Malcolm Cormack on alphabetical art
The editor has taken trouble to emphasise that the new Companion to Art has been de- signed as a non-specialist introduction to the fine arts in the narrow sense of painting and sculpture while the theatre, cinema, arts and crafts and the dance have been excluded. Even so, he has done well to produce one volume of nearly 1,300 pages and over 3,000 entries, when one considers that the standard artists' dictionary, Thieme-Becker, runs to thirty-seven volumes and its twentieth-cen- tury extension and Vollmer, to a further six. The Encyclopaedia of World Art with which the Oxford Companion may be compared is much larger. Peter and Linda Murray's pro- vocative Penguin and its newer, grander for mat are not quite the same sort of thing either; they are much chattier and occasion- ally more thorough. Standards of thorough- ness vary in both books, but they do tend to shy away from awesome concepts like Christ, which the Oxford Companion boldly tackles, and by extension aspects of His Life, the Church, and the Harrowing of Hell. Some- how the Companion attempts to combine an iconographic dictionary with a glossary of art terms, with entries for individual artists in a comforting Oxford reference format.
It has been a long time gestating. Some of the articles were written long ago, though some have obviously been brought up to date, for example the entries on Poussin, Pollock and Pop Art. The list of contributors is im- pressive, and includes a number of younger art historians of repute in England and Amer- ica. It glories, however, in rather old-fash- ioned articles on national styles, such as French art, German art, but not Swiss art —Harry Lime was right—and with an eye to the English-speaking market devotes a good deal of attention to Australian, New Zealand, American and Canadian art and perhaps more than they deserve to their minor exponents. It is not above daring to
risk value judgments, again in a rather old- fashioned way, on individual artists such as the late Dame Laura Knight, whose work 'was extremely competent by academic standards of technique but was judged to be lacking in aesthetic taste and sensibility', Poor Dame Laura. Like all good dictiona- ries, it leads us into fascinating highways and byways of art, with juxtapositions of Kit- cat Club, Kitsch and Kiyonaga.
As it is there for the plundering, it will doubtless be castigated by those who think, for example, that Kupka should have an entry devoted to himself, when, after all, he is justifiably represented in the section de- voted to the development of Abstract Art, or that to write the particular seven lines on Christen Kobke (1810-1848) was a desperate irrelevance. Nevertheless, the present Com- panion is useful to more than the mythical general reader. The sections on perspective, colour (for which the only colour plates are nicely reserved), the conservation of paint- ings, photography and art, for example, and individual entries, short and long, like Frag- onard, Reynolds and Constable are masterly. The Companion's safe rather impersonal manner provides the essential facts about most things that one looks up, and is parti- cularly useful when approaching a subject for the first time. The bibliography of nearly 3,000 items is conveniently at the end to lead one further, and only occasionally could it have been larger to include something at least on the more obscure artists. The illustrations are few and obviously could have been ex- panded at much greater cost, but what there are, are often curious and illuminating. It is unfair to compare the Oxford Companion with major works but for those without major library space, it would make a welcome addition to the countless shelves where the Concise Oxford Dictionary and other basic reference works already stand,
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