of them in color, start with samples painted on palm-lead in the late Eleventh or early Twelfth Century, and end with a picture painted about eighty years ago and clearly influenced by Victorian photography...
...The carefully executed and richly hued little pictures on a large variety of subjects provide, as W. G. Archer suggests in his introduction, "an essential clue to the Indian mind...
...2.25...
...This season's harvest extends from the attractive little pocket guides, issued by Washington's National Gallery of Art, priced at fifty cents each, to the giant "Great Masters of the Past" series, published by the New York Graphic Society, at $25 each...
...As was to be expected, four-fifths of the reproduced works are non-figurative...
...9.50) is a serious work that reproduces all of the master's paintings and many of his drawings, and contains fascinating scholarly notes on the plates...
...Liebermann died in 1935, not in 1919...
...Of special interest are works attributed to him and the seven supposed portraits (none of them entirely convincing...
...The compilers did not remain content with the well-known samples that nearly every child can recognize but have photographed works in private collections and in museums and galleries not often visited by American tourists...
...The Great Lambeth Bible...
Vol. 24 • September 2006 • No. 7
