The Best in Art
Werner, Alfred
The Best in Art by Alfred Werner IN OUR prosperity we have surrounded ourselves with the greatest cultural resources known to any society," a recent article in the New York Herald Tribune...
...THE REVIEWERS DEWEY W. GRANTHAM, JR...
...7.50) and Dresden Gemaeldegalerie, by Gertrud RudloffHille (Yoseloff...
...is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University...
...12.50...
...15), some people may be reluctant to confer the name of artist to, say, such an indefatigable mass producer of mildly charming daubs as our own Grandma Moses...
...12.50) which not only lists and illustrates the master's principal paintings a nd drawings, but also offers substantial portions of his voluminous writings...
...15), introducing the magnificent marble tombstones with which wealthy Athenian aristocrats commemorated their loved ones, and The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art, by D. V. Ainalov (Rutgers University Press...
...50), which contains ten large and superb reproductions that are well worth framing...
...10...
...The Artist and Social Reform by Eugenia W. Herbert (Yale University Press...
...EDWARD LURIE is an associate professor of history at Wayne State University and the author of "Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science...
...Four outstanding books are devoted to individual masters...
...Do the creations of Sunday painters really belong in the realm of art...
...The Byzantine style had a considerable influence on the Thirteenth Century Tuscan artists, discussed by Ernest T. de Wald in the initial chapters of Italian Painting 1200-1600 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston...
...5.95), Elsy Leuzinger is both enthusiastic and scholarly about the often rather abstract wood, terra cotta, and bronze pieces from Southwestern and Central Africa, all of them tinged with religious feeling...
...This is particularly true of books concerned with the plastic arts...
...In this connection, mention might be made of Washington's other great repository of art, the Corcoran Gallery, which expanded one of its ambitious exhibition catalogues to present it under the title, The American Muse (Viking Press...
...5) is a serious attempt to point out to what an extent painters and sculptors of France and Belgium participated in the social struggles from 1885 to 1898...
...From the three-volume edition of his Complete Letters the poet selected only those which "contain reflections upon the art of painting and the problems of being a painter...
...SIDNEY LENS has made several recent trips as a free-lance reporter to Cuba and Latin America...
...MICHAEL B. PETROVICH, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, is a Russion scholar who has traveled and studied extensively in Russia and Eastern Europe...
...ALFRED WERNER is a distinguished art critic and lecturer...
...25), in which the work of the untutored and somewhat naive Nineteenth Century toll collector is presented with all the love and respect that is due this originally unappreciated genius...
...The quiet and dignified Georges Braque is less widely known than the mercurial and histrionic Picasso, yet posterity may very well consider him to be the purer artist, and right now two publications, a large volume, G. Braque, by John Richardson (New York Graphic Society...
...In price they range from The Cathedral Builders, by Jean Gimpel (Grove Press...
...Although Henri Rousseau, who was a professional artist without training, is included in the volume, Modern Primitives: Masters of Naive Painting, by Oto Bihalji-Merin (Abrams...
...In the book, curator Henri Dorra collected paintings, poetry, and prose from the Colonial Period to the 1940's, to trace the constant growth of America's creative genius...
...it is owned by the East German Republic and is particularly famous for Raphael's Sistine Madonna...
...8.50...
...Oskar Kokoschka, by Bernhard Bultmann (Abrams...
...20) deals with an Austrian Expressionist painter whose talents were not recognized by his native country, whose works were labeled "degenerate" under the Nazi regime, and who ate the bitter bread of self-inflicted exile, to achieve world-wide fame only in old age...
...For more advanced lovers of art is The Archaic Gravestones of Attica, by Gisela M. S. Richter (Phaidon Press...
...The author admits that along with authentic naive arts there exists much that is "merely inept or rudimentary...
...12.50), edited by Eleanor C. Munro, which covers painting, sculpture, architecture, and ornament from the stone age to the atomic and also contains a glossary of art terms and thumbnail biographies of artists...
...Those of us who cannot travel to far-away countries will be pleased to know that two of the world's greatest museums need no longer be mysteries to us, thanks to The Hermitage Museum, by Pierre Descargues (Abrams...
...12.50) that reproduces and discusses many of the superb paintings, from Giotto to Ingres, that the merchant prince, Samuel H. Kress (1863-1955), donated to the capital's art gallery...
...12.50), and a much smaller one, Braque, by Jean Leymarie (Skira...
...Curiously, the finest African sculpture comes from areas where matriarchy prevails, "where woman holds a dominant position in society...
...Among the large number of books dealing with the subject, the present one is, despite all the scholarly apparatus, the most readable...
...The Best in Art by Alfred Werner IN OUR prosperity we have surrounded ourselves with the greatest cultural resources known to any society," a recent article in the New York Herald Tribune asserted, adding: "Art, regarded for many years as the private luxury of an affluent few, has now become public domain...
...The book goes on to lead us through the early Renaissance to the achievements of Michelangelo and Raphael and their imitators...
...One must be grateful to him for having included, apart from Rousseau, such gifted "primitives" as Bauchant, Bombois, Generalic, Hicks, and Hirshfield...
...5.75) appear in time to pay homage to the Cubist painter on the eve of his eightieth birthday...
...1.35), a paperback dealing with churchmen, architects, artists, and craftsmen of medieval France, to the album, Marc Chagall: Gouaches (Abrams...
...12.50) which refutes those historians who believed Byzantine art to be Roman in origin, and establishes that it actually was a heritage of the great Hellenistic markets of the Middle East...
...10...
...In Africa: The Art of the African Tribes (Crown...
...He has edited several art books and is the author of the forthcoming "Amedeo Modigliani, Sculptor," to be published by Arts...
...One of them is Henri Rousseau, by Jean Bouret (New York Graphic Society...
...A unique book is Van Gogh, A Self-Portrait, edited by W. H. Auden (New York Graphic Society...
...The book deserves special mention because it explodes the notion that artists (as well as poets) are, by necessity, happy-golucky fellows, too egocentric to care for anything but their creations...
...There can be no doubt, however, that the sculpture of the African Negro is, in many instances, art of the highest order, though as recently as forty or fifty years ago few people regarded these works as anything but idols, or of more than ethnographic interest...
...The Gemaeldegalerie, once the treasured collection of the Saxon kings, is now also a State Gallery...
...The beginner may welcome the richly illustrated Golden Encyclopedia of Art (Golden Press...
...In both books scholarly commentaries accompanied the reproductions.' Washington's National Gallery is within the reach of most of us, but we welcome, nevertheless, the handsome large volume, Art Treasures for America (Phaidon Press...
...Special attention should be called to The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by Andre Chastel (Orion Press...
...The Hermitage collection in Leningrad, a creation of Catherine the Great, was the pride of many tsars, and originally contained only works of the Old Masters...
...In pur century, however, wealthy Russian merchants like Stchoukine and Morosov acquired early works by Matisse, Picasso, and other modernists, and these, too, can be found in Leningrad and in the present book...
Vol. 25 • December 1961 • No. 12
