Illustrated Notebooks: 1917–55 by Georges Braque (review)

252 Books germination, was brown and russet.,.The first thing we notice is the tongue, whose complete, fleshy, voluptuous curve was pleasant to touch.’ For all of the advancement in our knowledge ofChinesestatuary art, no one has ceded as immediate a tactile appreciation of the objects as Segalen did. On the other hand, many of his annotations are charmingly impetuous at best. In approaching the famous f’ao t’ieh on the great Shen pillar, Segalen enjoyed too much his own metaphor that the beast was like a ‘mole digging away and finishing his hole’ when he used the metaphor to explain ‘why the nose is flattened out: he has pushed back the stone’. Likewise, what he admired, he praised with ebullience; what he despised, he simply dismissed. In the latter category falls all Ch’ing statuary, and almost all Buddhist sculpture, which he finds ‘neither beautiful nor Chinese’. In a chapter entitled ‘The Buddhist Heresy’, he claims that ‘the only thing great about the thousand Buddhas of Lungmen and Yun-kang ...is the span of their wide-open hands.’ An important feature in the present edition of Segalen’s early exegesis on Chinese statuary encountered in the field is an ‘Afterward’ by Vadime Elisseeff. Director of the Cernuschi Museum. Paris. Elisseeff reminds the reader that Segalen died before the great period of excavation in China and proceeds to indicate some of the major advances since 1919 in order to augment, even if briefly, the young Frenchman’s findings. Ultimately, then, one must read Segalen’s text less for art historical accuracy than for historiographic relevance; I believe that its idiosyncratic approach and style will enchant some and alienate others. but its reissue is certainly warranted and applauded. The Artist by Himself: Self-portrait Drawings from Youth to Old Age. Joan Kinneir, ed., Granada, London, 1980.224 pp.. illus., €9.95.ISBN: &236-4016&2. Reviewed by Inge Hoffman* Here are seventy relatively little known self-portrait drawings and texts chosen from the work of men (plus 1 woman) who lived between 1400 and the present. Some of the painters are unknown, some perhaps not artists, but most of the works have an allure which will delight or profoundly move the gazer. Even without the title explanation, we would have recognized these as self-portraits. Why? Is it the riveting stareof the artist’s eyes lookinginto our own? Is it something indefinable in the pose? More personal than paintings, the calligraphy of the drawings clearly traces mood and character in its gestures. And in comparing these curiously assembled works one common impression emerges: there is a magic intensity in the self-portrait which infuses life and with it. artistic merit, even into the slighter works presented here. But beyond that, what is one to make of this collection? Both the student and the scholar will be disappointed. For the editor shows poor judgment about nearly everything except the portraits themselves. The organization of the material is not felicitous and the texts are uneven. The portraits are arranged chronologically by the age of the artist when he sketched it. but often the age ofthe artist is omitted in the text. So we begin with the ca 12 year old Durer’s famous self-portrait (1484) and go on to an unknown schoolboy’s one known work, aged 14(1954). and to Raphael’s undated portrait of the 15th century, aged 16/17. Eventually, the mid-life painters bring us to Wyndam Lewis, aged 51 in 1932, Holbein, 51 in 1516, Bellini, 65 in 1496,and Blakeat 53 in 1810.in that order. Thus 1484. 1879, 1932, 1954, 1516, 1496 and 1810 is the chronological sequence of these portraits. The author tries to draw few conclusions from these juxtapositions. To us, this helter-skelter sequence doesn’t reveal its merit as a principle of organization. Perhaps in frustration,the reader will play guessinggames along with the reviewer: looking at the portraits selected by the editor,do wedetect more melancholy, brooding, introspective moods ofself-doubt in youth than in later life? Whereas Rembrandt’s at 29, Picasso’s at 30 begin to show more of a sense of well-being? Do we agree with the editor...