State of the art book
Bryan Robertson
A WORLD HISTORY OF ART by Hugh Honour and John Fleming Lawrence & King, £19.95, pp. 766 THE VENETIAN HOURS OF HENRY JAMES, WHISTLER AND SARGENT by Hugh Honour and John Fleming Walker Books, £20, pp. 180 nly a relatively small number of people buy art books: even fewer read them. There is first the disagreeable dis- covery that the book you want is going to cost roughly as much as a ticket to Paris. Going for broke, you find that once the seductive illustrations are digested, the text is opaque or turgid or impossibly unctuous in tone. Few art historians are eloquent writers with broadly cultivated insights; the best that most of them can contrive is a precise but leaden prose which seldom rises above the narrow concerns of an academic treatise. Kenneth Clark did better than anyone long before his Civilisa- tion series in combining great learning, taste and judgment with a disarmingly clear prose style. As you read Landscape Into Art or The Nude for the first time, both books full of original ideas, you think to yourself, 'Yes, I always thought so' — but you didn't, of course: it is Clark's uncondescending good manners in presenting a fresh insight or a complex historical fact so simply that makes one sense something like a flash of recognition.
The reissue in a revised and expanded format of Honour and Fleming's prize- winning World History of Art at a bargain price is the best example in my lifetime, after the Civilisation series, of enlightened popularisation that also maintains the high- est standards of scholarship, information, and, in this case, book production. The enlightened team of Honour and Fleming has done magnificent work for years, either separately or in tandem; The Penguin Dic- tionary of Architecture was followed by the equally invaluable Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts, reissued in 1989; there are clearly informative, often innovatory, btioks
on Chinoiserie, Romanticism and Neo-
Classicism. Honour's Companion Guide to Venice has been hard to beat for many years. His pioneer study in the first volume of The Image of the Black in Western Art, a continuing survey, made history a few years ago. Unflashy, quietly industrious, guiding public taste rather than following fashion or the market, the work of these admirable art historians deserves a wider public, par- ticularly for their World History.
A few other art historians write well, of course, notably John Pope-Hennessy and Michael Levey; and Gombrich's The Story of Art is still a very good example of clearly written, intelligent popularisation. But the Honour/Fleming World History is conceived and presented on a far wider, grander and more detailed scale, from the early civilisa- tions of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the ancient Hittites, China, Assyria and Babylon, Iran, Zhou China, America and Africa through to the classical period in Greece, the Scythians and Etruscans, Iberia and Sardinia, Hindu and Buddhist art in India, China and Japan. In proper perspec- tive, for this is truly a World History; Romanesque and Gothic art in Europe do not appear until halfway through the book. The volume ends with a decently objective account of the 20th century, including photography.
The art of each era is related to social, religious, geographical and political factors; there are 1,151 illustrations which include 472 plates in colour (the quality of black and white illustrations is exceptionally good), 20 maps, 106 plans and 21 time- charts. The authors have actually seen and explored at first hand practically all the works of art, buildings or sites recorded in this history, which gives the text a special veracity at a time when for many art historians the tidy pliability of the colour- slide files too often seems preferable to the awkward revelations of the masterpiece in reality.
I wish that I could also enthuse over the same admirable team's newest publication covering Henry James, Whistler and Sargent in Venice. It is a nice idea, to construct a freshly informative edifice from an artful compilation of new essays on James, Sargent and Whistler, with four descriptive pieces by James reprinted from his Italian Hours, and reproductions of etchings and paintings by Whistler, water- colours and oils by Sargent, with a number of period photographs. But although the
essays are first-class in their use of historical detail, grasp of expatriate, pre- dominantly American society frequented by both artists as well as by James, and sharp critical judgments on the work of all three, the purple descriptions of Venice by James now seem luscious and over the top. Humble artisans and washerwomen are
seen but distanced, like figures on a stage
— this was before James used Venice more imaginatively and less directly, almost as
another personage, in The Aspern Papers and, wonderfully, in The Wings of the Dove. The interminable-seeming descriptions in
these earlier essays remind me of Glenway Westcott's comment on James, that some- times reading one of his endless sentences was like awaiting the arrival of a loved friend to dinner: eagerly anticipated, the appointed hour arrives; half an hour later you put all the food in the oven; an hour passes, with rising anxiety you pace up and down; hours later, just as you are about to telephone, there is a knock on the door and, upon opening it, there at last is your friend on the dciorstep — flanked by policemen.
The impact of the book is diminished by an insufferable physical daintiness in visual presentation — presumably designed to invoke a period flavour. But which period? Printed on shiny art paper throughout, the book looks like a series of articles drawn from an old Studio magazine of the early Twenties. Hairline rules neatly trap all the columns of type on each side on every page; hairline rules underline the headings on each page. Thick lines accompany the thin lines bordering the columns of type for the James essays. Thin lines divide the type columns on all the pages throughout the book. Some photographs are printed in dark blue ink, others are sepia-toned. A few are tilted on the page, resembling the insouciant style of montage in old movie magazines. The title page looks like the hand-lettered cover of an old photo album. The intelligence and scholarship of the authors and their additions to our knowledge of Venice manage to shine through this stylistic catafalque, but only just.
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