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ART NOTES
CEZANNE's CoMPOSITION.
By Erle Loran. University of California Press.
$6.50.
TI-IE ARTs.
Number One. Edited by Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Lund
Humphries
&
Co.
$3.00.
THE DRAWINGS OF HENRY MooRE.
Curt Valentin.
$8.50.
T
HIS IS the second edition of Erie Loran's book, which appeared in
1943. A rereading confirms its importance as a precise and closely
knit analysis of the visual structure and spatial organization of the first
of the "modern" painters. Since so much of the contemporary concept
of what constitutes a well-built picture stems eventually from Cezanne's
practice, Loran's point-by-point dissection of individual paintings is
also basic for later work. As he himself says, this is neither criticism in
the ordinary sense, nor historical definition, but visual demonstration.
Its force lies in the exact definition of the terms employed, and their
consistent application throughout. One need not agree with the analysis
of every painting, nor with Loran's implication that successful construc–
tion will necessarily continue in the direction Cezanne began, to appreci–
ate the clarity and perception with which Loran forces us to follow
Cezanne's language of visual form.
The Arts
is a new English quarterly of elegant format, fine printing,
and superb reproductions, with articles on painting, sculpture, architec–
ture, film, and opera. Its point of view is that of the now well-established
avant-garde group of Moore, Piper, Sutherland,
et al.,
but its interests go
far afield. As the prospectus says, it proposes to keep the balance between
"past and present, tradition and experiment, scholarly dissertation and
imaginative criticism." Some of the articles are excellent (notably the
more scholarly), some are painful (prose-poems on painting are permis–
sible only in a Baudelaire) . In other words this is a large, expensive, de
luxe publication of good taste, aimed at a "cultivated" international
audience, with the limits upon daring and intensity inherent in such a
program. Can the fire ever heat so many irons?
The dominance of painting over sculpture in the present century
makes it hard for a sculptor to produce drawings. His whole aesthetic
is quite naturally so pictorially biased that his drawings tend to become
finished works in themselves. It is perhaps for this reason that in this
portfolio of thirty drawings by the English sculptor Henry Moore (a
comparatively recent discovery in this country, a fine artist in a notor–
iously difficult field), my preference goes to two extremes; on the one
hand those which, like the Shelter drawings made during the war, are
frankly graphic essays done with no thought of sculpture, and on the
other those which, in any technical sense, are the most unfinished
