Page 64 - Studio International - November 1967

eyebrows ten years ago, when, come to think of it, is laid here before him will finish up remarkably well
this study was perhaps already projected. And that's
Modern art surveyed the rub; already the book generates an atmosphere of informed.
Professor Hamilton has acquainted himself very
library shelves and of academic respectability. Chagall thoroughly with the essentials of his vast subject, and
and Utrillo at the same table as Matisse and Mondrian, the individual sections benefit from the breadth of his
even if the latter get slightly larger helpings. There learning in the history of modern art. He has also kept
Painting and Sculpture fn Europe 1880-1940 by George is a lot to be said for the magpie collection of the his scholarship amazingly up-to-date considering
Heard Hamilton. The Pelican History of Art; 443 pp.,
192 pp. of black and white plates. Penguin Books, Larousse Encyclopaedia of Modern Art-academically how long this study must have been in the writing.
6 gns. a most disreputable crib-where the illustrations are But the 419 pages of consecutive textual matter are a
at least interwoven with the text and where many great deterrent. Well-printed and well-produced as
different minds have been brought to bear on a welter this volume is, I feel that the author's erudition and the
This, the latest volume to be published in the Pelican of subjects amongst which it Is impossible to calcu• reader's needs would have been better served had the
History of Art, surveys, with extensive view, the history late how many pages each artist has been judged to text been more closely linked to the illustrations. No
of art ffom the beginnings of Post-Impressionism to be worth. The student will not wish to open Professor doul:it there are production problems which dictate
the consolidation and acceptance in the thirties of the Hamilton's book; the scholar will feel he should not the format to a certain extent, but surely it is time, at
discoveries made in the first quarter of this century. need to. the expense of drastic reorganization if necessary, to
The previous volume covered the years 1780 to 1880, This said, it is only fair to record that the book is accept that even studies as free from the taint of corn•
and one hundred and sixty years of art in two volumes extremely thorough, scrupulously annotated, and merce as the Pelican History of Art would be more
seems asking a lot of reader and writer alike. But these contains a useful bibliography. In his introduction, instructive, more readable and more useful if the works
are not perhaps books which one reads. The scholar the author writes that 'a history of art is ••. a were illustrated where they are discussed, alongside
who can fill a work of this size and scope with original history of consciousness': what he has given us is a the text. The Museum of Modern Art publications,
material and new insights.is a most rare and super­ history-period. But as history it is certainly very which are no more expensive pro rata, are models of
human figure-a Rewald or a Gombrich; there must reliable; it is clearly presented; and there are frequent how well this can be done. I am certain that Professor
surely be something in the very nature of the task passages of acute historical perception compressed Hamilton's book will already have been ordered for
which is dulling to the intellect. Professor Hamilton's in suitably decisive prose. Anyone able to overcome every college library throughout the country, and in
account of the period proceeds along the well­ his instinctive reluctance to reading through a book of principle it is right that it should be. Whether it will
trodden paths of art history; chapter headings arran• this density will, I think, find the going surprisingly be often disturbed in the face of competition from
ged in prominent artists and comprehensible move­ easy. History told straight and well has a fascination more seductive publications is another matter
ments, and no emphases that would have raised any all its own, and the reader who is able to digest all that altogether, Charles Harrison

historical importance in the rise of the greatest anywhere else) have to wade through sentences I ike
Picasso blue Picasso rose phenomenon of modern art, the King Kong of the 'Picasso is not a modern painter born in an age that
easel, the incomparable Pablo.
was not modern, but the modern painter of a period
But it is, as I suggested, difficult to sustain this which precisely was becoming modern, and he knows
Picasso-Blue & Rose Periods. A catalogue raisonne attitude, however subtly it may be attempted, in front it. We shall see besides that with Picasso one must
by Pierre Daix and Georges Boudaille, 348 pp., 770 of the Blue Period and its peculiar sentimentality. never argue in terms of influence, since he never
leaves anything in the state in which he finds it'.
What do we in fact see, as those emaciated clowns
monochrome and 61 colour plates. Evelyn, Adams and etiolated Mimis en chignon pass in review? The
& Mackay Ltd. 10 gns. Neither did Raphael, but do we think on that account
somewhat conventionalized responses of a student that he was not influenced by Perugino and Michel­
On April 26, 1967, a New York art dealer named David painter to the most-discussed styles of his day, angelo? And what can that waffle about 'modern'
Mann emerged from Sotheby's, hemmed in by news (Lautrec, Gauguin, Art Nouveau, Munch, and so on), mean? The authors seem to think that, for painters,
photographers, triumphantly brandishing a Blue used to project a compassion for the poor, the rejects it means looking analytically at prototypes from past
Period Picasso. He had just bought it for £192,000, on and the outsiders, that all too often slips off into cultures and transforming them; not gazing passively
behalf of a 'young couple' in the U.S.A. The painting, mawkishness. It is deeply ironical that this least at the Antique, as those poor illusionist zombies
Mother and Child in Profile, 1902, was arguably one of interesting area of Picasso's immense output should used to before the advent of Goya. It would be
the worst daubs that any of Picasso's off-moments still be the most popular; but the much-reproduced difficult to strike a more exquisitely naive formulation
ever produced; and its parade down Bond Street little blue girl holding a dove, in the D'Avigdor Gold• of a historical theory than this. What the authors call
before the clicklng shutters, In an ironic though no schmidt collection, is In a sense the Landseer spaniel 'the canons of beauty' come in for the ritual bashing
doubt unconscious parody ofthe triumphal procession of our day, while one of those thin-profiled saltim­ which, for some reason, is always thought necessary
in which the Sienese carried Duccio's newly-finished banques, waving his antennae fingers in a field of when writing about an avant-garde painter. Picasso's
Maesta to their cathedral, seemed to consecrate the pasty greyish cobalt paint, Is to the Los Angeles precocity is lauded as 'unequalled' and without pre•
myth of the Blue Period to which Pierre Daix' and property developer exactly what a canvas by Teniers, cedent. It would be interesting to see what adjectives
Georges Boudallle's volume is, in part, devoted. full of roly-poly yokels spewing and pissing on the the authors keep in reserve for Masaccio's or Ber­
That rT)yf:h is the supreme aesthetic importanee and tavern floor, was to h ls European equivalent 150 years nini's.
originality of everything Picasso has produced. In ago-a picturesque reminder of the more decorative Nevertheless, when the book shifts off Its axis of
terms of the Blue Period, it is a difficult one to sustain. aspects of poverty. rhetoric, it becomes a publication of considerable
It would have taken a critic of amazing percipience And so it is useful to be ready, when writing a book value. In all the thousands of books that have been
to foretell that, out of the 21-year-old Spaniard in the which involves the Blue Period, to stand a little aside done on Picasso, this is the first systematic catalogue
Bateau Lavolr, a major painter would emerge; but from the subj�ct and take the commonsensical view raisonne of the years 1900 to 1906. The authors'
now that the emergence has taken place, all the pres• that a painter may sometimes paint well, sometimes scholarship and patience in hunting up the facts have
sure of reputation is directed back onto the paintings middling badly, and sometimes .ill; that not every• resulted in a number of important revisions of date
of the Blue Period, which become objects of radiant thing he produces is to be seized on with rapture. and shifts of emphasis-especially in relation to the
significance because they are Picassos. It is not sur­ This, M. Daix and M. Boudaille tend not to do. time Picasso spent at Gosol in the summer of 1906,
prising, then, that M. Dalx and M. Boudaille have a Instead they are apt to subject the reader to the and its relevance to the development which, in Paris
pronounced Midas complex about their subject, and excited stream of cloudy rhetorical imperatives that autumn, was to lead through the African heads
are anxious to demonstrate, even in the rare instances which is so uniquely, and unfortunately, character• and the extraordinary portrait of Gertrude Stein to
where they can't import stunning aesthetic value into istic of Frenchmen writing about their greatest living that barbaric seed-pod of modern art, Les Demoise/les
the least of Plcasso's sketches, that it is oJ singular painter. One should not, in a catalogue raisonne (or d'Avignon. Robert Hughes
230