Phaidon Trio
Matthias Griinewald, By Joris Karl Huysmans. Raoul Dufy. By Marcel Brion. Edouard Mullet. By John Richardson. (Phaidon Press, 18s, 6d. each.)
THE Phaidon Press has launched an excellent new series, of medium-priced art books devoted to Modern Masters and certain Old Masters con- sidered particularly close to modern taste. With eighty well-chosen, good-size reproductions, a quarter of them in colour, these volumes give a very clear idea of the artist under discussion, especially when, like Grtinewald, he painted little. In this case, indeed, the result is virtually a com- plete edition of the painter's work. Eberhard Ruhmer's notes on the pictures will be useful, but I doubt whether the publishers were wise to reprint Huysmans's essays on Griinewald as a preface. Most great artists need a new inter- preter for each generation, and nobody could pretend that Grtinewald means the same today as he did in the Nineties. Nor is Marcel Brion's introduction to the Dufy ideal. M. Brion sensibly enough makes no great claims for Day, estab- lishing him for what he became—a charming and sophisticated petit maitre. He never attempts,. however, to answer what seems to me to be the crucial question of whether Dufy might not have reached higher and achieved more. He was talented enough, but the promise of pre-war work is never entirely fulfilled, and the mature art, delightful and assured though it is, still leaves one unsatisfied : Dufy's brand of neo-classicism is
hardly of the order of ..
,Stravinsky's or Picasso's 1 hope it's not just insular prejudice that makes me feel that John Richardson's Manet volume is the best of the three. Mr. Richardson, unlike the others, knows his audience, and he packs a remarkable amount of relevant comment and information into the text and notes. In doing so he provides us with by far the most satisfactory introduction to Manet's painting that has yet appeared in English.
ALAN BOWNESS
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