Admirable Art Guide

...Pre-Columbian, American Indian, African, and Oceanic art are discussed without the slightest trace of condescension...

...Admirable, too, is the inclusion of so many contemporary artists who have barely turned forty by now, such as Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, who were among the pioneers of Pop Art...

...But many will not be in accord with the selection of artists, especially of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, for separate entries...

...If he wants more, he may turn to the vast literature, guided by the comprehensive, yet selective, bibliography at the end of the volume...

...Yet the desire to make the volume handy and wieldy made it necessary to exclude subjects such as metal work, textiles, furniture or book design...

...He is co-editor with W. Raymond Duncan of "The Quest for Change in Latin America/' just published by Oxford University Press...

...He can find basic information on the four subjects in readable, succinct form in The Oxford Companion to Art...

...He wrote "The South and the Nation" and is co-author with Reese Cleghorn of "Climbing Jacob's Ladder...

...Leonid Pasternak is in, though he is now mostly known for having sired the author of Dr...

...Entries on architecture, ceramics, illuminated manuscripts are included...

...Reviewed by Alfred Werner It is not enough to look at a work of art, even though our contact with it is made through the faculty of vision...

...JERRY WINGATE is coordinator of Gl Counseling Services, an affiliate of the War Resisters League...

...This is particularly true of certain "academicians" of the last century...

...from "abacus" (the weight-bearing slab placed on top of a column) to "wood engraving...

...And to dwell on the more positive aspects of the book, it is with great relief that one notices the absence of pejoratives with regard to artists about whose merits the art world is divided...

...This reviewer has found, here and there, a factual error that could have been avoided, but nowhere a really serious one...

...others, such as those on Perspective and on Color, cover many pages...

...Few will object to the choice of general subjects related to theory, materials, techniques, or general art history...

...It is surprising to find an entry on the Austrian, Adalbert Stifter, an excellent novelist (not, as we are told here, a poet) who produced landscape paintings remarkable for an amateur...

...See Perugino," or "Robusti, Jagopo...

...Among Americans, why does Robert Motherwell receive a special biographical note, but not the more important Arshile Gorky...

...ALFRED WERNER, the distinguished art critic and historian, is the author of "Degas Pastels" and, just published, "Chagall: Watercolors and Gouaches...

...If one looks for Van Gogh under "V," one finds the proper reference, "See Gogh...

...PAT WATTERS, formerly a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal, is information director of the Southern Regional Council...

...Thus, the uninformed tourist in the Sistine Chapel will get much less intellectual or sensuous pleasure from seeing what is around him than the one who has read about the Renaissance, Mannerism, the method of wall painting called fresco, and Michelangelo Buonarroti...

...But then Victor Hugo should also have been listed, since he was outstanding as a draughtsman...

...But the editor fails to mention that "Van Eyck" is to be found under the letter "E...

...Many brilliant minds collaborated to produce this superb achievement in scholarship, serious enough to be worth consulting by anyone involved with the arts, yet sufficiently popular to be of use to the intelligent layman...

...One could go on mentioning "omissions" and deploring the inclusion of individuals who are not really important...

...Alphabetically, the range is from the Finnish avant-garde architect, Alvar Aalto, to the Spanish baroque painter of monks and saints, Francisco Zurbaran...

...He has certainly learned a great deal from these 1,277 pages...

...Only a few instances can be given here...

...Zhivago, yet one of the greatest draughtsmen, Jules Pascin, is omitted...

...This impressive dictionary confines the term "art" to its narrowest meaning: the visual arts...

...Some entries are only three lines long...

...THE REVIEWERS WILLIAM CHAPMAN, a staff writer for The Washington Post, covered the Chicago conspiracy trial...

...instead, important works that exemplify an artist's oeuvre, or a movement, but have not become so overexposed as to command no second glance, and often not even a first...

...ELS A PENDLETON combines free lance writing with graduate study and the care of two young sons...

...No Mona Lisa, no Alan in the Gold Helmet...

...One wonders why the least important of German Expressionists, Max Pechstein, rates fifteen lines, while the eminent representative of Viennese Expressionism, Egon Schiele, is omitted...

...A picture, or a sculpture, is more than just a "thing of beauty": it is the expression of ability and striving of a particular individual in a certain era, influenced by religion, politics, philosophy, literature, even science, and made by technical processes and from materials that have a definite impact upon the kind of impression exerted upon the viewer...

...But it is an editor's prerogative to follow his aesthetic convictions, and to retain, or strike out, names at his own discretion...

...But the editor must be commended for including contemporaries about whom many of his colleagues, if not himself, may have great reservations...

...The black-and-white illustrations are well chosen...

...JAMES NELSON GOODSELL is Latin American correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor...

...Knowledge of what Michelangelo felt and thought, what he gained from, and gave to, his century, will shed a sharp light on such intricate and complex masterpieces as the enormous painting on the Chapel's ceiling, and the equally overwhelming Last Judgment on the altar wall...

...Also, one wonders why there are such entries as "Vannucci, Pietro...

...The volume is laudable for its complete absence of any indication that the arts of non-Europeans and non-Asiatics are not worth attention...

...Harold Osborne, editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics, and his one hundred collaborators in The Oxford Companion to Art wisely address themselves to the non-specialist rather than to the scholar surrounded by thousands of tomes...

...See Tintoretto," to name two: nobody but a specialist knows these celebrated Renaissance painters by their real names...

...Whether they are of lasting importance, or whether they represent a mere fad of little merit, only time will tell...

...On at least ninety per cent of the listings, there can be no disagreement...