THINGS OF BEAUTY
Werner, Alfred
Things of Beauty by Alfred Werner As an intent observer, I have noted that the annual output of volumes on art and artists has about quadrupled since the end of World War II. Unfortunately,...
...Hawthorn Books has made a praiseworthy effort to provide the student with what is called, with a slight exaggeration, "The Complete Library of World Art"—the fifty-odd monographs cannot possibly exhaust the entire field of world art...
...6) is more likely to appeal...
...William S. Rubin appears less optimistic in Modern Sacred Art and the Church of Assy (Columbia University Press...
...The much smaller Tudor History of Painting (Tudor...
...Totally different, yet equally valid, aesthetic concepts prevailed in the Far East...
...In Paul Klee: The Thinking Eye, edited by Juerg Spiller (Wittenborn...
...Longstreet's biographical essays are a trifle too "popular," but the comments beneath the prints are pithy and accurate...
...6.50) deals with painters like Constable, Delacroix, Fuseli, Turner, and others who fled the drabness of modern life by discovering the sublimity of landscape or taking refuge in the world of dreams...
...22.50) is a much larger and more comprehensive enterprise...
...The Renaissance (American Heritage...
...In Christian Art Through the Ages (Macmil-lan...
...18.50...
...The Getleins have also found a great deal of satisfactory work based on religious themes in contemporary paintings, tapestries, and sculptures...
...Quality and Low Price) Series, offers books on Cezanne, Renoir, Van Gogh, and others ($3.50 each...
...8.75...
...Here the veteran German art historian presents us with a solid text, plus an extensive bibliography, to acquaint the American public with the leading figure of the now defunct Expressionismus...
...5) who proudly point to many fine new churches, among them La Purissima Church in Monterrey (Mexico) or the work of Marcel Breuer at the Benedictine establishment in Collegeville, Minnesota...
...A fascinating phenomenon of the postwar years is the activity of the Christian Church as a patron of the arts, and the upsurge of interest among contemporary artists in religious signs and symbols...
...12.50), which presents woodcuts, etchings, engravings, and lithographs by twenty-three artists, from Albrecht Duerer to Marc Chagall...
...Those who cannot visit the Louvre or the Prado may find consolation in the knowledge that New York's Metropolitan Museum and Washington's National Gallery, whose treasures are also listed, are within easier reach...
...Each has more than one hundred illustrations, and each is provided with a short, but sound, text by a specialist in the particular field (Greek, Roman, early Christian architecture, and so forth...
...Still, to judge by the first two little volumes of the series, All the Paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and All the Paintings of Pieter Bruegel, much is offered for $3.95 to those whose budgets are restricted...
...7.50) finds a great deal that is typically American in U. S. architecture...
...8.50) is recommended for quick reference to one thousand important pictures...
...For its "Gallery of Great Masters" ($5.95 each), the firm of Thomas Yoseloff has so far chosen Rembrandt, Watteau, and Goya...
...Professor Fitch thinks that we have done well, but cautions us not to become too smug about our striking achievements as planners and builders...
...He guides us from pre-Buddhist wall paintings, preserved in tombs from the Fifth Century, through all the important periods and schools, up to the delicate screen paintings done shortly before Japan opened her door to the Occident in 1858...
...This pessimism, however, is not shared by Frank and Dorothy Getlein, authors of Christianity in Modern Art (Bruce...
...8.95) skillfully covers what we prefer to call the Middle East—Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia, an area which "provided a setting for man's earliest and greatest adventures in artistic expression," and produced an art designed to flatter great gods and great kings...
...Michael Sullivan, as well equipped to discuss this subject as any Westerner could be, emphasizes in The Birth of Landscape Painting in China (University of California Press...
...sacred building...
...For those who prefer books on periods rather than on individual masters, three other new works can be recommended...
...The Moderns by Gaston Diehl (Crown...
...Volumes devoted to individual artists range from the small and inexpensive to the lavish and expensive...
...Romanticism by Pierre Courthion (Skira...
...While she has attempted a brief historical survey, Walter L. Nathan, in Art and the Message of the Church (Westminster Press...
...While he has high praise for the small church in the French Alps, which incorporates works by Chagall, Leger, Lipchitz, Matisse, and Rouault, he feels that the church has not taken sufficient advantage of the vast artistic resources available in our time: "Far from being a beginning of a 'Renaissance' of sacred art, the church of Assy now seems destined to go down in history as an anomaly...
...The Art of the Ancient Near East by Seton Lloyd (Praeger...
...In this category, certainly, belongs Paintings of the World's Great Galleries, edited by Bert Bilzer, Hermann Boekhoff, and Fritz Winzer (Praeger...
...Cezanne, whom the young Klee, in 1909, called "the teacher par excellence," did more than anyone else to undermine the Renaissance tradition and to make himself the master of nature instead of subjecting himself to all its whims...
...Another excellent series of informative books is "The Great Ages of World Architecture," issued by George Braziller, in which, so far, eight volumes have appeared ($4.95 per volume...
...17.50) contains ten richly illustrated essays on popes and princes, and the artists and scholars in their employ...
...Architecture and the Esthetics of Plenty by James Marston Fitch (Columbia University Press...
...Much attention should be paid to E. L. Kirchner by Will Grohmann (Arts Inc., $15...
...Another delightful and useful book is A Treasure of the World's Great Prints, edited by Stephen Longstreet (Simon and Schuster...
...The series of "pictorial biographies" issued by Studio-Viking Press ($6.50 each) includes, so far, Van Gogh as well as Da Vinci and Picasso...
...While the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries in Italy were dominated by magnificent extroverts, che early decades of the last century witnessed a resurgence of poetic introspection that culminated in the romantic movement...
...This Japanese scholar urges us to pay more attention to his country's paintings, since they are far more important than the curios and woodblock prints first discovered by the Western world a century ago...
...Slightly more expensive, but also larger in format and provided with a great many more color plates, is a new series issued by Phaidon Publishers...
...The flaw in The Moderns is that too many artists, including some who are third-rate, are covered...
...12.50) begins with the men who renounced the Inner Kingdom of Delacroix and his fellow-somnambulists and continues with those who since 1889 have been forging the tools and symbols for a world served as well as tryrannized by new sciences and new machines...
...Edited by Robert Maillard, the book tries to cover painting from the anonymous cave murals of Lascaux to the Expressionism of Jack Levine...
...Another artist who was persona non grata in the Third Reich was Paul Klee...
...While this important scholarly volume is a "must" for admirers of Klee, and for those interested in the genesis of abstract art, it is too theoretical for the general reader, to whom Cezanne by Henri Perruchot (World...
...The first titles cover Renoir, Van Gogh, Botticelli, Velasquez, and French Expressionists ($5.95 each...
...Similarly, Peter Hammond, in Liturgy and Architecture (Columbia University Press...
...6.50), Katherine Morrison Mc-Clinton deals with all manifestations of Christian art from the decorations of the catacombs in Rome to Rico Lebrun's Crucifixion...
...It is a lavishly illustrated guide to the world's most famous galleries...
...Crown Publishers, in its Q.L.P...
...Unfortunately, because the space allotted to reviews of art books has not expanded at the same rate, only a few lines can be spared for books that have been put together with great devotion and are lodes of priceless information as well as things of beauty...
...25) we are presented with this revolutionary artist's copious notes which in part precede, in part accompany, his aesthetic explorations and investigations in color and line...
...5), seeks to demonstrate that the church has, in recent decades, successfully wedded beauty to sacred ritual functions: "We can rejoice at the many outspokenly contemporary new churches with their clarity and simplicity, their absence of pomp and empty show, their insistence on truth...
...While Sullivan deals here only with one facet of Chinese art, and is primarily interested in the symbolic "language" employed by the early masters, Terukazu Akiyama's Japanese Painting (Skira...
...10) that the Chinese landscape painter depicts "not merely the outward and visible forms of nature, but the inner life and harmony that pervade them...
...The plates, some in color, reveal Kirchner as the chief protagonist of a movement that preferred to express the inner world of feeling and imagination rather than to imitate the outer world of reality...
...6) cannot find any satisfaction in "the modish and gimmick-ridden pavilions of religious art which are constantly being held up to us as the precursors of a genuine renewal of...
Vol. 26 • November 1962 • No. 11
