The Arts Betrayed by John Smith (review)

74 Books ance of fantastic instruments imagined by artists. In addition to references to the grotesqueries of Bosch and those appearing in Gothic manuscript illuminations, Winternitz provides an interesting account of Todini's 'Golden Harpsichord' in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, a baroque automaton capable of producing bagpipe sounds through subtle manipulations of a hidden keyboard located beneath the regular harpsichord keyboard. Two chapters are devoted to the exquisite Renaissance intarsia installation of inlay-surfaced walls, in particular the Gubbio Study, which has been reconstructed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exacting skill required for designing and constructing the inlay-surfaced walls epitomizes these Renaissance artists as not only masters of their craft but as knowledgeable technologists. The accurate depictions of foreshortened musical instruments and other objects and of light, shade and shadows (even taking into account light emanating from the door and window of the Gubbio Study) and the introduction of signs and symbols demonstrate their extraordinary capabilities. The chapter on musical archeology of the Renaissance contains one of the most convincing accounts that I have read on Raphael's fresco 'Parnassus'. The author is at his best when he treats topics rich in iconographic significance. The Arts Betrayed. John Smith. Herbert Press, London, 1978. 256 pp., illus. £6.95. Reviewed by Gerhard Charles Rump* It is very difficult for me to do justice to this book. Smith states in the Preface that 'the intention of this book is to show how ... certain artists, because of an innate temperamental affinity or the deliberate pursuit of a particular philosophy of art, develop in an extraordinarily similar manner. [ ... ] It does outline in little something of the way in which art has developed or declined during the first seventy years of the twentieth century. It also attempts to throw into relief the increasing dilemma of the artist in a time of social, economic, religious, moral and artistic uncertainty' (p. 8). The book is aimed at 'a growing number of general readers becoming aware of, and interested in, the major movements of the arts in our time' (p. 8). It is expressly not addressed to readers familiar with scholarly and specialist studies on the subjects also treated by Smith. He sets out in a very idiosyncratic way. The 10 chapters are concerned with the work of either two to four visual artists and composers or writers, with the exception of Chapter five, which deals exclusively with the poet Ezra Pound. Thus Smith brackets together major artists active at about the same time, with sometimes startling juxtapositions, like CamusDuchamp -Cage, the heading of Chapter nine. What these comparisons amount to, in the end, may be best illustrated by a quotation of his, bringing together (inspired, as he leaves no doubt, by Wilfrid Mellers) Klee and Webern: 'Klee's work is rarely fragmentary. It perhaps avoids being so by virtue of its scale. In order to be an artist showing no trace of the glory of post-Renaissance art it was necessary to avoid engaging in the proudly heroic and often large-scale subjects which are a part of that tradition. Instead of the enormous paraphernalia of a Delacroix he was to use the smallest means: a few scratches on paper; a few pure colours laid side by side in the simplest, least pretentious manner. Was this not what Webern, most austere of the Viennese school of composers, was about to do in his own severe and essentially 'private' musical compositions?' (p. 103). Although I am generally willing to take the author seriously, this seems a little too esoteric to me. What, if I may ask, will 'general readers' make of such paragraphs (and the book abounds with offerings of this kind). Will general readers see Delacroix' paintings in the future stamped 'enormous paraphernalia '? (How 'pure', by the way, are Klee's colours?have a look!) I do not think that general readers are really helped by such comparisons. *Ubierstrasse 135, D-5300 Bonn-Bad Godesberg, Fed. Rep. Ger. Another example, Smith on Arnold Schoenberg: 'Take the First Quartet. Has there ever been a work by so young a composer of such proportions or intensity and, on the whole, of such quality...