The World of M. C. Escher ed. by J. L. Locher (review)

254 Books plentifully illustrated) vividly recalls both its triumphs and its follies. To Keep Art Alive: The Effort of Kenneth Hayes Miller, American Painter (1876-1952). Lincoln Rothschild. Art Alliance Press, Cranbury, N.J., 1974. 206 pp. illus. S15.00. Reviewed by Francis V. O’Connor* This useful monograph is a hommage to a minor but influential painter-teacher by one of his more articulate, if overly polemical, students. Rothschild traces Miller’s origins, development and achievement in the first part of the book and his basic ideas in the second. The portrait that emerges is that of an individual totally dedicated to the art of painting and capable of communicating his commitment to succeeding generations of students, first at the New York School of Art and, after 1911, at the Art Students League of New York. Among his students were artists such as Reginald Marsh, Alexander Brook, Edward Laning, Isabel Bishop, Peggy Bacon and Yasuo Kuniyoshi, along with art world figures such as Lloyd Goodrich (who wrote an earlier book on Miller) and William Palmer. Miller’s style was based on the technical principles of Renaissance illusionism and applied to everyday subject matter. His best known theme is the shopper strolling along 14th Street in New York City, the earliest examples of which appear circa 1920, full 10 years before ‘social realism’ came into vogue during the 1930’s. He was not, however, exactly a proletarian artist and his basic ‘aesthetic’ amply documented here, is centered on the well-tested cliches of academic art. Thus (p. 70): ‘Art is the recreation of that deeper reality behind the accidents of immediate perception’. ‘Sound painting is done according to art, not according to nature.’ On page 81 his deeply personal obsession with conceptualized volumetrics in painting is set forth: ‘Our contact with the world is with surfaces. I shall now add that our deeper experience is with volumes ...‘1 ask you to think of a ripe plum. ...’ Not surprisingly, Miller’s subject is woman. In the roughly 100 paintings illustrated in the book, there are about 150 women to only 33 men and most of the works depict individual females. But they are in great part psychologically inert, proffering only surface and volume to an eye soon bored. Aside from the works prior to 1920,where the ‘influence’ of the very worst of poetic academicism is to be found (he seemed to have learned nothing from his friend Albert P. Ryder), Miller’s style is characterized by a cold literalism that vitiates whatever charm the elegant shoppers of 14th Street may have possessed. Try as he might, Rothschild cannot convince me that Miller was anything more than a good teacher, that his ‘aesthetic’was something other than an amalgam of academic bromides and that his major paintings (his drawings are abysmal) add significantly to the history of painting in the U.S.A. Rothschild’s claims for Miller’s salvific role in recent art, implicit in the title and explicit throughout the text, are without coherent foundation and Rothschild’s compulsive sniping at every innovation in the visual arts since the Armory Show is unworthy of a mature and informed understanding of the very real development in visual thinking made during Miller’s lifetime. Unfortunately, the book is marred by indifferent scholarship (of the four works Miller exhibited at the Armory Show, for instance, only two are so identified and one is not mentioned, though an attempt is made to list all known works), by the lack of a chronology that would give structure to the rambling text and by an incomplete and unreliable index. Nevertheless, this is a generally useful and well illustrated, if flawed, addition to that woefully incomplete shelf of monographs that will, when utilized by informed and critical scholars of the future, form the foundation for a history of 20th-century painting in the U.S.A. *250 East 73rd Street, Apt. IIC. New York, NY 10021, U.S.A. The World of M. C. Escher. J. L. Locher, ed. Abrams, New York, 1971. 270pp., illus. Reviewed by NahumJ&l** This book will be of great help, as well as a source of pleasure and delight, to those who...