The Art and Peoples of Black Africa by Jacqueline Delange (review)

Books 251 significantdetails, omitting what seem crucial parts while often adding idiosyncratic elaborations. The strength of Schapiro’s monograph is that hedefinesan order in this apparentchaos: the license is illusory; all textual interpretations-and these illustrations are simply visual representations of textual interpretations-must go beyond the literal meaning of the text. No biblicaltext completelyencodesits meaning; texts are, rather, vestiges of meanings that an interpreter-armed with (at least) linguisticand pragmatic rulesorconventionsand culture-specific facts and beliefs-must complete. The illustrations, then, represent consrrucred meanings of biblical texts, meanings that are, moreover, more often allegorical or analogical than literal. Schapiro’swork could thus contribute to both hermeneutics and iconographical theory. The evidence from three centuries of medieval art illuminates traditions of biblical interpretation while his commentary on the interpretations illuminates the generic conventions of representation. But Words and Pictures is not a theoretical work. Schapiro alludes to rich theoretical problems and provides acute iconographical analysis, but the book remains a traditional historical iconographical study. Focussing in the central two chapters on one biblical type: the story of Moses and the Amalekites, he explains the variation in representation that results from different political, psychological and religious influences. His central point in this section is important: the biblical text-in fact, any text of this kind-will support many interpretations. More precisely, these texts can be known only through interpretations and Schapiro shows how these visually presented interpretations aredetermined by the cultural contexts from which they come. Those requiring a coherent body of material to investigate verbal interpretation or iconography will find the book immediatelyuseful.Theoreticiansin both fieldswill be excitedby the problems he poses. But they may also feel that these theoretical matters are insufficiently examined. Words and Pictures tantalizes one by askingwhat a reader does in forming a textual interpretation and how visual and verbal thinking are related. But neither answers nor programs for investigation are offered. Although the book appears in the Approaches to Semiotics series, it is more an organization of material than a systematic study. Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator. Richard Fitzgerald. Greenwood Press, London, 1974. 254 pp., illus. €7.75. Reviewed by Malcolm F.R. Miles* This book, Fitzgerald‘s first, provides detailed, interesting biographies of five cartoonists (U.S.A.) of the first half of this century, a sound piece of research adequately recorded and provided with useful footnotes. But the issueof ‘art and politics’ is mentioned only in passing. K. R. Chamberlain, for example, was prepared to illustrate anything for anybody, as opposed to Robert Minor (1884-1952), a Communist Party worker, who was arrested as such in 1948. But their styles are not especially different. Likewise John Sloan (1871-1951), in some ways a follower of Robert Henri’s Ash Can School, displayed no clear connection between hiscartooning and politics. Maurice Becker also provides no reason to study the issue through his work except that, amongst other things, he produced cartoons for a radical magazine. Only Art Young (1866-1943) consciously chose cartooning as a vehicle for his political ideas. The author could have described the broad context of preWorld War I1isolationism in the U S A . and the Regionalist art that characterized that political stance. But he does not set the fivecartoonists into the general art scene,despite the connection of Sloan with Henri, the impact of the Armory show (1913) and the activities of Stieglitzand his ‘291’gallery, and he ignores the debate between a native realism and an innovative art largely imported from Europe. At a time when artists from the U.S.A. studied in Paris and there was even an American movement (Synchronism) that developed in the cubist-orphist milieu, the relation of the new ideas in art and those in politics was a significant issue and, hence, is a serious omission rn this book. The individual studies show the five relatively minor artists working in a period of transition, a period to which too little attention is paid, but which, through the work of artists such as Stuart Davies and Arthur Dove (who was working in the area of non-figurative art as early as 1910), shows the inception of ‘modern’art in the...