THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars by Steven Heller and Louise Fili (Chronicle, 500 pp., $35) Exactly 80 years ago, a great design exposition in Paris...
...Unpleasant as the fact niay be,theTh ird Reich produced some notable graphic design in the Aert Decy idiom: tlie airbrush poster art of Ludwig Hohlwein, for instance, so comparable in its streamlined aesthetics to the work of George Petty in the United States...
...This book is a fine coffee table item, but its value as scholarship is limited...
...Heller and Fili believe that this omission is actually justified: "While the Nazi party did produce a graphic identity system and visual propaganda campaigns that were unmatched in history," the authors write, "overall German Gebrauchs-graphik was reduced to a cliche...
...Especially valuable is Bruce Frohnen's discussion of the way in which history and circumstance rather than abstract ideals informed Burke's understanding of international human rights...
...In pictorial terms, the book is first-rate work, but its conceptual basis and historical commentary could have been better...
...If modernism equals progress and progress equals communication, then modernism equals communication," the authors state...
...Barton Swaim...
...There are excellent essays by the historian Jonathan Clark and the literary scholar F.P...
...It is unfortunate that by and large the only people who seem capable of adequately handling Burke are scholars whose fundamental views on politics and government are broadly in keeping with Burke's own...
...As Heller explains in the introduction, this book is a collection of condensed materials from six out-of-print books by the same publisher...
...But this statement is an overgeneralization...
...The Standard Reader Books in Brief Euro Deco: Graphic Design Between the Wars by Steven Heller and Louise Fili (Chronicle, 500 pp., $35) Exactly 80 years ago, a great design exposition in Paris launched the movement that today is generally known as Art Deco...
...Quotations lack a footnote apparatus...
...Lock...
...But interpreting the great man's writings in a way that brings some measure of insight to current political questions is not easy, even assuming an accurate and sympathetic understanding...
...This is meant to pass for cultural commentary, one supposes...
...In the case of Italy, the Fascist influence in graphic design is explored at length...
...Almost 40 years after the first responsible studies of the subject as an art-historical topic, publications about this interwar style continue to proliferate...
...Image was the heart of Fascist politics," the authors proclaim—and this airy observation is matched by a number of others that are equally jejune or sophomoric...
...There are books on how Burke was really a proto-Marxist, a radical revolutionary, a pent-up homosexual...
...Steven Heller, a senior art director at the N^'w York Times, and Louise Fili, a New York graphic designer, have now given us E'uro Deco, an illustrated survey of graphic design in the Art Deco manner from France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Holland, and Britain...
...But the text could have used more editing...
...But the visual appeal of the book is overwhelming, and the diligent work that assembled these images deserves a strong commendation...
...These essays are clearly written and come to their point in a reasonable space...
...Richard Striner An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke, edited by Ian Crowe (University of Missouri Press, 247pp., $44.95) Books on Edmund Burke by American academic historians published over the last 30 years tend to be bad...
...Harvey Mansfield's essay on whether and to what degree Burke's conservatism urged compromise with the "unfailing unwisdom" of the moderns is alone worth the price of the book...
...Burke was not primarily a philosopher but a politician whose most important ideas are found in speeches and occasional writings rather than in systematic treatises...
...By the outbreak of WBorld War II, whatever remained of German Modern was dead...
...Very little German work from the Nazi period is presented, and this is unfortunate...
...There is no index...
...Moreover, while the relevance of his counterrevolutionary writings for the West's struggle against communism was critical, the contributors to Ian Crowe's collection of essays, An Imaginative Whig, have tried to consider Burke in light of more recent debates...
Vol. 10 • June 2005 • No. 38
