On Color in Western ArtAuthor(s): Jack FlamSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 73, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), p. 344Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3045804 .

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344 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1991 VOLUME LXXIII NUMBER 2

imperceptible ... a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles."20

One of Bann's virtues in this book is that he is always retroactively citing present work to understand past art, an

interesting reversal of the standard lines-of-influence recita- tions. Another is that in its ambition to combine mostly French, "speculative intelligence with poetic insight" and use them

against "the positivist orthodoxy which still forms the bedrock of Anglo-American historical studies" (p. 245), the study resur- rects a host of alternative discourses for talking about the

history of art. Bann's scheme is audacious and eccentric, and his words are almost always elegant, so that even if we come away unpersuaded by the theological substratum to his pageant of evolution, we nonetheless conclude, as Barthes said of Michelet, "that history can be an aliment only when it is full as an egg.'"21

MICHAEL ANN HOLLY

University of Rochester Rochester, N.Y. 14627

20 Braudel, 20. 21 R. Barthes, Michelet, trans. R. Howard (1954), New York, 1987, 25.

Letter On Color in Western Art

In his stimulating article on color in Western art (Art Bulletin, December 1990), John Gage remarks on the problematical relationship between the colors in paintings and in reproduc- tions of them. His point about discrepancies between originals and reproductions is well taken, but the example that he cites to make it, Lawrence Gowing's purported description of Matisse's Moroccan Garden (1912), now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is a rather unfortunate one. In fact, although Gowing's text is not clear about which painting is being described (it refers generally to "the pictures of Moroccan

gardens"), Gowing's description clearly seems to be not of Moroccan Garden but of Park at Tangier (1912), now in the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. This painting is not reproduced in Gowing's book, where the New York painting confusingly appears opposite a remarkably evocative description of the color in the Stockholm painting: "langourous and dramatic by turns; lustrous meetings of green with mauve-pink and violet- blue are broken by sharp emerald explosions of light on palm leaves and aloes." (The Stockholm painting is reproduced in color in my Matisse: The Man and His Art, 1869-1918, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1986, 334, and-somewhat

muddily-in J. Cowart et al., Matisse in Morocco: The Paintings and Drawings 1912-1913, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1990, 69.)

I have taken the trouble to make this point because I think it casts further light on Mr. Gage's remarks about the favor

traditionally given to black-and-white reproductions-suggest- ing as it does that even now when publishers choose illustra- tions for books, they often pay more attention to subject matter and general design than to color. In so doing, they sometimes treat the color reproductions in their books as somewhat

independent of the texts that they are supposed to be illustrat-

ing-almost as if the reproductions were indeed still in black and white.

JACK FLAM

Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center

City University of New York 33 West 42nd Street

New York, N.Y. 10036

Correction In Richard Shiff's review of John House, Monet: Nature into Art

(LXXIII, 1991, 149-156), a line of type in n. 6, p. 151, was inad-

vertently dropped in page makeup. The second to last sentence in the note should read in its entirety: "Interpreters of the 'political' content of modern French art must beware that critical reviews written for journals of either leftist or

rightist orientation often ignore political allegiances for the sake of a transcendent nationalism and/or a modernist faith in the supreme value of aesthetic excellence."

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