Some Picture-Books of the Season

The monograph on art comes into gaudy prominence at this season as a gift book, and despite the frustrations which bristle like thorns from the whole subject of the art book— its economic commitment to approved and safe artists, its mediocrity in the hands of American printers (the fine books in our shops are printed in Holland, Switzerland, Germany, or Italy), its pitiful status as reading matter, its prohibitive costs—there is much to be recommended in this year’s pickings.

Werner Hofmann’s The Earthly Paradise: Art in the Nineteenth Century (George Braziller, $25, translated from the German by Brian Battershaw) stands with Professor S. J. Freedburg’s Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Harvard, 2 vols., $30) among the finest to be had. Prof. Freedburg’s study of the classic painting of our civilization is a scholarly masterpiece, but for all its freshness cannot claim the interest of a more daring study, Werner Hofmann’s startling organization of nineteenthcentury painting into a single subject. One has long suspected that the received program of movements and styles in the latest old masters were not quite what they avowed, that Naturalism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism, and so on were stop-gap designations. Beginning with Courbet, Mr. Hofmann shows us that Naturalism is just as symbolic as good painting has always been, and proceeds to make the most familiar of paintings wholly new things. We find subject headings such as “Lightworship,” “Gigantomania.” “Youth and Friendship,” and chapters entitled “The Earthly Hell,” “Woman as Myth,” “Nature and History.” This highly imaginative, exciting essay is one of the first in the long-needed studies of modern art. Those familiar with the work of Panofsky, Wylie Sypher, and Selden Rodman (to be thoroughly eclectic in naming critics who can refocus our eyes) will recognize Werner Hofmann as a critic worth close attention.

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Guy Davenport

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The monograph on art comes into gaudy prominence at this season as a gift book, and despite the frustrations which bristle like thorns from the whole subject of the art book— its economic commitment to approved and safe artists, its mediocrity in the hands of American printers (the fine books in our shops are printed in Holland, Switzerland, Germany, or Italy), its pitiful status as reading matter, its prohibitive costs—there is much to be recommended in this year’s pickings.

Werner Hofmann’s The Earthly Paradise: Art in the Nineteenth Century (George Braziller, $25, translated from the German by Brian Battershaw) stands with Professor S. J. Freedburg’s Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence (Harvard, 2 vols., $30) among the finest to be had. Prof. Freedburg’s study of the classic painting of our civilization is a scholarly masterpiece, but for all its freshness cannot claim the interest of a more daring study, Werner Hofmann’s startling organization of nineteenthcentury painting into a single subject. One has long suspected that the received program of movements and styles in the latest old masters were not quite what they avowed, that Naturalism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism, and so on were stop-gap designations. Beginning with Courbet, Mr. Hofmann shows us that Naturalism is just as symbolic as good painting has always been, and proceeds to make the most familiar of paintings wholly new things. We find subject headings such as “Lightworship,” “Gigantomania.” “Youth and Friendship,” and chapters entitled “The Earthly Hell,” “Woman as Myth,” “Nature and History.” This highly imaginative, exciting essay is one of the first in the long-needed studies of modern art. Those familiar with the work of Panofsky, Wylie Sypher, and Selden Rodman (to be thoroughly eclectic in naming critics who can refocus our eyes) will recognize Werner Hofmann as a critic worth close attention.