Painterly Painting ed. by Thomas B. Hess, John Ashbery, and: Oil Painting: Basic and New Techniques by Leonard Brooks, and: Oil Painting in Progress by Moses Soyer, Peter Robinson (review)

Books of this nature. It is certainly one of the most elegant and handsome of its kind, being a handbook for the construction of seventy-five known uniform polyhedra as well as of a representative set of stellated forms. For each of these there is a black and white photograph of the completed form and extensive layouts for the faces and their connectivities. In addition, there are tables suggesting coloring of the faces to obtain interesting color effects. The author describes with loving care the pitfalls or special effects to be encountered with each model, reflecting fifteen years of experience in the assembly of these fascinating and beautiful structures. The frontispiece consists of color photographs of the three regular triangulated solids and the three solids derived from their symmetries. The pages devoted to individual polyhedra are preceded by a Preface, a Foreword by H. S. M. Coxeter, an Introduction and a chapter on 'Mathematical Classification' marked: 'This section may be omitted at first reading.' Indeed, this latter section suffers from trying at once too much and too little: in its conciseness it is very difficult to follow (this reader found it very difficult to make sense of p, 8) and not really extensive enough to' provide a sufficient background to the relationships between the various polyhedra. In contrast, the specific instructions for building the polyhedra are lucidly and agreeably expressed. Altogether, then, this book is highly recommended for use both as a manual accompanying a course in applied mathematics, mineralogy or design and for the 'polyhedrabuffs' pursuing independent study. Human Anatomy and Figure Drawing. Jack Kramer. Van Nostrand Reinhold, London, 1972. 143 pp., iIIus. £4.50. Artistic Anatomy. Paul Richer. Translator and editor, Robert Beverly Hale. WatsonGuptill , New York, 1971. 256 pp., ilIus. $15.00. Reviewed by,-Norman Narotzky* The first book's subtitle, 'The Integration ofStructure and Form', defines the author's approach to his subject. He aims to combine a knowledge of human anatomy with an understanding of its function in rendering the spatial structure of the figure. Kramer's positive contribution to the subject is his emphasis on the use of anatomyin drawing the figure as a form in space. '. He divides the book 'into (1) Structure and Figure Drawing and (2) Anatomy and Structure. In the first part he presents elements.that he feels will serve better than the traditional cylinder, sphere and cube as the basis for drawing. These are (a) a point as a symbol of locatron in space and (b) a line as a measurement of dimension. Drawing should not be a mere copy ofwhat is seen but reflectanintellectual analysis of reality. 'The significant, preliminary groundwork in drawing is the spatial information '(measurements or dimensions) deduced fromlobservation and separately identified (symbolized by lirie and point).' The author's explanation ofhow point, line, plane and light and shadow are used by the masters to render the figure's three-dimen- .sional form and structure is highly revealing. In the second part, he.analyzes the bones and muscles and their effect on external form. Here, too, drawings by the masters and from various anatomical works of the past form the core around which the text isdeveloped, amplified by the author's own drawings and diagrammatic analyses of the reproductions. Always the *Corcega 196,Barcelona 11,Spain. 83 anatomy is explained in relation to structure in drawing. While the work is not exhaustive, it nevertheless contains a good deal of information that will be valuable not only to artists but to critics and historians, leading them to a more profound understanding of figure drawing. I have a few criticisms. The anatomical plates by Albinus that are meant to be used as reference in following the text give most of the muscles and bones but the position of many of them on the figure is not indicated. Thus, when they are mentioned in the text, one cannot always locate them. The book's usefulness as a reference would have been increased with more complete labelling, as it would be also if the study list of anatomical terms at the back included the origin, insertion and function of all the muscles listed. The many reproductions are, with a...