Looking at the overlooked. Four essays on still life painting by Norman Bryson (review)

analogies among the arts, but the jury still deliberates in the literature. One Schwarm catalog (we all depend on them) gives the impression that all or most musical compositions are available on records, CDs or tapes. A conclusion the reader of these volumes will reach is that there is a monumental, cavernous warehouse of unheard and forgotten musical literature out there. For example, we all know of the prodigious output of Haydn in symphonic form alone. We learn that composers Gassman, Dittersdorf, Michael Haydn, Vanhal and Hoffman wrote voluminously for various genres and in symphonic form alone: "Gassman wrote 33, Dittersdorf approximately 120, Michael Haydn over 40, Vanhal 76, and Ordenez over 70" (Vol. 1, p. 223). This is a revelation to me. Reassuring is the information that about 3000 B.C., "Both Assur ... and Babylon ... honored musicians more highly than the learned, placing them next after kings and gods. In the massacres following their conquests, the Assyrians always spared the enemies' musicians, whom they took back to Assur with their booty. Very soon, bands were formed which, at the height of Babylonian civilization, grew to an enormous size" (Vol. 1, p. 15). Recently, while I was flipping channels to avoid football, the announcer stated that the Ohio State marching band numbered 600 players . The more things change, the more .... There is no pretense in these volumes of substituting the dictionary biographies for book length biographies of composers available elsewhere . All are written by experts, we are told, though the set lacks biographies of the experts. Missing, too, is any discussion of instrumental or vocal virtuosi, unless the virtuoso happens to be a composer as well. Heifetz, for example, is mentioned once in a phrase, but not as a soloist. Some specialists writing in analytical , musicological detail about some esoteric, and even well-known, compositions read like dustjacket explications . Or perhaps it is the other way: some dustjacket experts are often excellent historians who, perforce, give us a hard bit offormal analysis. Telephone kisses again. As Santayana said, in another context , "To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have the imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be .... [Philosophical] reflection is indeed a part of life, but the last part". Reference 1. David Ward-Steinman, Toward a Comparative Structural Theory ofthe Arts (San Diego, CA: San Diego State Univ. Press, 1989). LOOKING AT THE OVERLOOKED. FOUR ESSAYS ON STILL LIFE PAINTING by Norman Bryson. Reaktion Books Ltd., London, U.K., 1990. 192 pp., illus. Paper, £11.95; trade, £25.00. ISBN: 0-948462-07-8, ISBN: 0-94846206 -X. Reviewed byJohn W Cooper, sub-editor, Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford 0X3 OBW; U.K Except peripherally, the genre of still life has not been featured in any of the critical debates on art and art history, even though the first modern examples date from about 1600. In these essays, the origins, history and logic of still life are analysed, and in the final essay the author concludes that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women and 'women's work'-that is, domestic routine and the rituals of hospitality . This is a searching and readable inquiry into what still life might mean to us here and now. THE MEANINGS OF MODERN DESIGN by Peter Dormer. Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, U.K., 1990. 192 pp., illus. Trade, £14.95. ISBN: 0-50023570 -8. Reviewed byJohn W Cooper, sub-editor, Pergamon Press, Headington Hill Hall, Oxford OX] OBW; U.K Perhaps the first-ever design was part of primitive ritual. There, what was right (orthodox) looked good; but how do we today decide what looks good? Our almost universal desire for possessions, our consumerism , may initiate and feed the seemingly continuous restyle of all our 'objects of desire', shifting the emphasis to the designer-as-stylist, as fashion arbiter. Yet few of these objects are necessary for brute survival. Placing design in an...