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BOOK REVIEWS cate an "objective" sense of their subject, and can create in an audience of diverse readers a broad measure of assent. Frank Giordano University of Houston A Style is Born Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw on the London Art Scene: 1885-1950. Stanley Weintraub, ed. University Park: Perm State Univ. Press, 1989.482 pp. $50.00 AS A BOY, Shaw wanted to be a painter like Michelangelo. As a young Irish expatriate in London, he performed yeoman's service as reviewer of gallery exhibits for The World (from February 1886 to January 1890). Other activities, for which he became better known, soon intervened; but he never lost interest in the visual arts. The nonagenarian Shaw even drafted a preface to a contemplated edition of his newspaper reviews and occasional writings as an art critic. Now editor Stanley Weintraub has assembled the complete collection—the early World pieces comprising the bulk of it—which would have eluded Shaw's search even if he had not died in 1950. Compiled with the zeal of a regiment of beavers, the editor's headnotes provide useful information on thousands of artists, many of whom are so obscure that a date of birth or death remains blank. In a critical introduction exploring painting and sculpture as direct and indirect inspirations for Shavian drama, Weintraub builds a persuasive case that "perhaps no one else in drama brought so many artistic scenes to life on the stage as Bernard Shaw." (An earlier version of this essay—published in The Unexpected Shaw [New York: Ungar, 1982]—was enormously enhanced by illustrations enabling one to see connections between image and text: this book on pictures, despite its hefty price tag, alas contains none.) Shaw's pieces written for the World in the 1880s do not betray the faltering hand of the neophyte. Rather, they reveal him as amazingly well informed about the development of European art from the Florentine school to the offshoots of Impressionism. While not hesitant to express his own likes and dislikes, Shaw is in the main judicious in his treatment of factions dominating the art scene in late Victorian Britain —e.g., the "academic" Royal Academy, the diffidently "impressionistic " New English Art Club, and the Society of British Artists presided over briefly by Whistler. The young critic writes clearly, confidently , and with portents of later Shavian wit. As all who know Shaw would expect, he is interested in everything—Dutch Masters, Japanese drawings, the Arts and Crafts movement, Picasso and Matisse (later 231 ELT: VOLUME35:2 1992 on)—even in paddles and spears from the cannibal districts of the Upper Congo where artisans "carry meat-eating to its logical extreme." These virtues granted, Shaw on the London Art Scene cannot compare with his more famous efforts (composed mainly from 1888-1898) on behalf of the London music or theater scenes. On both the latter fronts he achieved a preeminence that would suffice to keep his name alive if he had done nothing else. By comparison, the collected art reviews— though never falling below a decent level—are less riveting. Yet the reason cannot be that they are the green fruits of apprenticeship, for Shaw's careers as critic of art and music did overlap chronologically. The journalistic concert reviews from the same period (collected by Dan H. Laurence in Shaw's Music 1:1876-1890) have superior vital force. Part of the explanation lies in the crushing logistics of the physical task Shaw faced in the galleries. As a music critic, he reviewed only a few pieces per week—mostly by composers whose music is still performed today. As an art critic, he often had to review exhibits that might contain 629, 1066, or even 1413 paintings: to disburse a sentence or two on the fifty or so items that seemed best or worst was all that was possible. Shaw was quick to rise to the occasion of a collection of pictures by Velazquez, Monet, or a "splendid wailful of Rembrandts" when he saw them, but he very seldom did. For every canvas by Rubens or Sargent or Tintoretto or Turner, he encountered dozens by the likes of Arthur Douglas Peppercorn, Vassili Verestschagin, Jan...

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