Some Recent Books About Art

IN 1867 the young French pointer Frédéric Bazillc told his family in provincial Montpellier that “a dozen young people of talent” were thinking of hiring a hall, somewhere in Paris, to exhibit paintings rejected by the jurors of the official Salon. John Rewald’s The History of Impressionism (Museum of Modern Art; Simon and Schuster, $10.00) reconstructs this group of refusés painters and, in a swiftly paced, thickly peopled, and richly documented narrative, traces its wavering fortunes over thirty-odd years.

1 he pathetic hero of the piece is patient Camille Pissarro from the Danish West Indies, age 37, a pupil of Corot. Pissarro lost 1500 pictures in the war with the Prussians and wearily thought, What’s the difference, ihev never caught on! Claude Monet, who had early learned to paint out-of-doors with Eugène Boudin, a pioneer realisl, had been touched now by Courbet’s broader treatment of landscape, and at 27 was looked up to by his fellows and scorned by the critics for his looseness of form. Renoir, likewise 27, had saved up enough money as a painter of porcelain to treat himself to some fun, as he called it, in the forests near Paris. Sisley, the Englishman, had once made the Salon, but like his friend Renoir he was turned down in this year.

Fantin-Latour, turing 39, made the 1867 Salon with a portrait of Édouard Manet, and after that, pursuing a dry style of photographic exactness, began to lose interest in the new movement. Berthe Morisot, a lone woman, had painted with Corot and was honored by being copied by Manet. Armand Guillaumin and Antoine Guillemet, whose names were only less confusing than Manet and Monet, owed their place in the developing school as much to the gentle Pissarro as to their own rather frail efforts to copy Courbet; and Bracquemond, an engraver introduced by Fantin-Latour, served his purpose by posing for the impoverished painters.

The greatest prestige was enjoyed by Degas, then 33, and Édouard Manet, who had turned 35. But Degas kept looking back in the academic direction, while Manet kept his eye peeled on the Legion of Honor a few paces ahead. And as for the rough youth from Aix, Paul Cézanne, he was never quite one of the group, although, as he later said with some truth, he was Pissarro’s disciple. Bazille himself, the school’s tragic hero, was cut off at 30 in battle, long before the “young people of talent” got around to finding a hall they could pay for: it was not until 1874 that they gave the joint exhibition which led to the coining in utmost derision — of the impressionist name.

Rewald brilliantly keeps these impressionist stars in clear focus through the long years of disaster and occasional triumph. Abundantly and unforgettably illustrated, in all the right places, the text proceeds through the solid years of impressionist growth down to the collapse of the school some six years after Zola foretold it.

Further impressionist works can be found amongst a miscellany of undated, uncatalogued, and unnumbered nineteenth-century prints — etchings, stereotypes, copperplates, dry points, woodcuts, and lithographs (especially lithographs) — in a work entitled The Etchings of the French Impressionists and Their Contemporaries (Hyperion, Paris; Crown, New York, $7.50). Six pages of text by Edward T. Chase illustrate Hyperion’s perennial problem of t he constitution of the impressionist school in particular and of book titles in general. In attempting to bridge the gap between title and contents, the Introduction tries to persuade the reader that engraving, in its “generic sense,” includes lithography, a wax-pencil process, and that an impressionist. was practically anyone who failed to find space in the official Salon. Actually, fewer than half of the reproduced prints are etchings and only one third of them were made by impressionists.

The copperplate portrait of Edmond de Goncourt by Félix Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot’s lithograph of Manet, the etched self-portrait and the studies of Mary Cassatt and Manet by Degas, Pissarro’s Cézanne, and Cézanne’s self-portrait might engage the subsequent interest of John Rewald’s readers; but (he “etchings” are so shabbily reproduced in the Hyperion collection that they are hardly worth looking at.

A more conscientious view of the obligations of printers will be found in the magnificent folio, Honoré Daumier: 240 Lithographs (Reynal and Hitchcock, $12.50). The plates for this work-the subject was an unresponsive idol of the younger impressionists-were printed in Zurich on paper which simulates the color and texture of the nineteenth-century newsprint upon which Daumier’s political cartoons and social satires first appeared. Dr. Wilhelm Wartman’s systematic theme-bytheme sampling of about one sixteenth of the great print-maker’s output ranges from 1830, the year of the accession of Louis-Philippe, to the fall of Paris, 1871; Bernard Lemann’s Introduction is an eloquent yet reticent piece of biographical and critical scholarship; and there is an annotated and dated Index of Plates in which James Galston has usefully turned the original Captions into English.

Most of the modern paintings in The Art of Russia, edited by Helen Rubissow (Philosophical Library, $6.00), would have been quite fit home in the I arisian Salons from which the great French impressionists were so fatuously excluded: for Soviet painting, as one of Russia’s foremost critics is here quoted as saying, seeds upon the “verifying" nineteenth-century art, which told readable stories. Kandinsky, the greatest of Russian artists in Western opinion, has had to give way to “social realists” who for the most part ought to be writers.

The Museum of Modern Art scores a second time in a season in Picasso: Fifty Years of His Art, by Alfred H. Barr, Jr. (Simon and Schuster, $6.00). Primarily planned to set forth 330 handsome examples of the artist’s work in twenty-odd mediums, Barr’s exemplary monograph provides a continuous and logical text which carries the reader through all of Picasso’s manifold “periods.” Barr has opposed, in the painter’s defense against a mounting charge of insincerity, a more than wayward and only less than predetermined order of stylistic development. To prove that Picasso is not merely capricious, Barr shows that unchanging facts of his character, such as his predisposition to think well of plain people, are revealed time and again in his pictures. His variability, on the other hand, has to do only with professional problems.

As an artist and not an intellectual (not that Barr says as much!), Picasso is subject to rapid change of impressions, and as he has gone about feasting his eyes in turn upon classical sculptures, archaic Iberian carvings, and primitive fetiches, his techniques have varied. Yet this remarkable artist never forgets, never loses, anything he has learned: so that in the midst of antics which have caused his fetiches the consternation of mislaying their members along with their organs, he could return, at the drop of a hat, to neoclassical line and romantic contour.

The illustrations for Picasso: The Recent Years, 1939—1946, by Harriet and Sidney Janis (Doubleday, $7.50), are designed to answer the specific question, What did Picasso do during the war? Somewhat less temperate than Alfred Barr, the Junises display their rich plates and photographs, and say, Peace, it was wonderfull It may be thought, however, that the Janis collection suffers from the nearly undiluted unpleasantness of the subject matter of the later pictures. However Vapid much of Picasso’s neoclassical and romantic painting may prove to be in the future, it now makes a restful contrast to the grotesqueries. It is fun, though, to see what the world’s most famous painter was doing in the midst of the war. And I dare say that if one could see more of the astonishing color, one would feel that the jolly new still-lifes of leeks and tomatoes could once again give us pleasure and not merely inform or correct us.