Page 66 - Studio International - March 1968

taking the wrong direction. Al I this is not too exciting factly respectable method of letting the basic facts The book reads I ike a series of critical essays or
but very well done at a textbook level and t.f there are speak for themselves, but I think she has been too reviews and has the virtues of the best of these-per­
any awful mistakes of fact I did not notice them. narrow in her choice. She duly mentions the Armory ceptiveness and the willingness to respond to the
However since most of the painters have been written Show, the W.P.A., the influx of refugee artists in the pictures. The writer's own internal audience seems to
about elsewhere, what I, for one, was looking for, was thirties and forties, Black Mountain College and so on, be the community of painters and their friends. She
a more general insight. If art is to be written about in but she does not mention the effect of the tax laws on writes from a stance leaning towards that of Green­
terms of countries it is fair to expect specific qualities patronage and museums, or the nature of American berg in her discussion of the more recent phases, in
to be attributed to the national experience, otherwise higher education, including art schools, to name only spite of what has been said above and even though
the book could be about artists with five-letter names two factors which seem to me at least as important. the section with the greatest vitality is that on Pop.
or size eleven shoes. I think the author has been shy No doubt this sort of thing would have threatened to She nearly always avoids in-group jargon, writes as
of doing this at al I decisively, no doubt because such a overload the book but surely the absurdly abbreviated clearly as the compression will allow; the book will
way of thinking is not normally very meaningful In the section on architecture at the end could have been certainly and deservedly sell in large numbers.
condition of high art in the twentieth century. His­ dropped and the sculpture included where it be­ But however hard you read, you will not find the
tories of the art of other countries for the whole longed in the body of the text. magic ingredient that made it all happen so marvel­
period (1900-1967) would be hardly more than com­ Paradoxically the feature of the American artist's lously and so enrichingly for the rest of the world. Of
pilations of artists and movements and a history must experience which gets most mention is his constant course there was no such thing but the story does
say something more than this. It Is precisely the preoccupation with the Idea of American-ness, which quite unintentionally make some of us who feed on,
present dominance of American art that itself makes recurs from The Eight rejecting European academic but do not make, art a bit wistful.
It possible and even Important to study it as an entity. subject-matter at the beginning of the period to the M. G. Compton
Barbara Rose has preferred on the whole the per- Minimalists repudiating European composition.

is precise in describing sources of myths, influences and ceramics out of a personal myth of the courtship
Personal myths on technique and the occasional 'statements' of the and mating of a blue-black lover and bridegroom and
a paler bride. What all this has to do with aborigines
artist. It could be very dangerous to apply the histori­
cal method at such length to a living artist, and Franz and their problems is moderately stated in this book.
Arthur Boyd by Franz Philipp. With an introduction by Philipp is sometimes pompous for a sentence or so. Stated rather than explained-the paintings say some­
T. S. R. Boase, 288 pages, 44 colour plates, 134 mono­ But his subject is disobligingly lucid when being thing about poverty, sex, death, colour and wells
chrome plates, Thames & Hudson £9 9s. paradoxical. which is literal and obvious and damnably obscure.
Boyd is a good landscape painter, but his choice of Arthur Boyd has to paint what is perfectly plain to
Arthur Boyd is not an easy painter to write about; and Australian landscape does not quite flt with the fami­ him at the time. He is in the myth-making business
the fact that he can take to pottery, ceramic painting, liar Australian romanticisms. He came to England willy-nilly. So, when the last war was on the way he
ceramic sculpture, etching or ballet design effectively partly out of a love for Constable, but when he settled caught a social realism which had connections with
Is no great help. Franz Philipp's big book is very near Hampstead Heath his work became haunted by Bosch and Breughel and Goya. So he can be splen­
properly dominated by illustrations and supported by a red or black or white dog roughly out of Piero di didly concerned with metamorphoses of man to
a thorough catalogue raisonne and bibliography. Cosimo. The dog became the Wolf of Gubblo which animal; so he can make a major painting called and
This is reliable art history applied to a born maverick could also dooble with a frog-thing or an inquisitive meaning Nude to Dragonfly, and many works in
who is willing to explain what he has done civilly angel peeping at lovers liable to be thrown out of many media in which lovers become 'joined figures'
enough, but is not good at movements and is, at any Paradise. in several senses.
time, liable to break out in unpredictable directions. It has been said that Boyd has a great openness to The literalness of his biographer is fitting. Both of
Franz Philipp takes seriously the Boyd family history, his environment. It has also been said that he has an them respect Australia, technical skills, mythology
the Australian background In terms of landscape, 'elephantine commitment to his own images'. He ancient and lnventable, and the possible needs of the
available European art and traditional teaching, and devoted much time and madf,! many good paintings common people. Frederick Laws

A substantial part of her subject-matter is the Independence, and the Revolutionary Wars with
English middle class. This is the class which
The bestial English eighteenth century travellers to the continent such France. The fundamental matters over which these
wars were fought are ignored.
as Dr Johnson, Mrs Piozzi, .and Horace Walpole, Much of her text is fascinating, or more accurately,
deplored as being largely non-existent there. Her entertaining. But what she omits is equally fascinat­
Hogarth to Cruikshank: social change in graphic satire selection of works dealing with this pushing, grasp­ ing and often more significant; indeed for the taste
by M. Dorothy George. 224 pages, Illustrated in colour ing, acquisitive class captures much of its visual of our times, some omissions are surprising. What
and monochrome. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press repulsiveness. But her text makes no effort to pry into then are some of the fundamental truths of the period
105s. the reasons for their impressive ugliness. Instead covered? She refers to the elegance and security of
Dr George's pen is agitated by that occupational tic society but never hints that much of its prosperity
In this handsome book, M. Dorothy George, the well­ of the professional art historian: she describes in derived from the profits of slavery and colonies, and
known social historian of the eighteenth and early relentless detail the contents of many of the prints at home the intensive exploitation of land, raw
nineteenth centuries In England, surveys the changes reproduced in the book, all clearly visible to anyone materials, and people. Her selection of prints and
in graphic social satire from Hogarth through the with reasonable sight. drawings is mostly quaint and sentimental and avoids
reign of George Ill, to the Regency. She has selected This excess of scholarship accompanies seventeen the crude and harsh (such as the anti-semitic car­
prints (and some drawings) illustrating-to use her fine colour plates and 201 black and white illustra­ toons of Rowlandson and Cruikshank). Works are
own words-'Hogarth's moralizing, Gillray's irony, tions. Still the text reveals very I ittle of the fundamental excluded which emphasize the rapidly increasing
Rowlandson's comedy, Newton's burlesque,' as well truths of the period covered and the underlying devaluation of human life.
as the satire of the Cruikshanks, and the charm of reasons for the corruption of the society satirized or There is a brief passing reference to slavery which
Bunbury. Her subject headings are Arts and Letters, caricatured. Who would know from her text that during the period covered reached its peak when
High Life and Low Life, the Professions, the London between the publication of Hogarth's A Harlot's some two million Africans were 'imported' into the
Scene, and Travel at Home and Abroad. This Is an Progress in 1732, and Cruikshank's A Theatrical Atlas English colonies in North America alone, Organized
exemplary work of its kind, lucid, beautifully written, in 1814, England had been almost continuously at from Bristol, Liverpool, and London, 192 slave ships
Its scholarly apparatus displayed helpfully and war, not only in Europe but all over the globe. Her provided space for nearly 50,000 slaves, 12½ per cent
modestly. Dr George has dug up a wealth of facts selection of prints is contemporaneous with the Wars of whom perished during the 'middle passage' (such
about the appearance of urban life in the period she of the Spanish and Austrian Succession, the Jacobite being the precise estimate of the cost accountants
covers. Rebellion, the Seven Year's War, the War of American and management experts of the day). It could be said
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