Conquest of Beauty
Werner, Alfred
Conquest of Beauty by Alfred Werner One may very well disagree with some of the political activities of Andre Malraux, De Gaulle's minister of cultural affairs, but it is hard to deny that he is a...
...Both by his work, writing, and lectures, and through a small group of young disciples, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan gave form to the major architectural trends of the Twentieth Century," writes Mendelowitz...
...In this superbly illustrated volume, Malraux surveys art from Sumerian archaeology to the Fifteenth Century painter, Botticelli...
...In School of Paris, by Raymond Nacenta (New York Graphic Society...
...10), is a brief but perceptive biography...
...This vast collection has provided inspiration for numerous schools of artists...
...10) he talks about his meetings with outstanding men such as Nehru and Krishna Menon...
...A substantial part of the monumental two-volume work, Painting in the 20th Century, by Werner Haft-mann (Praeger...
...A much larger number of works of art (but exclusively painting) are interpreted in The National Gallery, London (Harry N. Abrams...
...PRISCILLA ROBERTSON is a former editor of The Humanist...
...Sullivan is comparatively unknown to us: "One sees his buildings . . . without envisaging the master himself...
...In The Metamorphosis of the Gods (Doubleday...
...Each of the large color plates is faced by a black-and-white detail of the painting, with a brief but penetrating analysis of the illustrated work...
...In Daumier: Drawings (Yoseloff...
...In the other volume, about thirty of Wright's shorter essays, many of them autobiographical, are reprinted...
...While the complete omission of the Abstract-Expressionist school must be noted with dismay, the book can be recommended as a good elementary introduction to a large subject...
...Apart from being superb craftsmen, these muralists were good story-tellers who rejoiced in "the sheer beauty of nature and man-made things...
...A worthy successor to Daumier was the German artist, George Grosz, who died last year...
...ROBERT J. ALEXANDER, professor of economics at Rutgers, has specialized in Latin American affairs...
...He wrote "Political Man...
...School of Paris is an elaborate and elegant "museum without walls" picturing the artistic climate of Paris since 1910...
...A similar service is rendered by Clark's compatriot, Eric Newton, who, in The Arts of Man (New York Graphic Society...
...Egyptian art can be fascinating rather than oppressive when presented lucidly by such an expert as Boris de Rachewiltz (Egyptian Art, Viking...
...English Cathedrals (Hastings House...
...Personal details of their careers are well blended with the stories of their creativeness...
...Hence, we are grateful to Connely for bringing to life the man whose bold imagination made the skyscraper a work of art...
...He maintains that "modern painting is the most striking expression of the universal process by which one cultural epoch with a long history yields its place to another...
...25), we can also learn a great deal about "the decline of an old conception of reality and the emergence of a new one," to quote Haftmann...
...A more impressive volume is Treasures of the Louvre (Abrams...
...f 12.50...
...9), with text by R. H. C. Davis and photographs by Helmut Domke, are stunning picture books...
...A useful addition to the bookshelves of museum and school libraries is A History of American Art, by Daniel M. Mendelowitz (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston...
...10), providing essays and pictures that originally appeared in the vanguard monthly, Oeil (The Eye...
...The first book deals with noble British churches of different periods, from Chichester in the south to Durham in the north, while the second illustrates the Romanesque legacy as it survives in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and other countries...
...3.95), with text by C.L.S...
...The text was provided by the museum's director, Philip Hendy...
...7), Wy-lie Sypher undertakes an important task which, unfortunately, scholars rarely feel able to perform: he uses both poetry and painting to trace the evolution of styles and techniques through the course of centuries...
...Of twenty artists mentioned, all but one are more than fifty years old...
...17.50), with text by Rene Huyghe, which reproduces most of the classic works of art dear to Western man...
...10) endeavors to examine the significance of paintings by sixteen masters, from Roger van der Weyden to Seu-rat...
...While Matisse is repeatedly mentioned in School of Paris, and is represented there with a delicate oil of two women in a room, readers should turn, for further information about him, to the substantial Matisse by Raymond Escholier (Praeger...
...Wright is one of the heroes of Peter Blake in The Master Builders (Knopf...
...MARTIN BRONFENBRENNER, professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, was a Japanese language officer in the Navy during World War II...
...His Utrillo (New York Graphic Society...
...Conquest of Beauty by Alfred Werner One may very well disagree with some of the political activities of Andre Malraux, De Gaulle's minister of cultural affairs, but it is hard to deny that he is a man of enormous erudition and a keen sensitivity for the arts...
...A brief historical introduction covers the scene from the visits of King Edward VI to the day of General De Gaulle, and an appendix contains photographs and biographical sketches of 477 artists...
...two other heroes are the Frenchman Le Corbusier and the German Mies van der Rohe...
...Waldemar George knew Maurice Utrillo intimately...
...Equally learned, but less flamboyant in his language, is the British Kenneth Clark, whose Looking at Pictures (Holt, Rinehart and Winston...
...But most of us will prefer his biting criticisms of German reactionaries and his challenging anti-war pictures to the charming but unoriginal studies of nudes he did after his flight to America...
...He later served in Japan as censor and tax economist and taught and studied in three Japanese universities...
...In Indian Impressions (Orion Press...
...6.50 each) are useful, for they recapture successfully the habits, foibles, and moods which prevailed in the French capital while the masters, from Manet to Leger, kept busy in their studios...
...6.50...
...The writer was a personal friend of the painter and had access to a wealth of unpublished material...
...The forty-three pictures of churches, palaces, and old streets are by the celebrated photographer Brassai...
...he knows that all arts are closely related to each other and expressive of the same human intentions and desires...
...12.50) is also an all-inclusive study (and a lovely specimen of book production), whereas Greek Sculpture by R. Lul-lies and M. Hirmer (Abrams...
...20), which is a sequel to The Voices of Silence, Mairaux states his aim: "To discover the significance of the fact that throughout the ages man has always sought an answer to the problem set him by the spark of eternity latent in his being—a problem which has assumed a new complexity in our modern culture, first of all cultures to realize and recognize its ignorance of man's significance...
...A good additional source of information and pleasure is Modern Art: Yesterday and Tomorrow (Reynal...
...Linnell and photographs by A. F. Kersting, and Romanesque Europe (Macmillan...
...The introductory essays are by Ruth Berenson and Norbert Muhlen, and there is a communication in which Grosz himself begs the reader to note that in his middle years he had abandoned his earlier mood and style: "In all humility I offer you the evidence that I have outgrown the satirical phase of my artistic development...
...10), K. E. Maison gathers 150 sketches in charcoal, pen, ink, and other media by the French Nineteenth Century satirist whose sureness of touch was admirable, and whose work is now in such demand that "there seem to be more outright forgeries of Daumier's than of any other artist's drawings...
...5) has a long, yet highly readable, text...
...the book can be considered an authoritative work on Matisse's life and work...
...The volume deals not only with architecture, painting, and sculpture, but also with interior design, the household arts, and the various crafts, and is illustrated with a large number of small but satisfactory black and white photos...
...5.95), devotes brief essays to 174 examples, from a cave painting at Altamira to works by such contemporaries as Henry Moore, Marino Marini, Abraham Rattner, and Pierre Soulages...
...7.50...
...Unlike these two books, Paris, by John Russell (Viking Press...
...In Rococo to Cubism in Art and Literature (Random House...
...Another first-rate draftsman is the American, George Biddle...
...The king of modern draftsmen was Henri Daumier...
...Lovers of modern architecture must not omit tribute to the great structures created centuries before these three men were born...
...Greek Art by Raymond V. Schoder (New York Graphic Society...
...Similarly, our understanding of the arts is vastly enhanced by familiarity with the time and milieu from which a certain sculpture or building emerged...
...There was little concern for aesthetic beauty among the earliest white settlers in building their churches and homes and in making their furniture and household utensils...
...As is commonly known, Italy's Renaissance geniuses were greatly indebted to ancient Greece, and this influence can be seen clearly in The Mural Painters of Tuscany, by Eve Borsook (Phai-don...
...They represent, respectively, the mastery of space, the mastery of form, and the mastery of structure...
...Of more lasting value, however, are the more than fifty illustrations, based on quick, yet subtle sketches made on his journeys...
...6.95), who discusses not only architecture and the arts related to it, but also pottery, faience, glass, wood-carvings, works of the goldsmith, and other samples of what are incorrectly labeled "minor arts...
...42.50) inevitably is devoted to the pioneers in France who deliberately violated every one of the tenets of Renaissance tradition...
...Thus, the small, profusely illustrated volumes, Paris Fin de Siecle, by Jean Roman, and Paris in the Twenties, by Armand Lanoux (Arts Inc...
...12.50), Herbert Bittner has collected more than a hundred samples of Grosz' often devastatingly corrosive art...
...12.50...
...Recently Horizon Press issued both a biography of the teacher— Louis Sullivan as He Lived, by Wil-lard Connely ($6.50)—and a survey of the pupil's work, Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings, selected by Edgar Kaufmann and Ben Raeburn ($3.95...
...Curator-in-chief Huyghe sums it up aptly: "The Louvre stands at the center from which paths radiate toward as yet unknown territories, to be explored by future generations...
...A useful appendix lists all the Frank Lloyd Wright structures still standing in 1960...
...12.50), which traces the development of the fresco from Cimabue to Andrea del Sarto...
...15) surveys, as the title indicates, three-dimensional works only (from a strictly stylized archaic bronze horse to the celebrated Laocoon group found in Rome in 1506...
...In the late Seventeenth Century, however, the settlers began to beautify their private worlds...
...In Utril-lo's life," George emphasizes, "art has the function of a purification: it is an Aristotelian catharsis...
...years ago when beautifully shaped stone implements and ceremonial objects were fashioned by hunters and fishermen...
...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic...
...While several Americans (De Kooning, Lippold, Macdonald-Wright, and Tobey) are honored by inclusion, the artists are either Frenchmen or immigrants who became fully identified with the "Ecole de Paris...
...In George Grosz (Arts, Inc...
...Art began on this continent thousands of THE REVIEWERS SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET, professor of sociology at the University of California, is on leave this year as the visiting Ford research professor of political science at Yale...
Vol. 25 • January 1961 • No. 1
