Annuaire de l’art international, 1968–69 ed. by Max Fourny, and: Annuaire international des ventes, 1969 ed. by E. Mayer (review)

Books-Livres 439 elaborated towards a general philosophy of art, usually functioning as a reflection and a source of both an individual’s and society’s meaning of art. Various books by authors such as James W. Schinneller, Nathan Knobler, Edmund Burke Feldman, Ray Faulkner and Albert E. Elsen have encompassed selected ideas, either pragmatic, existential, concrete or historical, as bases for description and have then progressed from their respective points of departure towards an explanation and definition of all art. One conspicuous omission, however, has been a discussion of the actual process of creation. Knobler, in The Visual Dialogue, included a very limited section on techniques , which was relegated almost entirely to an appendix. Ten or twenty years ago it was common to encounter introductory art books concentrating on techniques. The least fruitful of these presented a schematic ‘howtodoit’program that waseventually decried as overly technical, dry and highly impersonal . As a reaction to this, a shift towards ideological and historical explanations has resulted, which perhaps makes many recent ‘appreciation of art’ books too ponderous. Introduction to the Visual Arts attempts a fusion of the above two divergent approaches but tends to emphasize rote techniques over the excitement of discovery, accepted dogma over personal ideology and a pretention of materials over their plastic potential. While this book may be subjectively limited (the ‘elements’ of art, for example, are emphasized as projections of personal response to the environment but are built upon a very definite approach to technique, with little reference to the ways these elements act as emotively chosen or applied entities), there is a redeeming clarity. The book seems to me to be most useful for the 9-14 year age group but it can be of value to the adult with a very limited experience in the visual arts. The overall emphasis in the book is on the sources of art in the natural and everyday world. This, I feel,is a very healthy quality, asit emphasizes the relative rather than the absolute importance of art. This has special importance for young people to whom it is addressed. The simple vocabulary correspondstothe basicquality of the text, although the illustrations contain several very provocative and complex photomicrographs from the animal and plant worlds. The rest of the illustrations (516 in all) are devoted to a broad range of art: painting, sculpture (not enough of this, I feel), architecture, interior decoration, furniture design, fabric decoration and other decorative arts. In order to validate the position taken on art ‘principles’, the book occasionally exaggerates formal values into misleading generalities. For example, there are given two justifications for opposing ‘don’ts’ in the use of rectilinear and curvilinear forms: (1) ‘the exclusive use of straight lines creates an impression of lifelessness’, and (2) ‘the excessive use of curved lines can result in a lack of vigor’ (p. 14). The first statement implies that straight lines are l.$eless, which is misleading in the light of works by such modern painters as Mondrian and Albers. The second statement appears a little safer by virtue of its formulation (‘can result in a lack of vigor’). While avoiding philosophical considerations of why art is and has been produced, the text presents a highly schematic program structured around traditional materials (such as pencil, watercolor, gouache, mosaic and ceramics). Within this framework, a series of progressions is built up focusing upon Materials, Observation, Decoration and Imagination. The last, Imagination, is primarily limited to distorted forms of art. The whole seems to emphasize technique at the expense of emotional awareness, along with an insistence that what is not observed within the environment is either decorative or, in vaguer terms, imaginative. Observation of the natural world is described as the major source of the imagination and is stressed in the first three parts of the book. ‘To imagine is thus to create, to represent what does not exist; but asthe imagination cannot create from nothing, it modifies and combines already existing images’ (p. 156). A few quotes by artists such as Leonard0 da Vinci and Klee are included but often without a convincing elaboration in the text, especially when the statements are personal. This contributes to the already...