Masterpieces of Dobell. Masterpieces of Drysdale. Masterpieces of Nolan by Charles Osborne (review)

168 Books so tactile in their presence, serve as illustrations to the sculptures and not vice versa, although, of course, both media are intended to be mutually complementary. In endeavoring to combine literary and artistic media, Bentov maintains the well-known ‘synthetic’ traditions of the Russian and Ukrainian Modernists and, like them, is interested primarily not in form but in content and in its relevance to the human and spiritual condition. Her concern with the theme of escape (‘illusory desires’, ‘freedom from matter’, ‘the radiant fire-bird’) is deeply autobiographical and seems to allude to her experiences of a forced-labor camp, darkly remembered. Essentially, however, Bentov’s objective is not the evocation of a cruel. distant childhood but the anticipation of some luminous ideal. Just as her sculptures ‘end’ often with an ascendant or forward impulse (stairs, raised hands, etc.), so her poems end on a note of presentiment. It is the kind of optimism, of imminent flight that we identify with Bentov’s Ukrainian colleagues, Archipenko and Zadkine (she studied with Zadkine in Paris). Sylvia Juran, who translated the poems from the original Russian texts (some published in 1972). has succeeded in rendering the essential meaning of the poems, although, of course, shecannot reproduce the economy of image and subtlety of orchestration germane to the Russian. Arthur Dove. Barbara Haskell. New York Graphic Society, Boston, Mass., 1974. 136 pp., illus. El 1.50. Reviewed by Naomi BOretz* This is a wel1:designed and carefully-organized exhibition catalog, with good color reproductions, accompanied by a thoroughly researched and documented text. The author had access to Dove’s unpublished writings and consulted, as well, with Dove’s son and others who knew him well. She has made a real effort to be accurateand has done an excellentjob of placing Dove’s early work in its proper chronological context. That task was rather more difficult than it might appear at first glance. With rare exceptions, Dove did not date the work he did between 1911-1920. To complicate matters further, it seems that his dealer, Steiglitz, often changed the titles of paintings after they had been delivered to the gallery. A group of pastels (1911), originally entitled ’The Ten Commandments’ and exhibited at Steiglitz’s ‘291’ gallery in 1912.were shown again in 1916as part of a ‘Nature Symbolized’ series; some of them later acquired individual titles. The significanceof these works-the fact that they. as well as Dove’s 1910 ‘Abstractions 1-6’ (1910), were the first nonrepresentational works to be produced in the U.S.A. before the Armory Show (191))-makes it particularly disappointing that they cannot be identified correctly, so that they may take their rightful place in the early ‘modernist’movement. That Dove was an innovator cannot be denied. Steiglitz had said of Dove’s first exhibition: ’So the pictures went up, and, of course they were over the heads of the people. . . .They were beautiful, they were not reminiscent of any one else.’ Although the Armory Show in New York City had shocked the public, for artists the shock was rather that of sudden recognition. It seemed impossible for them to avoid the impact of the European Moderns. Interestingly, Dove had been thinking in a ‘modernist’ vein since 1910,apparently without any knowledge of similar innovations in that year by Kandinsky and Delaunay. By 1913, when others were turning to ‘abstraction’. Dove spoke of giving up working with ‘pure form’and ‘goingback to nature’. But his vision remained amazingly consistent and his earliest ‘Abstractions’ still have much in common with his later work. Actually, in a letter he wrote to Arthur Jerome Eddy in 1912, he defined his attitude toward his art that was to hold true throughout his life:‘Oneof these principles[in all good art] which seemed the most evident was the choice of the simple motif, ., a few forms and a few colors sufficed for the creation of an object . . . . I gave up trying to express an idea by stating innumerable little facts, the statement of facts having no more to do with the art of painting than statistics with literature. . . .’ For reasons difficult to assess, Dove never achieved a popular success...