Painting Nature: Solving Landscape Problems by Franklin Jones (review)

Books 255 This book, a small Seuphor 'bible', very well conceived and illustrated, constitutes a precious complementary source of information about this writer, artist and art writer. He was born in Antwerp in 1901 and his real name was Fernant (sic) L. Berckelaers, which he changed to Michel Seuphor (the latter an anagram of Orpheus). Between 1921 and 1925 he and the painter Jozef Peeters edited the magazine Het Overzicht. In 1925 he moved to Paris, where he still resides. Seuphor belongs to the energetic group of the generation of the 1920s including, for example, Van Doesburg, Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, who made important contributions to the visual arts, with the difference that art writing became a dominant activity for Seuphor. In 1929 he founded the Circle and Square Group, which organized exhibitions in Paris in 1929 and 1930 and then the Group ceased to exist. He has produced many drawings and developed in 1932 the style, for which he is well known, consisting only of horizontal parallel thin lines with gaps to provide blank shapes [see Seuphor's article in Leonardo 1, 373 (1968)]. Based on the style, which he calls Dessins a lacunes, tapestries have been produced and Sevres ceramic objects decorated. In this book, his friends (painters, architects, writers, et al.) pay tribute to him (McDonald-Wright, Sartoris, Arp), there is a discussion by A. Nemours, Piquois and Batbedat and, finally, there is reprinted the 1967 lecture by Seuphor entitled The Social Function of Art. The illustrations contain photographs from Seuphor's family album showing him with artists of many tendencies that were taken during his many travels. They provide a pictorial history of those active during the first part of the 20th century in developing nonfigurative or abstract art, particularly Concrete art. His writings on visual art and works of fiction are widely appreciated. In 1949 he arranged the important exhibition entitled 'Abstract Art, Its Origins, Its First Masters' at the Gallery Maeght in Paris and prepared the catalogue's commentary . Dictionnaire de la peinture abstraite (Dictionary of Abstract Painting) (Paris: Hazan, 1957) contains a seminal and extensive History of Abstract Painting. I highly recommend this book to those who are interested in the development of nonfigurative or abstract art before about 1960. High Diver. Michael Wishart. Blond & Briggs, London, 1977. 208 pp., illus. £7.95. Reviewed by R. S. Biran'" The Anglo-USAmerican poet, W. H. Auden, commenting on autobiographies in general, once stated that 'Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money'. Can this remark be applied to this autobiography? An English painter, Wishart was born in 1928. On his family estates, as a young and lonely boy, he manifested cruel and psychotic behavior. As an adolescent, in order to conceal an unrequited passion for a certain boy, he seduced some girls whose presence he resented, because they came between him and his object of desire. As time went on, he indulged in homosexuality, first with a Nazi pilot (who landed in England during the Hitler regime) and subsequently with other degenerate homosexuals. He took to drugs and alcoholic drinks. He married Anne Dunn and stayed married for 10 years. The biggest problem of his life was his inability to decide whether he preferred males or females. He flitted from continent to continent, but nothing could keep him out of night clubs to indulge in excessive drinking. Eventually, his way of life began to frighten him. For four weeks he was confined to an asylum for drug addicts and alcoholics. The thought of death and suicide obsessed him, and he mentions numerous similar cases among his intimate and not-so-intimate friends. Although the book consists of only 208 pages, more than 450 personalities in the arts are mentioned . The book reads like a Who's Who of degenerate celebrities, many of them drug addicts, homosexuals and alcoholics. Wishart has had a number of exhibitions of his paintings. Their quality, however, cannot be assessed from his auto- *107 South Broadway, Nyack, NY 10960, U.S.A. biography, which ends when he was 33. He claims there was a sensational reaction to an exhibition of his paintings held at the Archer...