Progress in Art by Suzi Gablik (review)

248 Books usefulness as far as books and scholarly and professional journals are concerned.) Thus the advantages of the Arno Press edition. cloth binding and less drasticaliy cropped illustrations. must be balanced against the lower price. fuller captions and biographical notes and expanded (albeit confusingly so) bibliography of the other edition. Some readers may bypass this choice and seek out copies of one of the out-of-print U.S.A. editions or the British edition (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1939). or, if they prefer a German language edition, choose one ofthe two which appeared in 1955 and 1968. Of course Bairhuus 1 Y l Y ~I928 now faces a lot of competition that did not exist in 193X or 1952. To mention only brief general treatments there are Gillian Naylor’s I59 page Bauhaus (Studio Vista Picturebacks. London, 1968; E. P. Dutton. New York, 1968)and, in German, Hans M. Wingler’s 80 page Klrinc, Bauhaus-Fihe/(Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, 1974). In the recent past there were the well illustrated. reasonably priced catalogs issued in a number of languages to accompany an exhibition that marked the S0rh anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus. This exhibition opened in Stuttgart and was subsequently shown in cities in a number of countries. but there was no effort to make the catalogs available on a continuing basis. But. one suspects, if the Bauhaus bibliography were to be multiplied ten-fold. new editions of Bauhuus l91Y -1928would continue to appear. The limitations noted by many reviewers in 1938 and 1939. and even privately admitted by Alfred Barr. director of the Museum of Modern Art. centering around its diffuse and confusing character. no longer seem to matter. When the latest two incarnations are out-of-print, continued requests for copies and pride in its past achievements will no doubt prompt the Museum to bring out still another edition. Considering its resources, it is reasonable to insist that the next time around the Museum should go back to actual photographs of the original illustrations whenever possible (which should be the case in all but a few instances) so that these can be used as a source of plates rather than the mindless rescreening o C the readily available along with the rare photograph. The confusions of amateurish revisions should be eliminated. and picture captions and credits should be as full as possible. Why not. for example, acknowledge such important contributions as Lucia Moholy’s classic photographs of the Dessau Bauhaus buildings that appear on page 105 of the Arno Press edition and on page 103of the edition distributed by the New York Graphic Society? And why not a new, scholarly introduction, and. as a bonus. why not include a reprint of the eight page Bulletin ( J / /hi>Mir.seun~ o/ Moderri Ar/ Ihr December, 1938? This issue contains attractive pictures that tie together the book and the exhibition because actual installation shots are included, along with such gems as a photograph of Frank Lloyd Wright greeting Ise and Walter Gropius at the opening reception. (This issue has even been reprinted by the Arno Press as part of a reprint of a complete run of the Birllc~riri.) I n brief. any further edition should document a legendary event and forego any amateurish attempts to make it again what it once was in the days when it was the only general source of information about the Bauhaus. Progress in Art. Suzi Gablik. Thames & Hudson. London. 1976. 192 pp.. illus. f8.50. Reviewed by T. Healey * In this book the author carries out an exercise with a dual purpose. She applies Jean Piaget’s observation of an ordered development of the sensory awareness of children of their environment to the visual art of the West. If the application proves valid. Gablik suggests that this is to be taken as a proof that Piaget’s observation is valid for at least one other field than that for which it was obtained. That would seem fair enough, but her argument also seems to be that therefore art in Western cultures at least must have continuously ‘evolved’ to the present peak of perfection represented by so-called ‘modern art’, including non...