13 JANUARY 1950, Page 26

SHORTER NOTICES

Gauguin. Introduction and Notes by Herbert Read. Venetian Paintings. Introduction and Notes by W. G. Constable. (The Faber Gallery.

THE best of this bunch of coloured books, and a welcome addition to anyone's library if not to his bookshelf, is the Gauguin collection. A uniformly high technical standard is achieved, several of the pictures are not easily available elsewhere and the selection well represents the artist's development. Dr. Read, who introduces it, insists, with the support of an excellent paragraph from the more painterly and now undervalued hand of Sir Charles Holmes, that Gauguin is an artist not to be lightly dismissed ; it is interesting that this point should still be worth making, as it certainly is. Professor Vogelsang begin his by no means lyrical introduction with the remark that " in its fullest sense the fifteenth century belongs to the people of Flanders." A statement precisely contrary would perhaps be as true ; at all events the articulation of colour which was peculiarly the fifteenth century's gift to painting is to seek in this picture by van der Weyden. Colour is the least essential of its elements, and the reproductions are proportionately unrevealing. Moreover it is clear that the mechanical process used is not so reliable as to dispense with the need of retouching. In the third plate, for example, the red has received crude and ill-drawn reinforcement ; in such cases it is difficult to see that the ambitious reproductions of the present time offer, as objects of aesthetic contemplation, any improvement of the methods of forty years ago. Several of the plates in the collection of Venetian Paintings have, in fact, a thoroughly antiquated look. The text appears to offer authoritative guidance to the history of Venetian painting. But when we read that Bellini's Rimini Pieta is generally accepted as having been painted for Sigismondo and find the old view of the " Sacred Conversation," which has been demolished by Rasmo, repeated at length, it seems safer to abandon the guide and strike out on our own. This book does not show the Faber Gallery at its happiest.