In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

162 Books American Indian Design and Decoration. LeRoy H. Appleton. Dover, New York, 1971. 277 pp., illus. Paper. $4.00. Reviewed by J. J. Brody* Appleton’s book is one of several recent Dover reprints that bear on Native American arts. Among others is Ruth Bunzel’s 1929 monograph called The Piteblo Potter. This was never a handsome book, but it became a collectors item because of its text. Its Dover edition is sloppy, marred by typographic errors and smudgy illustrations, but its replication is nonetheless a real service, for Bunzel was a marvellous and imaginative reporter and the book is a classic in ethnoesthetics. Appleton’s book originally was published by Scribner’s in 1950 under the title Itidiun Art of the Atnericns. It also became a collectors item, but only because it was a pleasure to handle, combining all of the components of the bookmaker ’s art into a fine esthetic whole. It was obsolete when published and the Dover reprint is of value only as a demonstration of the importance that paper has to the art of making books. Because it lacks the beauty of the original, this version is rather like the melodramatic scene in a horror movie when the death corrupted corpse of the lover pops out of her coffin. A potpourri of art objects, poetry and prose, Appleton’s only contribution other than selection was in brief and over-simplified chapter introductions. Its intent was to help establish the ‘rightful place in the history of world art’ for Native American art. The phrase smacks of betweenthe -Wars paternalism, suggesting a kind of League of Nations in World Art. This search for prestige assumes an hierarchy that exists only in the minds of ‘true believers’ and a set of timeless and universal values that are equally mythic. The ‘place’ of any art is only in the mind of its user and ranking is a senseless exercise that assumes inferiority. Against this, the other faults become meaningful. The myth of the American Indian is fortified, this time denying uniqueness to any of the hundreds of indigenous Native American peoples across two continents. If Balboa had sailed to Australia, would it have been three continents? The illustrations are all hand-drawn renderings, nicely done, but interpretations rather than reproductions, and not one is adequately identified, nor are any of the poems or stories. Such treatment would be unacceptable if the art producers had been Chaucer or Hokusai rather than anonymous Red Indians. Sentimentality and a-historicism denigrate and dehumanize any art and Dover does no service by reviving this volume as anything other than a work of art in its own right. Cubism and Abstract Art. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1974. 249 pp., illus. Paper, $6.95. The Cubist Epoch. Douglas Cooper. Phaidon Press, London, 1974. 320 pp., illus. Paper, $3.50. Reviewed by Alfred Werner** Exhibition catalogues are usually kept for a couple of months and then discarded for ‘lack of space’. But the more astute among the visitors to the ‘Cubism and Abstract Art’ exhibition that was held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1935 carefully preserved their copy, while less lucky ones have since searched in secondhand bookshops for this classic analysis of this kind of post-1900 art. The new edition is a tribute to Barr, former director of this museum. He grew to manhood in the U.S.A., a country that then had barely adjusted to Impressionism. For the exhibition he assembled objects by artists who, with few exceptions (Alexander Calder, Lyonel Feininger and Man Ray), were both Europeanborn and anti-naturalistic and thus doubly upsetting to *Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, N M 87131, U.S.A. **‘Pantheon’, 230 West 54th St., New York, NY 10019, U.S.A. chauvinistic and conserative critics such as Thomas Craven and Royal1 Cortissoz. Apart from paintings and sculptures, Barr included photographs, illustrations of new works of architecture, pieces of furniture, film strips and, for didactic reasons, even samples of African sculpture . Barr discusses many varieties of abstract and quasiabstract art, including those works in which an artist ‘approaches an abstract goal...

pdf

Share