PRINTS
Six Centuries of Fine Prints. By Carl Zigross:r. (Williams and
Norgate. 21s.) • •- • —7 7'
The English Print. By Basil Gray. (Black. 7s. 6d.) —
ONE of these book's is American and the other is English,
and neither could be more typical of the art criticism practised in the country which produced it.
Mr. Zigrosser's book is a volume with many plates and no footnotes. It gets. through the whole history of engraving in Europe in less thin zoo pages, giving the reader a great deal of information and amusement in the process: From its form it can clearly not be either very' thorough or very systematic, but ''it is instead readable -and interesting. The author tells us a lot about technical processes, about the per- sonalities of the artists, about the part which engraving played in the artistic life of any period, about prints as records of manners, and so on. If he gets bored with the matter in hand he has no scruples about going off into a little story suggested by the subject of some print which he is describing, but in so doing he usually manages to get some useful tip across. It is to be regretted, though it is no cause for surprise, that there should be a certain number of mistakes throughout the book ; some of chronology, such as calling the seventeenth century the SetteCento, and putting Elsheither apparently after Claude; others of different kinds, such as at least one doubtful piece of French grammar and prosody. But these are not fatal in a book of this kind which is valuable as a good general account of the subject. From this point of view it has the great advantage that it goes right up to the present day and includes a representative group of illustrations including abstract and superrealist art. There is also a chapter on oriental prints which is too short to add much to the value of the book as a whole.
Mr. Gray writes from a very different point of view. He keeps always to the point, and his approach is always that of a serious student who is anxious to convey as much accurate information as possible in the minimum space. Not that the book is a 'mass or facts. On the contrary, one of its curious features is that it is a mixture of extremely objective history and of highly personal aesthetic judgements. Mr. Gray has avoided one great temptation which threatens all those who write about prints, namely to deal only with those who have considered engraving as a pure art process and to neglect the commercial aspects of the question. 'Mr. Gray treats equally of both traditions, and while he shows how far they were sometimes separated he describes the contribution which each made to the advancement of the technique of engraving. The book is not intended, like Mr. Zigrosser's, to be a fully illustrated handbook, but the 24 collotypes are chosen with care to explain the text, and they include many examples rarely
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