Page 70 - Studio International - November 1971

Rops who brought a powerful illustrative style Art internment reproductions illustrating the artist's
to bear on nerves excited by Sacher-Masoch; development. The only period which does not
A History of German Art by Gottfried
neurasthenics whose private fantasies had been appear to be as well researched as the others is,
Lindemann. 106 pp with 134 illustrations, 64 in
suddenly overtaken by the times. surprisingly,.the English period which still
colour. Pall Mall. £3.
The focal point for most of them was the Kurt Schwitters by Werner Schmalenbach. needs to be illuminated fully. People who knew
Salon de Rose + Croix which was founded by Schwitters in England continue to pop up in the
Thames and Hudson. £12.6o.
the art critic and novelist who called himself most unlikely places, and they remain
the Sâr Paladan, and ran from 1891 to 1897. A history of German art in 228 pages undiscovered by the thesis writers and students.
John Milner's book is by far the most represents an achievement similar to the Lord's One of the people who knew Schwitters well
informative both about the Rose + Croix and Prayer inscribed on a grain of Patna rice. You and who even shared internment with him on the
the ramifications of the cult of decadence in the can marvel at the dexterity and economy but, Isle of Man is Fred Uhlmann, who has a great
rest of Europe. But the book is so short that his supposing you can read it at all, does it tell you deal to say about his countryman and artist in
treatment is condensed and often highly anything you didn't know already ? This exile in his autobiography. According to
schematic. Philippe Jullian, who has far more particular history, written by a lecturer at the Uhlmann, Schwitters painted a large number of
elbow room, is merely silly. He is the illustrator Hamburg School of Engineering, impressively portraits for pin money on the Island and often
whose trivial drawings mar the English edition condenses its bulky and difficult subject-matter indulged in the strangest practices, even
of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. He is trying and has something to say about the painting, pretending for a time that he was a Dachshund,
to do a Mario Praz on the imagery of the period. sculpture and architecture of Germany from the barking himself to sleep at night. Little of such
He is indifferent to dates and to chronology. He Carolingian period to the present day, but is not purely human information appears in Dr
is trapped in purple rhetoric. Almost anyone likely to be of use to anyone who has progressed Schmalenbach's book, and this is a pity,
who had the knack of it could have written the further in his reading than those even more although his study is likely to remain definitive
book after a flip through the pictures. rigorous exercises in digestion, the concise for a very long time. q
It is a pity because there is a great deal to be histories of world art that seemed to appear with FRANK WHITFORD
said about the period and a lot yet to be found such depressing regularity a few years ago.
out about the metamorphoses of a tradition of Extreme limitations of space inevitably force Gloomy successions
the imagination that stretches from Delacroix an author to generalize and even to misrepresent How We Are by Euan Duff. With an introduction
and Baudelaire to the Surrealists and beyond. his subject. They prevent him from having by John Berger. 15o pp with 214 photographs.
Gillian Naylor's excellent book on the Arts and anything more than a conventional point of Allen Lane the Penguin Press. £4.
Crafts movement deals with the other side of view and cannot accommodate even the deftest
the coin. For its length it is marvellously solid sidestep from the straight and narrow. Dr James Agee and Walker Evans, whose project
and informative, as balanced and well-written Lindemann's study is no exception. Even his Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, (the
an introduction as one could find, although the choice of plates is predictable. Dürer appears in photographic account of poor white farmers in
last pages where she is dealing with the his shoulder-length curls, High Gothic the Depression), could be seen as an ancester of
continental repercussions in the twentieth sculpture is illustrated by the Bamberger Reiter How We Are, call themselves 'spy' and 'counter-
century are sketchy compared with what has and Leibl's Three Women in Church dutifully spy'. Although the author of this photographic
gone before. Gaunt and Clayton-Stamm's takes the field on behalf of Realism. There was study has in many ways a different conception of
book is the first monograph on the principal no space available for a bibliography or a list of his work, the spirit of the spy is there. He has to
ceramicist of the Arts and Crafts movement. plates and the owners of works illustrated are observe in minute detail, to observe without
Artist as Mage—artist as honest workman. It is never credited. attracting attention, to record facts
just one way of expressing the vast question One of the greatest problems faced by dispassionately, while the whole enterprise is
that hangs over art in capitalist society and publishers and writers of art books is obviously suffused throughout by an explicit world view
which was first felt with an acute sense of how much space to give any subject. Dr and commitment necessary for it to have been
crisis in the 188os. Much of symbolist thought Lindemann's book is an example of microscopy; undertaken at all.
was profoundly reactionary—as Pissarro and Werner Schmalenbach's monograph on How We Are is a book of photographs of
others were well aware. 'Gauguin is not a seer' Schwitters on the other hand is an example of ordinary English life arranged into six chapters.
Pissarro wrote at the time of Aurier's famous macroscopy. Although neither Schwitters nor None of the photographs are captioned; John
article about symbolist painting, 'he is a clever Dada are mentioned by Dr Lindemann I am not Berger has written an introduction explaining
man who has sensed that the bourgeoisie is of the opinion that they play a role in the history his view of the book's importance, placing it in
moving backwards.' At the same time several of art too negligible to merit mention. Whether photographic history and outlining some
figures close to symbolism saw its anti-realist, Schwitters is as important as the size and criticisms. The whole burden of interpretation
anti-descriptive elements as the anticipation of presentation of this study suggest is another is therefore thrown on to the reader. The
a new and truly radical art. Fénéon, that staunch matter, however. photographs are difficult, since they make no
anarchist, for one. And Charles Henry, But I have criticized enough. No-one is compromise with established methods of
Signac's mentor in science, thought that there better qualified than Dr Schmalenbach to write photographic reading; that is : pre-supposing
was a necessary connection between the about Schwitters. When Schmalenbach was photographs as integral objects which speak
diffusion of scientific rationalism in ordinary drawing on his enormous budget during the clearly for themselves, emotionally and
life and mysticism in art. The same sort of early years of his directorship of the North- aesthetically; as a consecutive series of pictures
contradiction is present when one considers Rhine-Westphalian collection in Düsseldorf he revealing an idea or event; as illustrations to a
the impact of British art on the continent spent much of it assembling an unrivalled story explained simultaneously by language. At
during the last decade of the century. The year collection of Schwitters's work and this book is first glance these photographs irritate by their
that the first Salon de Rose + Croix opened in obviously one of the results of the research Dr often obscure lighting and apparently arbitrary
Paris, with its multiple echoes of the P.R.B., of Schmalenbach had to undertake as a necessary sequence and size. On careful observation their
Watts, of the Aesthetes, the Arts and Crafts adjunct to his task. His monograph appears, meaning becomes clear : this, in itself, is a
Exhibition Society was holding its first show indeed, to have everything: a biography, sections corrective to the idea that it is easy to take in
in Brussels. It seems a far cry between the two dealing with Schwitters the typographer, poet rapportage photography, or that the function of
events —but it carries. q and architect as well as a large number of a photograph is to make a written text more
ANDREW FORGE full-size plates and 189 postage-stamp-sized palatable.

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