Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905–1925 by Robert C. Williams (review)

Books 339 extent of German influence on English art during the first half of the 19th century and to determine what this cultural interaction implied. On the first of these issues, he is positively encyclopaedic . He opens with a lengthy description of the numerous ways whereby the British public, but mainly artists and connoisseurs, came into contact with German art between about 1800and 1850.In these decades the English becameaware forthe first time of the existence of a school of German painting exemplified by monumental historical works by Cornelius, Overbeck and Schnorr von Carolsfeld. At the same time, there arose in Victorian art circles a profound admiration for certain types of German print-making; here Moritz Retzsch's outlines and Gothicised wood engravings by such practitioners as Alfred Rethel played a singularly important role. These various manifestations of German Romanticism shared two basic features in common: a stylistic revivalism harking back to the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, and an underlying beliefthat art should be used as a moral and educational tool for the improvement of society. In the 18305 and 18405 especially, the didactic purposes and formal concerns of the Germans took some British artists. by force, climaxing with the fresco decorations for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament. Vaughan shows how the leading Victorian history painters, including Eastlake, William Dyce and Daniel Maclise, adapted and transformed the German works to their own ends; furthermore, his detailed analysis also charts the profound effectsof these works on English book-illustrators and draughtsmen , the young Pre-Raphaelites among them. Given the strong intellectual bias of these German artists, it is only appropriate that Vaughan provides as wella chapter dealing with the contributions made by their fellow-countrymen to the early development of philosophical aesthetics. This section embodies a clear introduction to the basic ideasof Kant, Schiller, Schelling and the Schlegels,but isnot successfullyintegrated into the text as a whole. Certain other parts of the book, such as a chapter entitled The Depiction of German Subjects by English Artists, also seem to have been included more with a view to completeness than for the sake of strengthening Vaughan's basic arguments. The eager response in Britian to German Romanticism does indeed point toward a crisis in English historical painting during the early Victorian era. But Vaughan does not fully explain the reasons for this crisis, or why the Germans (e.g, opposed to the French) appeared to provide a way out of the impasse, or why their manner fell so rapidly from favour in Britain after 1850. Surely the religious factors that he mentions (like the rise of Anglo-Catholicism) do not tell the whole story behind such abrupt and profound reversals of taste. Instead, the answers must lie in the realm of social history; that this artistic crisistook place in a period of unprecedented social upheaval (which Vaughan ignores almost completely) cannot be merely coincidental . His failure to determine sufficient causes for the cultural phenomenon that he has studied in such depth makes his book seem curiously incomplete. In other respects, however, I praise him for having written a serious, eminently scholarly analysis of a neglected but fascinating phase of European art history. Vaughan's book will no doubt become, and deservedly so, a standard text on the subject of early Victorian art. Artists in Revolution: Portraits of the Russian Avant-Garde 1905-1925. Robert C. Williams. Scolar Press, London, 1978. 242 pp., illus. Reviewed by Marylin R. Brown· The title of the book is misleading. Williams is only incidentally concerned with the larger ideological issues that should be addressed in any consideration of the relationship between the arts and political revolutions. In recent years Tim Clark's studies of visual art and the French Revolution of 1848 The Absolute Bourgeois and Image of the People(Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973)are excellent examples of a synthesis of·Dept. of Art, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA 70118, U.S.A. the analysis of works of individual artists and of the broader issue of the political implications of their 'collective' efforts. Williams, in contrast to Clark, sidesteps the political issues of the original definition of avant-garde and...