Page 58 - Studio International - July August 1971

Now art gets less and less collectable, more and Committed Art
The Paintings and more uneasy in a domestic setting. Some of the
George Grosz: Art and Politics in the Weimar
Drawings of Dante interiors illustrated here are going to look more Republic by Beth Irwin Lewis. 328 pp with 93
than quaint in ten years time.
Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Perdigao's book on Gulbenkian makes an illustrations in monochrome. University of
Wisconsin Press. £7.10.
A Catalogue Raisonné unusual tribute to an unusual man. Books about
Virginia Surtees great collectors tend to be of two kinds. If George Grosz emerges from this detailed and
'Anyone who wants to understand Rossetti and his art should unofficial, like Aline Saarinen's The Proud well-documented study as much more than a
dispose of all the profiles and the case histories that have been
written about him and get this Catalogue instead. The price is Possessors, they stress the eccentricity of their great satirist. From his early role as cynical
high, but the two volumes are worth their weight in every subjects, often rather maliciously. If official, `merchant', through the decade of political
decimal of it.'—The Times Literary Supplement 2 volumes
225 plates £20 they are pompous and unreadable. José commitment, to his last 'commercial' years in
The Assisi Problem Azeredo Perdigao, though an old friend of America, he exhibits a persistent refusal to
Mr Gulbenkian's, and now President of the succumb to artistic or political illusions, and
and the Art of Giotto great Foundation which Gulbenkian founded demonstrates more clearly than most artists of
A Study of the Legend of St Francis in his will, has managed to produce something this century the virtues of a realistic critical
in the Upper Church of San Francesco, Assisi which is respectful but by no means intelligence put to the service of radical political
Alastair Smart unrevealing. activity. From very early on in his career he
The great fresco-cycle of the Legend of St Francis in the Upper
Church at Assisi is among the most celebrated of all the artistic One of the characteristics which emerges seems to have rejected the Romantic tradition
monuments of Italy: it is also one of the most controversial, for most strongly is Gulbenkian's confidence in of the self-obsessed artist, concerned with 'pure'
modern scholarship has thrown doubt upon the tradition handed
down by Vasari that the frescoes are early works of Giotto. In himself. When he was negotiating with the values; and this may have made it easier for him
this comprehensively illustrated book the author offers a new Soviet Government for the magnificent silver to place his work uncompromisingly in the
study of the frescoes and proposes an alternative interpretation
of Giotto's early development. 111 plates £8 and equally magnificent paintings from Russian service of the proletariat as people, rather than
collections which are now to be seen in the in that of an abstract 'revolution' or a particular
Giotto and the Orators Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, he speaks to party.
Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and them, not so much as a private individual, but Without particularly liking or admiring the
the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450
as the head of a sovereign state-they, he people, he chose, in the immediate post-war
Michael Baxandall
implies, may rule over men and territory, but he Germany of the Freikorps and the Spartacists,
Painters and humanists were joint pace-makers for the early
Italian Renaissance, but how much the painters' visual art had rules over money, which is something just as to work for the people as a deliberate decision of
in common with the humanists' verbal art is still not clear. This important. a very specific kind, in which the revolution
book examines the one firm bridge between them : what
Petrarch and other humanists wrote about painting. It makes a In fact, many of his actions as a collector had was not seen as a way of improving the
survey of the range and main themes of their art criticism. a kind of royal wilfulness. Unable to obtain the situation of the artist, or of creating some kind
16 plates £3.75 Oxford Warburg Series
Goya portrait he really wanted-that of the of ideal society, but as a means to improving the
Oxford University Press Countess of Chinchon -he would buy no other. actual conditions of the masses. If this could be
Though the collection itself follows, at first achieved, the status of art was of negligible
sight, the pattern laid down by conventional importance. As he said, 'Whether one names my
taste during the past half-century, with its work art is dependent upon the question of
Rembrandts, its Guardis, and its signed French whether one believes that the future belongs to
furniture, a visit to the Gulbenkian Museum the working classes'. This is the statement of a
shows that it is in fact the reflection of a most man prepared to accept and adopt as a logical
unusual personality. The carpets and the Greek basis for his own work a Marxist view of
coins-both marvellous of their kind-illustrate culture.
Gulbenkian's interest in highly technical Equally Grosz's single-minded adherence to
subjects which required a great deal of study. the view that revolution was only about
The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Isnik improving the situation of actual human beings,
pottery demonstrates his attachment, as a kept him from becoming any kind of party
former subject of the Ottoman Empire, to his artist. Although he joined the German
own past; and objects as diverse as the Communist Party in 1918, and was chairman of
obsidian head of an Egyptian pharaoh of the the 'Red Group, Union of Communist Artists
twelfth dynasty, and the Lalique jewels, show of Germany', founded in 1924, and, even as late
the real individuality of his 'sense of delight', as 1928, joined the Party's 'Association of
the major principle which guided him when Revolutionary Artists of Germany', he never
deciding whether or not to make a purchase. allowed his art to indulge in either the
The obsidian head, indeed, has some claim technological idealism of Constructivism (with
to be the greatest piece of Egyptian sculpture which he had a brief flirtation in 1920-I), or the
outside Egypt-greater, even, in its weary fraudulent heroics of Socialist Realism.
spirituality, than the celebrated bust of In an important sense, Grosz's art and ideas
Nefertiti in Berlin. It was no ordinary man, and are based on a 'negative' realism: a critical view
certainly not a 'mere millionaire', who coveted of actuality so firmly based on the real condition
that, pursued it, and bought it. of real people rather than on political or
EDWARD LUCIE-SMITH aesthetic theory that only an actual
improvement in their condition would permit
him to assent to a situation. He was one of the
very few, if not the only one, of the Western
European Communists to visit the Soviet Union
in the early 1920's and return unimpressed. But
as Beth Irwin Lewis points out, 'That he did
not glorify Lenin or the Soviet Union did not