Japanese Prints and Western Painters by Frank Whitford (review)

76 Books made a few wealthy, is happy and free of conflict. The genre paintings portrayed the poor as pious and content, ragged newsboys as picturesque, blacks as cheerful and lazy, etc.’ In summary, the authors accuse the art establishment of being under the control of the rich and powerful. They further accuse the establishment of using art to perpetuate the existing social and economic order and to insure that the corporate power structure isviewed ascivic-mindedand virtuous. Whether or not one agrees with their position, the book is passionately and well written and should be required reading for artists and teachers of art. Art and Act: On Causes in History-Manet, Gropius, Mondrian. Peter Gay. Harper & Row, New York and London, 1976. 265 pp.. illus. f9.75. Reviewed by Jeanne Brody” This book contains an interesting, informative analysis of the life and works of Manet, Gropius and Mondrian. Gay seeks to take account of various factors that determine the direction of an artist’s work instead of focusingon onespecificfactor. He arrives at three sources of‘causes’, whichhecalls ‘private’,‘cultural’and ‘craft’. ‘Private’ refers to personal and family psychologically induced causes. ‘Culture’ includes causes arising from the atmosphere of the artist’s lifetime.‘Craft’covers those stemming from the demands of the chosen medium. He tries to show how these ‘causes’interact with one another and with the particular individual. The‘private’causesare perhaps the most complexand fraught with contradiction. Manet was very conservative politically and bourgeois in his tastes, due to his up-bringing, yet his extreme individualism often led him to be at odds with the establishment of which he considered himself a part. This conservatism was behind his refusal tojoin the impressionist exhibitions, although he knew personally and appreciated many of its members. However, his artistic sincerity and individualism of style and subject incurred the opposition of the official Salon jurors and caused his works to be rejected time and time again. A similar psychological complexity is brought out in Gay’s discussion of Gropius. While historians have written extensively about Gropius’ emphasis on functionalism and on the collaboration of art and industry to provide a democratization of architecture, little has been said about his equal appreciation of aesthetics and the importance he placed on the role of intuition in architecture. These two seemingly contradictory directions complemented themselvesin Gropius’case and wereat the origin of Gropius’ practical yet aesthetically pleasing buildings. In the case of Mondrian, Gay pushes the psychologizing a bit too far for my taste. His attempt to reduce the rigid, restrained yet aesthetically pleasing geometric forms of Mondrian’s developed style to the artist’s obsessive fear of women and the female in nature seems an over-exaggeration. And although he documents his hypotheses rather well. they remain unsatisfactory explanations for such a master of 20th-century art. Gaydescribesvividly,and with a realsense for details.the times in which these men lived and how the cultural atmosphere might have penetrated their works. His thesisis not new, however, and the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu haswritten extensivelyon this question. Not all of thesecauses play an equally important role in the life and works of each man. For Manet, culture, for Gropius, craft, and for Mondrian, the psychological make-up, determined the historical events that became the body of works of each artist. The reasons Gay offers for his conclusion seem plausible though not entirely convincing. Unfortunately, Gay’s introduction leads one to expect something much more earth-shattering than his three biographies provide. He criticizes Marxist historians while proceedingtodoanalyses in the best traditionof the Marxist approach to history and spends 32 pages defending a type of art history that can perfectly well defend itself,having, by this late date, nothing to qualify it as inherently radical or revolutionary. Gay’s prose could at times be simplified, his taste for rhetoric in no way enhancing this already thoughtful, if unexciting, book. *I9 rue Ferdinand Duval, 75004 Paris, France. Japanese Prints and Western Painters. Frank Whitford. Studio Vista, London, 1977. 264 pp., illus. f12.50. Reviewed by Sean O’Driscoll** Many artists are aware of the fact that, during the last half of the 19th century, following Commodore Perry...