History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture by H. H. ArnasonReview by: Bartlett HayesThe Art Bulletin, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Dec., 1973), pp. 645-646Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3049182 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 645

H. H. ARNASON, History of Modern Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York, Abrams, 1968. Pp. 664; 1379 ills., 261 in color. $28.50.

I have been wondering for some time why I have been having trouble making notes about this book and sticking with them. The reason, I now believe, is that the book is its own review. Any paraphrase runs the danger of being inadequate. Like the panor- amic view of Rome and the distant snow-capped mountains

spread before me as I attempt to write, the artistic events of the twentieth century are seen by the author as a continuum, frag- mented at times perhaps, but with all the pieces interrelated none- theless through a temporal and spatial environment. The book is

composed of manifold expeditions into the "city" (to look again at

my view). Just as successive shafts of sunlight bring district upon district into dramatic focus, the paragraphs of the book become, not severally but altogether, the panarama of history. A few

particulars may readily explain the character of the volume: It is massive (over 650 pages); therefore it is to be consulted

from the study table, not from the frivolity of the coffee table, nor from the stupor of the bed.

It is informingly illustrated (Mr. Arnason has sought to have as

many text references reproduced as possible); accordingly the illustrations occupy one-half to two-thirds of the total space of each page, not including the color plates where no text occurs.

It is explicitly written (a few excerpts follow) for the layman and student as well as for those scholars who have need of a reliable reference. For all of them, an adequate, but by no means in- clusive bibliography should satisfy anything but the intensive

requirements of the specialist. It has been ambitiously manufactured in Japan with apparent

solicitude for color quality (I do not have immediate access to the

originals for verification) and the cloth cover binding seems to be

sturdy enough for considerable use in the library. I have little doubt but that it has already gotten considerable use and will obtain more, which it deserves.

So much for general aspects. Let me turn summarily and

sketchily to the content:

Beginning with a chapter on nineteenth-century painting, which includes a few references to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century backgrounds, one may break his own trail through chapters (parts) of the dense aesthetic growth of the present century. I

suggest one's own trail because a strict reading, page by page, may become tedious, even confusing, and prevent an opportunity for such comparisons which a single volume easily offers as, say, between the Dada movement and certain elements of Pop art, for the sake of a better understanding of their differences in attitude as well as similarities; or, again, for a simultaneous examination of the kinetics of Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism with the newer technology of light and motion as it is found in the

I96O's or, in architecture, for a look at the social emphasis of the Bauhaus in Germany as parallel, not prior to, the social urbanism of recent architecture and engineering as exemplified by Saarinen, Pei, Johnson, Van der Rohe, Fuller, etc. But comparisons of the sort I envisage are actually suggested by the author himself. For example, of the Spanish Art Nouveau architect Antoni Gaudi he writes: "In his concept of architecture as dynamic space joining the interior and external worlds and as living organism growing out of its natural environment, in his daring engineering experi- ments, in his imaginative use of materials - from stone that looks like a natural rock formation to the most wildly abstract color organizations of ceramic mosaic - Gaudi even though little known outside his own city to the mid-twentieth century is actually a great pioneer, a prophet, one of the foundations on which archi- tecture at mid-century began to build."

Yet it is quite fitting that the book is organized chronologically, because only in this way may one appreciate certain affinities between architecture, painting and sculpture within a given period of years. Furthermore, the lengths of those periods vary. Certainly a decade is too long to allow a suitable examination of changing trends if one considers the speed of social and technical change that has occurred during the first half of the twentieth century.

For this reason, the reader will have to use his own wits to mark his trail. After all, to do so is not bad pedagogy and, if he should become lost he can always be rescued by a straightforward reading of the text. Indeed, because there is a strong temptation to wander to and fro among the garden of illustrations, a straight reading is not to be discouraged at times, especially of those sections dealing with movements and artists which may be less well known to the

general reader. For example, it is well to read particularly, if at

all, the passages about the recent architecture of Japan, or the international scope of assemblage and junk sculpture or of the

Nabis, at the end of the nineteenth century in France. In case

you hadn't heard, "the Nabis, despite their brief existence as a

group, were, in their theorizing and their issuance of dogmatic manifestoes, immediate ancestors of all those groupings, mani- festoes and theories which have marked the course of twentieth-

century art. They also taught a synthesis of the arts through continual activity in architectural painting, the design of glass and decorative screens, book illustration, poster design, and in stage design for the advanced theater of Henrik Ibsen, Maurice Maeterlinck, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, and notably for Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi." But, to seek an explanation of the meaning of the word Nabi, one may seek in vain in the paragraphs under that heading. Derived from the Hebrew word meaning "prophet," it is mentioned in a preceding section on Art Nouveau. It is an

argument for consecutive reading. Mr. Arnason is well aware of these obstacles which cause one to

stumble across arbitrary geographical and temporal boundaries, and it is to the credit of his lucid organization of material that this

encyclopedia becomes something more than just that. For

example, the preface to the last part, 23, is worth noting because it

preaches an incisive sermon while yet outlining a plan: "As has

already been pointed out, in dealing with the art of the most recent past, an organization by national boundaries or classifica- tions become almost irrelevant. Communications are so rapid, artists so mobile that one must acknowledge an international style that actually is world wide. The variations of individual countries are possible to plot, but increasingly they seem to be unimportant. The organization of the last portions of this book, therefore, is in terms of broad categories, with comparative comments on artists who are widely dispersed throughout the world. In a world of tensions and hostilities, this international spirit among artists, this

desire, this willingness to understand one another, is a hopeful sign."

To describe the many recent cross-currents which the author observes actually affects his style. There is little he can write about people and their work who have scarcely been around long enough to know what they are about. To indulge in a listing is to do one's best. The following paragraph is helpful for purposes of

reference, for example, but beyond stating the fact that certain artists have recently been painting circles, it is not colored with

any literary pretence: The interest in optical research has led to a number of new

experiments on the part of artists who do not properly belong to this category [i.e., Op Art]. One of these is the employment of the circle as central motif. In general, optical art employs a balanced, symmetrical composition as opposed, for instance, to the consistently asymmetrical approach of Mondrian and the De Stijl artists. Jasper Johns' targets may have started the circle cycle. Kenneth Noland (b. 1924), a leader of the color field painters, employed the circle in a number of his paintings of the early I960's, sometimes with a deliberately illusionistic effect, achieved by blurring the contours. In A Warm Sound in a Gray Field, 196I (colorplate 247), the outer circles seem to revolve slowly around the tiny spot of light at the exact center. Although Noland has moved away from circles, the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor (b. 1922) has independently continued to use them, with contours dissolved, in paintings that have the impact of sun or moon eclipses. Others who have used the circle with some illusionistic implications are the Japanese artists Tadasky (Tadasuke Kuwayama) (b. I935, fig. I Io5), Toshinobu Onosato (b. I912), and Atsuko Tanaka (b. 1932); the Canadian, Terence Syverson (b. I939); and the American, Alexander

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646 THE ART BULLETIN

Liberman (b. 1912, Russia) among many others. However, there is much more to say about art earlier in the

century, and the bulk of the volume consists of informative pages describing the artists and their times. For example, four pages, including ten illustrations, are devoted to Rene Magritte, the Surrealist or magic realist artist, according to one's choice. The

writing is fluent because, with historical perspective, the author has been able to connect the works of art with the artist's ex-

perience of life. A portion of a paragraph will suffice as an example: Magritte's style of precise, magic realism changed little -

except for temporary excursions into other manners - after

1926; and because he frequently returned to earlier subjects, it is difficult to establish the chronology of his undated works. Man with Newspaper, 1927 (fig. 577), shows four identical views of the window corner in a modest caf6 - identical, that is, except that the man appears only in the first; in the other three he has vanished. That is all, yet the sense of melodrama is acute. Again one is reminded of the silent motion picture of the

early 1920's, the four views suggesting four frames of the film. The setting has the insubstantial, barren look of early cinemas, and the next event in the drama might be the disappearance of the room itself. Magritte was fascinated by the unreality of early efforts in film realism; as a boy, he had delighted in 'Fantomas,' penny thriller mysteries. Drawing on these sources, he extracted their essence in his fantasies of the commonplace.

The last phrase may well be the unifying thread which stitches the book together, for all art consists of fantasies of the commonplace according to the interpretation of each artist. It is the gradual metamorphosis which provides both the kinship and distinction between artists. Mr. Arnason refers to it at the beginning of his

essay on "Painting in the I9th Century," wherein no "new out- look suddenly appeared," he writes, but rather "separate develop- ments were shifts in patterns of patronage, in the role of the French

Academy, in the system of art instruction, in the artists' position in

society and, especially, in the artists' attitude toward artistic means and issues - toward subject matter, expression, and

literary content, toward color, drawing, and the problem of the nature and purpose of a work of art."

Indeed, in his introduction to the book, Mr. Arnason attempts an answer to the problem by asserting that the purpose of a work of art is to define space and that "it is essential to approach these arts of the twentieth century, or in any other period, through an

analysis of the artist's attitude toward spatial organization." This

analysis is the other thread which may be traced through the book. Again and again the author dwells upon structural organ- ization in order to help the reader see (i.e., understand) the work of art. A comment on the evolution of Mondrian's style reveals the author's feeling for spatial organization far more deftly than his remarks about the fact that certain artists are interested in paint- ing circles: "Although Mondrian, during his first years in Paris, subordinated his colors to grays, greens and ochres under the influence of the analytical cubism of Picasso and Braque, his most cubist paintings still maintained an essential frontality; he rarely attempted the tilted planes or sculptural projection that gave the works of the French cubists their defined though limited sense of three-dimensional spatial existence. Even while absorbing the tenets of cubism he was already moving beyond to eliminate both subject and three-dimensional illusionistic depth."

To paraphrase Mr. Arnason's thesis, a definition of space is the medium by which illusion becomes art. It then becomes apparent that without illusion there is no art. The ways of looking at nature have never been so many as during the kaleidoscopic experiences of the twentieth century. For me, the dispassionate ways in which each is considered in this book form its principal value. The book ends in 1968, as justifiably as if it had in 1963 or 1973. But there is no end to art, as the author of this superbly categorical work is at pains to indicate. It would be a mistake to suppose that, years hence, it will be out of date. It will be no more so, within the limits of the years it covers, than the concept of history itself.

BARTLETT HAYES

American Academy in Rome

BARBARA JONES AND BILL HOWELL, Popular Arts of the First World War, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1972. Pp. 176; 24 color pls. + I 70 black and white ills. +50 drwgs. $14-95.

There are public war museums and public toy museums aplenty; here is a private war-toy museum, the product of a lifetime of

junk-shop browsing by Bill Howell, and handsomely reproduced in this book, together with some additional objects from the Imperial War Museum and a few other collections. Functionally a

catalogue, in style this is an intelligent, good-humored an i chatty guide, relaying antiquarian lore and snippets of historical infor- mation (some of it quite rare), laced with a touch of moralism and a taste for the macabre. The clutter is marvelous, typical and deliberate: we are confronted, in turn, with a George V sugar- cane leaf statuette, a Kitchener-head flower-pot, a tapestry- cartoon of Wilhelm the Non-conqueror, a Kaiser's head ball- puzzle, a fund-raising statue of Hindenburg erected in Berlin, into which people paid to stick pins, a fund-raising Russian Easter-egg with the Imperial monogram, a Brazilian anti-gossip poster, a

Japanese chromo of simultaneous air-and-land combat, a postcard of a supposedly war-injured kitten, a brass mine-layer, tanks in

every conceivable material, Swedish pewter soldiers (distributed to the Finnish army), Chinese soap-stone monkey amulets (as worn by both Japanese and British soldiers), a fretwork design of

burning Zeppelins, and a memorial plaque, from an official monu- ment, to the canaries and mice sacrificed by sappers. The "recog- nized" media are represented by some newspaper, magazine and

postcard cartoons, together with a few posters, an area otherwise omitted because covered by several specialist studies. Most of the material is British, but national differences count for relatively little.

This is the detritus, both peculiar and trivial, of one of the great events of history. As in the musical and film "Oh What a Lovely War" (the songs from which often find their visual equivalent here), the rationale behind the publication of such a book lies in its

attempt to give a retrospective human dimension to the first of the

great inhuman holocausts of the century. Thus the book is the rationalization of a great irrationality. At the time of course this

irrationality passed unperceived, and the contemporaneous manu- facture of the war souvenirs represents an unconscious need to mask and elevate it, and maintain the idea of the war as one of the

great positive achievements of the human spirit. The souvenirs were made by and for the people who fought the

war - proletariats conditioned to escape the boredom and degrada- tion of their life by means of a culture relating only superficially to them. It is thus not surprising that, cut off from normal entertain- ments, and placed in a totally alien world of mechanical slaughter, they should seek relief by making objects which bore the outer

garb of war, but were incapable of interpreting it.

Working on the model of a machine-gun - his own personal, unique fantasy weapon which was far superior to the rifle he carried in reality - the bored and frightened man in the trenches was able to hide from himself its true significance. The exacting, intensely personal labor of his hands held at bay any recognition that the existence of a similar, real-life machine-gun in the enemy trench made an absurdity out of the order he would shortly receive to storm that trench with a mere rifle and bayonet. Un- fortunately the authors do not enter into questions of symbolic function, or the idea of the art-object as a surrogate masking the reality. In their quest for nostalgic effect, they fail to interpret sufficiently the true cultural role of these petty souvenirs. Possibly the contradictions they embody are sensed to be too great, too tragic and too personal to bear such exposure directly. The identification of the authors with the era is unequivocally made on the dust-jacket, in a pair of photographs of combatants, in battle-dress, onto which portraits of the authors have been collaged. It is as if these author-combatants, lucky survivors of the holocaust, had scoured the field of battle after it was all over in search of historical souvenirs, which they then collected, arranged, labelled, and presented to the public as history. But history un- adorned is not necessarily history revealed.

The ambivalence of the material and the contradictory attitude

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