The New Avant-Garde: Issues for the Art of the Seventies by Grégoire Müller, and: Art without Boundaries: 1950–70 by Gerald Woods (review)

Books 179 Boccioni’s “in-and-out of a piston in a cylinder”, or Hulme’s “hard clean surface of a piston rod”.’ That is, the futurists’ concern with dynamism, which looked back to the surface activity of Impressionism, was rejected by the vorticistswho delighted in the precision, depersonalization and clarity of the machine. The latter attitude, a fundamentally more modern view, may be linked to Purism, Constructivism, De Stijl and other artistic manifestations of the early part of the 20th century. Wees also examines the personal relationships among the vorticists, their search for an expressive typography in Blast and some of the factors that led to the rapid collapse of the movement by the mid 1910s. World War I, financial difficulties brought about by the publication of Blast, the break with Futurism, the public’s turn away from art to more pressing matters by 1914, all took their toll. But perhaps most important, Wees skillfully gives us an insight into the ‘politics’of Vorticism, the manipulation by Lewis of his colleagues (and conversely), that hastened the disintegration of Vorticism. As a result, the author shows us Vorticism as the product of very intense but very fallible human beings, who for a few years succeeded in lifting British art out of its prewar complacency to a level equal in importance to major art centers on the European continent. Symbolist Art. Edward Lucie-Smith. Thames and Hudson, London, 1972. 216 pp.. illus. Paperback, €1.50. The Eclipse of Symbolism. Peter Fingesten. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, S.C., 1970. 172 pp., illus. $6.95. Reviewed by: Alan C. Birnholz* Symbolist Art continues the broad, rather pedestrian studies we have encountered so often in The World of Art Library’s History of Art series. It mentions all the artists one would expect to find in an examination of this subject. Particularly noteworthy is the author’s emphasis on Moreau as ‘the central figure in any discussion of symbolist art’; on Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Watts and on the Rose+Croix group under Sar PBladan. In short, the book is a competent, if undistinguished look at the symbolist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. One point held in common by Lucie-Smith and Peter Fingesten is the former’s assertion that ‘born of the symbolist movement, modernism has nevertheless been hostile to the symbol as a means of visual communication’. In his brief, but provocative book, Fingesten makes no excusesfor his own deep hostility to the assence of Symbolism , now in ‘eclipse’. Actually, The Ecfigse of Symbolism is two books in one, with the author’s personal beliefs largely reserved for the second half of the essay. ‘Symbolism’, the first part of the book, is a demonstration , occasionally pretentious, of Fingesten’s familiarity with much art-historical, anthropological and even anatomical. At the outset he introduces the leitmotif of the book: that under the impact of rationalist scientific thought, the world of modern man has undergone the process of desymbolification. Fingesten then talks about symbolsin various contexts, often with striking conclusions. The concept of the divinity of the artist, so prevalent during the Renaissance, is linked ultimately to various myths of Creation in which God is seen as an artist or potter. Another chapter deals with ‘the symbolism of the eye’ in which we detect an unmistakable debt to Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy of 1908.The smile of the Buddha, Fingesten goes on, derives from the smile of the deceasedthough the author could spare his readers the lecture on which muscles are involved in the act of smiling. Finally, Fingesten turns to Gothic cathedrals. The cathedral represents the magic mountain with ties back to near-Eastern ziggurats. As a result, the flying buttress, for example, is not only functional but also symbolic as it helps the church become ‘thearchitectural magic mountain’ like ‘real mountains with their fantastic snow and ice bridges’. Gargoyles evoke the widespread belief that mountain tops were inhabited by good and evil spirits and thus they served to remind us always to be on guard against the forces of Satan. The interior of the church, Fingesten concludes, symbolizes the body of Christ and the body...