Review: The Art Book
Ken MacIver
art-historical classifications by throwing together brilliant examples
of all periods, schools, visions and techniques," a claim that
Gombrich or Janson, those wonderful and sturdy compilers of western
art, would surely dispute, given the debunkment is achieved by the
simple device of alphabetizing its artists. Much the same could be
said of the Baseball Encyclopedia, for that matter.
Even so, The Art Book is a treasure in its own right, a
pocketful of fun that, unlike Gombrich or Janson, can be carried
everywhere you go, easily savored over a morning coffee or on a moving
subway train. Its compact fat package fits nicely in your purse or
briefcase. The book's five hundred reproductions, about small
postcard size, are done well. Each artist depicted, no matter how
famous, whether Leonardo or Zoffany, Monet or Zuccarelli, gets only
one picture and no more. The two paragraph commentary above each image
sets the artist historically and provides a quick reference to other
artists.
And, it is in those references to other artists that the
book's pleasures truly lie. These references can lead you forward or
back in time, concern contemporaries who led or followed the artist,
or point to "schools" of artistic development, whether less known such
as the Barbizon School, or beaten to death such as Impressionism or
part of our deep time (artistic) heritage such as the Renaissance.
Trite but true, this is eating delicious peanuts in a bar; you know
you should stop but just can't.
There are down sides to such economy, as you will see, but it
is hard to deny the fun of, for example, looking up the Haarlem
painter Frans Hals and finding the nonrepresentational, for Hals, that
is, Portrait of a Young Man with a Skull. The references for Hals
include Claesz, Honthorst, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Terbruggen. Many
art grazers might look immediately to at least three of these
references with curiosity and pleasure, discovering bright new images,
while deploring that the book has trapped Hals in his own time, an
oversight for an artist who inspired Impressionists, early and late,
with his broad and almost careless brush strokes and striking capture
of the instant moment. And, the reference to the great Carravagio
under Honthorst and Terbruggen suggests Hals as a true original,
Carravagio's own reference mentions Hals. Hals' own link to the
future appears subtly but ineptly drawn through Rembrandt and Rubens.
The book has a section entitled "Glossary of artistic
movements." Grazing through this section, I was struck by what was
left out. This is a book of Western European art, with a bow to
Russia and to the United States. The glossary explains the Camden
Town Group, Cobra, and Pittura Metafisica and omits the Circle of the
Itinerants (the Russian equivalent of the French Impressionists, in
terms of its anti-academy stance and eventual wide public acceptance),
the Ashcan School (those tough turn-of-the-century chroniclers of
American cities, who told it like it was long before Howard Cosell),
and the Harlem Renaissance (the defining period of African American
art , poetry, and writing as important, brilliant and influential in
its own right).
Indeed, I believe the book contains no African American
artists from any period, an inexplicable gap. The great Jacob
Lawrence, the legendary chronicler of Jim Crow and Klan Terror, with
his brilliant murals, is absent. There's not a hint of Edward
Bannister, perhaps the greatest of the American Barbizons, famous and
respected more than a century ago in a time when blacks simply weren't
recognized on any level of American society. No Romare Bearden, a
brilliant Abstract Expressionist or Aaron Douglas or Palmer Hayden and
so forth. This is an oversight to be corrected.
On an international level, the book has not one of the famous
and talented Russian painters of the nineteenth century. It leaves
out possibly the three most influential and brilliant Russian painters
of that period. Isaak Levitan, the greatest Russian landscape painter
and a Barbizon disciple, whose The Birch Grove is as wonderful as any
French Impressionist landscape, is nowhere to be found. Konstantin
Korovin, the king of the Russian Impressionists, has no entry nor does
Ilya Repin, the most prominent Realist painter.
The Art Book sells for less than ten bucks. The reproductions
are decent. The bios set context. The references inspire digging and
thought. Buy one, leave it around where a child might find it.
Better yet, buy two, keep one for yourself.
Ken MacIver