The American Tradition in the Arts by Richard McLanathan (review)

Books 185 pages of contemporary periodicals of the time, this work should provide a starting point for anyone interested in pursuing research or in collecting objects of the period. The lavish use of black and white and color illustrations provides further enticement for purchasing this handsome volume and using it as a reference edition. If the work has flaws, they seem to be in the area of deeper scholarship and analysis. The author might have provided a smoother transition from art nouveau design, with its use of curvilinear rhythms, to the angular and geometric designs of the 'twenties. Perhaps further enlargement of Battersby's view that' ... Art Nouveau was essentially an artificial and imposed style, valuable in that it had broken the long domination ofhistoricism... .' would have helped in preparing the stage for the type of decorative art which followed during the 'twenties. In addition, examination of the sources of the style of the decorative 'twenties from cubism to Negro art could also have clarified the movement. Ifhe had expanded these areas, his volume would be as significant an achievement in interpretive scholarship as S. Tschudi Madsen's book, The Sources ofArt Nouveau. A Reading of Modern Art. Dore Ashton. Press of Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, 1969. 217 pp., illus. $8.95. Reviewed by: Susan Compton* On the jacket ofthe book we are told: 'The author believes that the purist or isolationist approach of contemporary art criticism is too limiting; that in the effort to deal with things strictly in themselves, a whole realm of experience is ruled out.' I was reminded while reading the book of looking at a very large abstract painting but with certain easily recognizable signs that repeat and draw the eye from one large area of colour to another, the relationship of one part to another being spatial rather than logical. The areas may consist either ofdescriptions of painters and their work or related quotations by writers (unfortunately, without the dates they were made). The numerous quotations seem to float in the text. The array of writers is distinguished and more catholic than the array of artists. Miss Ashton has confined her discussion of early twentieth-century artists mainly to Matisse, Klee and Miro. She links Matisse with Rothko, and Klee and Miro with Rauschenberg. I find much of her word-painting sensitive. For example: 'Rothko's paintings are agents. They are agents ofreciprocity. There is light concealed within them but it is light that is like a flower: it opens out only when responding to light... .' (p. 27). As an art historian, the author seems to be tracing two paths through modern painting. She writes: 'Beginning from the same zero point-that of * 5 Moorhouse Road, London, W.2, England. "stripping" art to its essentials-two "families" of artists diverge. For Matisse, Miro and scores of organic artists, stripping is the result of a purifying process largely governed by intuition. For the long line of purists from Malevitch to Vasarely, it means the incarnation ofan intellectual act ofwill, intended to reveal the "objective" character of forms and spaces' (p. 116). Such a dualism has had labels like Romanticism and Classicism. In the widest sense, those labels stick best to such eclecticperiods as seventeenth- and early nineteenth-century European art. Miss Ashton helps one (perhaps unwittingly) to see twentiethcentury painting as closer to that of the eighteenth century, when painting was more concerned with writers. The element of direct sensation, which emanates from a Chardin and a Fragonard, was consciously reinvolved by the Impressionists and helped to produce the climate from which Matisse could distill his sensation. The American Tradition in the Arts. Richard McLanathan. Studio Vista, London, 1969. 492 pp., illus. £5.25. Reviewed by: Gabriel P. Weisberg* After reading Richard McLanathan's book, oneis left with the distinct impression that the author was trying to present an encyclopedic study of American art from colonial times until the present. Following a premise that '... many traditions and ideals ... became a part of an American tradition', he examines the impact of the European Baroque and Rococo styles as well as the effect of the Classical past on American art. His approach is meticulous, exacting...