The Indignant Eye. The Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso by Ralph E. Shikes (review)

Books 293 accepted definition’ when dictionaries of social science offer operationally perfectly adequate definitions. Why make matters more complicated than they really are? Edward Lucie-Smith, Michael Tree and Stanley Reed contribute fairly standard pieces respectively on current social trends in contemporary art, industrial design, the film-maker and the audience. The burden of their argument is the reciprocal relationship between creators, audience or clients and the wider societyin recenthistoricalperspective. The only non-British contributor, Gyorgy Kepes, puts forward a rather interesting proposal for the formation of a closely knit work community of promisingyoung artistsanddesigners,eachcommitted to some specific role to overcome the artist’s lack of orientation in the contemporary world. Dennis Gabor, a scientist well-known for his work on predicting innovations, worries about what people will do with their increasing leisure and arrives, via the population explosion, urban aesthetics, controlled economic growth and the dead hand of advancing technology, at the conclusion that we must pin our hopes in the revival of hobbies, craftsmanship for its own sake and amateur artistic expression. Edward Adamson’s essay on art for mental health is at an even more specifically therapeutic level. Perhaps the broadest view is presented by H. R. Kedward who, after briefly surveying the heterogeneity of modern art and its creators, concludes that ‘there is a need for sensitive caution in the intellectual approach to modern art. But such caution should not sap imagination and it does not invalidate search for meaning. What is unlikely to emerge is a coherent picture of twentieth-century man, for there is no such coherence in his art.’ Two things may be said about this collection. First, it is a great shamethat only a singlepractising artist is to be found expressing his point of view amongstalltheseteachers,criticsandadministrators. Must we assume that artists are either so tonguetied or so incoherent that they cannot be admitted into the decent company of such pundits as can advance a well-turned case, though they may never havelaidbrushtocanvasorbowto string?Secondly, it seems, to say the least, surprisingthat the crisis of modern art, which by now has a history going back at least half a century or more, appears here for all the world as if it had just broken out the other day. Do we really need to be told that ‘modern art has never existed in isolationfrom the rest of society’or ‘that the modern artist does not always seem very happily adjusted to the society in which he lives, to the point where his actions begin to fit certain standard patterns of psychologicalmaladjustment’? Could not we take that as read and, if we have to elaborate any further on the theme, come out with something a little more incisively sophisticated? Maybe that strange animal, art, is deadly sick, in which case it might be humane to put it out of its misery. Maybe it is the only healthy element in society,full of impulses and rearing to go, in which 21 caselet it speakup. But in any caselet us not choke it with goodwilland chit-chat. The Indignant Eye. The Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso. Ralph E. Shikes. Beacon Press, Boston, 1969. 439 pp., illus. Reviewed by Gabriel P. Weisberg* The author presents a broad canvas of artists involved with the social problems and ills of their societies from the fifteenth century until contemporary times. The text is exceptionally literate and provides a stirring panorama from which a reader can gain immediateinsightinto the socialdifficulties of a specific period and learn how the artists of a time reacted to them. Tracing social awareness in prints and drawings by Pieter Bruegel, Albrecht Durer, Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, George Cruikshank, Honor6 Daumier, F6lix Vallotton, James Ensor, George Grosz, Otto Dix, Ben Shahn, Jose Orozco and Pablo Picasso, as well as scores more, oneisconstantlyremindedthat eachhistorical period was beset by dark troubles that did not fail to move the emotions and consciences of some of history’sfinest artists. It is a tribute to Shikes’liberalviewpoint that the ‘intensity’ of the artistic image has been presented with care and subtle analysis in order to place the work withinthe period that producedit...