The Venice Biennial, 1895–1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl by Lawrence Alloway (review)

112 Books-Livres and evil, also infuse ‘Guernica’; the Minotauromachy , a 1935etching which combines the symbols of the two foregoing works and the Crucifixion of 1929-1930, in which a rendering of the mourning Magdalen reappears as the mourning woman in the final painting. ‘Guernica’ is thus shown to be not an explosive, spontaneous creative act with no antecedents but a culmination of the slow fusion of all the abovewhich had been stored in the artist’s memory and experiences and then synthesized. Theday by day changes that appear in each of the seven states of the work are then discussed in detail; each change and each motif is related to prior states and works by the artist. We thus share, to some extent, the artist’s thought processes and see the composition shift, slowly unfold and evolve into its final form. Next, Blunt undertakes to relate various motifs of ‘Guernica’ to other works of art and attempts to show how Picasso has employed an extremely catholic vocabulary of form that ranges as widely in its sources as the figures in Guido Reni’s and Poussin’s ‘Massacre of the Innocent’s’, to the woman with head thrown back that recalls Ingres’ goddess in ‘Jupiter and Thetis’ or even the raving maenads from Greek vases. Perhaps the farthest stretched of these parallels is one made to certain animal and human figures found in a rare collection of eleventh-century Spanish manuscripts . . . but Blunt savesthis from utter improbability by pointing out that the same collection was published in the 1931 edition of Cahiers d’Art, which Picasso knew and read. In less skilled hands an exercise such as this could lead both reader and author astray but here it shows a fascinating side of art history: the intricate and often surprising iconographical relationships between the past and present. In the last section, ‘Guernica’ is evaluated as a whole and placed in context with Picasso’s more recent works, particularly the bullfight drawings of 1959, which Blunt asserts ‘. . . are among the few works executed by Picasso within the last ten years, in which the imaginative power and intensity of ‘Guernica’are for a moment recaptured’. Anthony Blunt, a respected art historian in Europe, has written a lucid, sensitive appraisal and analysis of this painting. The book, though only 60 pages in length, offers to the reader a beautifully constructed , carefully documented and intelligently presented example of what, I believe, the ideal of the art historian should be. Judith Applegate 4 rue HonoreXhevalier 75-Paris6, France. The Venice Biennial, 1895-1968: From Salon to GoldfishBowl. Lawrence Alloway. Faber & Faber, London, 1968. 220 pp., illus., 50s. I can think of three ways of approaching a history of the Venice Biennial and Mr. Alloway would be well qualified to follow any of them. The ‘best seller’ way would be to give ‘the inside story, the intimate details of the struggle behind the scenes for the world’s greatest art prizes’. Such a book would obviously have a wide appeal and would provide useful know-how for those who might wish to get in on the act. The second approach would be to present reproductions of all past prize winners, together with a few works of special interest from the exhibitions, and allow them to speak for themselves. The third possibility would be to consider the prizes as a way in which society influences the course of art. If one believes that artists, like other members of the human race, respond to punishment and reward, then these prices could be studied from this point of view. Have they affected the development of painting and sculpture during the past three-quarters of a century? Are contemporary artists’ works to be considered as having evolved from past works? If so, how do the Biennialjudges select which mutations should survive? (Or should we return to the romantic conception of the artist as someone above the temptations of money and prestige, thus depriving these most coveted awards of any serious influence?) Unfortunately, the author follows none of these approaches. Instead, he provides a factual history of this old institution spiced with gossip that is too peripheral to be intriguing. The reproductions...