Art for Life's Sake
Werner, Alfred
Art for Life's Sake by Alfred Werner Civilization, as we know it, began on the banks of the Nile six thousand years ago, and all art of the Western world is, to some extent at least, indebted to...
...6) collects his most important critical essays...
...Rodman perceives a sharp distinction between the Outsider ("an artist who makes noncommittal statements") whom he deplores, and the Insider ("who feels drawn to values outside himself strongly enough to examine them in his work...
...22.50) which takes us to the Iranian plateau and reveals to us lushly colored illuminated manuscripts produced in Tabriz, Herat, and other cities between 1300 and 1630...
...12.50) and a smaller one, Braque, by Jean Leymarie (Skira...
...A similar position is taken by Clement Greenberg who, in Art and Culture (Beacon Press...
...5.95), E. R. Meijer makes an eloquent statement about the portraitist: "The everyday mask behind which his subjects hid themselves is stripped away, and their naked humanity is revealed...
...As for Icelandic Art, by Kristjan Eldjarn (Abrams...
...6) appears posthumously, was a cheerful, lustful braggart whose story—as told to the American journalist Gladys March— is highly entertaining, though one is advised not to trust him completely...
...He is the subject of a large volume, G. Braque, by John Richardson (New York Graphic Society...
...While Apollonio's book, well illustrated though it is, fails to go beneath the surface, Robert Rosenblum, in Cubism and 20th Century Art (Abrams...
...20) earnestly deplores that, while we still pay respectful homage to his name, we avoid looking him in the face...
...Like Rembrandt a tragic figure, but tragic for different reasons, was Toulouse-Lautrec, whose biography by Henri Perruchot, simply titled Toulouse-Lautrec (World...
...it explores from the crude, yet powerful creations of warfaring tribes to the slightly decadent expressions of city dwellers who had substituted grace and charm for fervor and vigor...
...The author interviewed people who knew the painter, and he has pieced together a life story unmatched in power by many a work of fiction...
...6.75...
...The largest, Rembrandt, by Claude Roger-Marx (Universe Books...
...Unlike Rembrandt, Lautrec never knew financial worry nor hostility of the art world, and also unlike him the crippled and deformed genius was totally deprived of a woman's genuine love...
...Ancient Egypt, by William Stevenson Smith (Beacon Press...
...In his short text for Rembrandt (Yoseloff...
...Books on Cubism are numerous, but Marcel Jean's History of Surrealist Painting (Grove Press...
...We are proud that some of the finest specimens of this branch of Persian art can be found in libraries and museums of New York, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore...
...Richardson calls him "subtle" and "reticent," while Leymarie sees him as a spiritual poet who "molds space in his workman's hands and renders the infinite tangible...
...The World of Art, by Paul Weiss (Southern Illinois University Press...
...While medieval art, essentially religious, endeavored to "express the invisible by means of the visible," later periods often had less lofty aims...
...THE REVIEWERS WILLIAM McCANN makes an avocation of paperbacks and reviews them regularly for The Progressive...
...While the Catholic church regained some of its power through the counter-reformation, the domes built by Jesuits and other orders are characterized by theatricality verging on the melodramatic...
...This is well pointed out by Basil Gray's Persian Painting (Skira...
...7.95), as he first took part, with Matisse, Vlaminck, Derain, and others, in the "Wild Beasts" revolt against academism, and subsequently helped his friend Picasso develop the most important movement in our century—Cubism...
...6.95), which is volume one of the "Acanthus History of Sculpture," consists of a brief text plus large photographs of New Kingdom sculpture (1580-1090 B.C...
...We are also told that with that era "for the first time in the annals of Christianity religion ceased to be the exclusive inspiration of artists and architects...
...His new book, "The Patterns of African Politics," will be published later this year...
...A totally different individual is Georges Braque, who is several years older and still quite active...
...17.50) may be considered the first authoritative treatment of a chapter in art that still puzzles and even irritates the ordinary museum-goer...
...More than a hundred drawings are reproduced in Rembrandt as a Draughtsman (Phaidon...
...6) is deeply touching...
...Art for Life's Sake by Alfred Werner Civilization, as we know it, began on the banks of the Nile six thousand years ago, and all art of the Western world is, to some extent at least, indebted to the Pharaohs and the painters and sculptors they employed...
...These edifices mirror Humanism's "predominant interest in the affairs of the individual as opposed to the medieval concern with abstract theological argument...
...By contrast, Diego Rivera, whose autobiography, My Art, My Life (Citadel Press...
...There is much to admire in the talent of anonymous farmers on an isolated cold island who presented the world with wood carvings, metal work, and embroideries that are deeply convincing in their decorative charm...
...Not sufficiently known either are the arts and crafts of the people who roamed North America before the white man's arrival...
...Those who seek a comprehensive guide through all of Greek sculpture, from the archaic beginnings in pre-Hellenic Mycenae to the sophisticated works ol Hellenistic masters, will want to consult Greek Sculpture by Pierre Devambez (Tudor...
...Whereas in the Romanesque period French miniaturists imitated the achievements of neighboring countries, in the subsequent Gothic period France, artistically come of age, set its own pattern and even exported the finest specimens of its craftsmen's output...
...3.95), reached the age of eighty-one, but all his life and work were haunted by visions of sickness and death...
...10), a good number of the buildings reproduced are castles, town halls, private mansions, and other secular structures...
...While most of it is folk art, in the truest sense of the term, certain tribes trained artists to be professionals...
...in the Louvre, Holland's Leyden Museum, and the State Museum in Berlin (which owns the celebrated bust of Queen Nefertiti...
...5.95...
...The Middle Ages of Christian Europe are well represented by Jean Porcher's Medieval French Miniatures (Abrams...
...Though several cathedrals are in the volume Renaissance Europe, edited by Harold Busch and Bernd Lohse (Macmillan...
...He edited "Ambrose Bierce's America" (a paperback...
...Braque plays a leading role in the volume Fauves and Cubists, by Um-berto Apollonio (Crown Publishers...
...Ancient Egypt, by Christiane Des-roches Noblecourt (New York Graphic Society...
...Now we have, at last, Indian Art in America, by F. J. Dockstader (New York Graphic Society...
...In the books mentioned so far, the emphasis is on large beautiful color reproductions, but volumes on art history and aesthetics must not be ignored simply because the stress is on the text, or carry only small black-and-white reproductions, or are altogether without illustrations...
...Edward Munch, who is the subject of the volume by Otto Benesch (Phaidon...
...25...
...In The Insiders (Louisiana State University Press...
...It had Rembrandt, who is the subject of several new volumes...
...Totally different is Selden Rodman's approach...
...6.95) was written by an abstract painter who demonstrates that non-figurative art, far from being a hoax, must be considered the inevitable and indispensable art of our industrial, scientific age...
...Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism were born and nurtured in Paris, but we should never forget that great art was, at all times, produced outside France as well and, for that matter, outside Europe...
...ALFRED WERNER is the well-known art critic...
...8.50) it is safe to say that this is the first work on the subject accessible to American art lovers...
...Art into Life, by Frank Avray Wilson (Citadel Press...
...GEORGE W. SHEPHERD, JR., visiting assistant professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, has made several trips to Africa...
...Diego's youth in pre-revolutionary Mexico, his participation in the anti-Diaz conspiracy, his Parisian interlude, and his amours, artistic ventures, and political escapades during the last thirty-odd years of his tempestuous life are described with the zest of a real showman...
...25) which covers all territory north of the Rio Grande...
...This reviewer maintains that there must be a middle ground between the extreme positions held by the two men: Art for life's sake, always with a capital A...
...RALPH K. HUITT, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, has worked on the staffs of two U.S...
...9.50) is most valuable because, apart from giving us fine reproductions of the master's paintings, drawings, and etchings, it contains the full texts of the three earliest biographies of this unusual man...
...50) Victor Tapie does not confine himself to ecclesiastic architecture, but takes us on a grand tour of the ostentatious and rich fountains and facades of Bernini's and Borromini's Rome, and the spacious palaces of which Versailles is the most glamorous and impressive...
...He died wretchedly at the age of thirty-seven...
...4.50) is the work of a philosopher who tries "to make evident art's nature and reality, to indicate what it is that can be found in it, and to expose some of the principles which a sound criticism should use...
...Most of the superb color photographs are based on the originals kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris...
...5.95) in which author Otto Benesch lovingly talks about the wisdom of the master "grown old and forsaken in his struggle against the tragic fate of genius unrecognized by his time and surroundings...
...In The Age of Grandeur (Grove Press...
...We must not think, though, that the Baroque age was devoid of inwardness...
...6.95), he severely attacks the action-painters and other abstract artists such as those whom Greenberg discovered and praised...
...Identical in format is the second volume in the series, Classical Greece, by Nicholas Yalouris (also $6.95) which limits itself to the famous marbles from the Parthenon, that pride of the Periclean age which Lord Elgin removed from Athens and, which, for the past one hundred and fifty years, have been the main attraction of the British Museum...
...Jean first discusses surrealist painting before surrealism, and then deals with Dali, Tanguy, Picabia and others who believe in the "omnipotence of the dream...
...25) gives us a thoroughly documented study of the 1906-1925 period, and even examines more recent works of art that have been influenced by Cubism, among them paintings by such Americans as Charles Demuth and the still very active Stuart Davis...
...The countries covered are Italy, France, England, and Germany...
...Senators...
...Rembrandt, with an introduction by Henri Focillon (Phaidon...
...7.50), a handbook on the Egyptian collections in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, offers an excellent general introduction, not only to wall paintings and sculptures, but also to everyday utensils, tools, weapons, jewelry, tiles, faience, and pottery of the Pharaonic age...
Vol. 25 • June 1961 • No. 6
