BOOKS

As a pukka art historian, Robert Rosenblum appears a little shamefaced, in his preface, about descending to doggies in art. It is rather as though Seve Ballesteros were caught playing clock golf at Margate.

Rosenblum is one of those art historians (most) other art historians treat with re- spect. He is up there with Gombrich, Wollheim, Pope-Hennessy and Hugh Hon- our. He has written with distinction on neo-classicism, transformations in 18th- century art, Ingres and Caspar David Friedrich.

Of course, Ballesteros would acquit him- self well in clock golf, and Rosenblum is quite equal to the dogs of art. But one's first thought is: perhaps this is a superior pot-boiler, a sort of Cruft's Gallery, dreamed up over a cosy lunch between author and publisher. Lord Clark, after all, stepped down from Civilization long enough to write a coffee-table book on Animals and Men: Their Relationship as Reflected in Western Art from Prehistory to the Present Day (1977) — though a potboil- er by Clark was better than most art historians' considered works.

But in fact Rosenblum's enterprise is closer to something Clark was planning in his last years but never got round to — a serious study of how distinct motifs are treated by different artists, across different centuries. For 'motif' here read `mastiff: if Rosenblum could have found an Altdorfer of a Rottweiler, or a Le Sidaner of a Weimeraner, he would have been pleased as Toby. The dog in art is a subject of great kitsch potential — as Murray's have ack- nowledged by putting a piano-playing pup on the jacket (as opposed to his fiddle- Playing cousin, Airedale on a G-string). There is a corresponding temptation to write a kitsch review; but I have promised myself never once to say 'I have a small bone to pick with Dr Rosenblum.' A lot can be said for looking at art by isolating a theme — scoring with a single well-aimed shot rather than by scatter firing. This method parallels the historian's `sinking a shaft in history' by studying, say, the vicissitudes of one household or dynas- ty. The Lisle Letters edited by Muriel St Clare Byrne illuminate Tudor history better than any rambling chronicler. In A Writer's Notes on his Trade (1930), C. E. Montague recommended the same approach to litera- ture: one was to know a few writers well, rather than several indifferently. (`You may take a very small holding on the slopes of Parnassus, or you may get shooting rights over the whole of the mountain. But there is no getting both.') The most reveal- ing application of the principle to art

A painter's best friend

Bevis Hillier

THE DOG IN ART FROM ROCOCO TO POST-MODERNISM by Robert Rosenblum

John Murray, £15.95, pp.119

History so far has been T. H. Clarke's grandly obsessional The Rhinoceros from Durer to Stubbs, 1515-1799.

Rosenblum very successfully shows how dogs in art have represented prevailing styles. In this he is aided by his own style, which at its best rivals Berenson's and Lord Clark's. Here is Rosenblum on romantic- ism in dog art, specifically on James Ward's portrait of a poodle named Buff, a work which bears the super-romantic date 1812: 'Isn't that just typical? You wail half the day . .

. . . this artificially trimmed pet, with its pompon tail and restraining collar, is set free in total isolation upon a remote precipice overlooking an agitated sea and a horizon of infinite expanse. Were the dog a human player, he might well be cast in the role of Byron's Manfred standing on the Jungfrau • . . Ward's poodle, his eyes staring theatri- cally into the abyss, his ears swept back by the wind, his legs assuming an agitated but steadfast stance, is the very image of a Byronic hero.

It is hard to evade the bathos of this: we suddenly remember. with a gurgle of sup- pressed mirth, that the exalted passage refers to a poodle. At least a third of Rosenblum's illustrations would qualify for an anthology of roaring kitsch; you begin to think he has gone out of his way to choose the campest examples. Quite apart from the piano-playing spaniel by Philip Reinagle (1805), we have Clodion's `Mausoleum for Ninette' (I wouldn't like to let Dr Spooner loose on that) with begging terracotta lapdogs somehow managing to hold smoking torches with their hind legs; an unequivocal sculpture of 'Dog Defecat- ing' (c.1880, but does it matter?) by Adriano Cecioni; Robert Alexander's 'The Happy Mother', awash with winsome balls of fluff; Francis Barraud's 'His Master's Voice' and a French optician's sign bearing the pun '0 PTI CIEN'. Then there is a sculpture which even Ruskin, who special- ised in denunciation, considered 'the most perfectly and roundly ill-done thing . . . which I ever saw produced in art' Matthew Cotes Wyatt's 'The Faithful Friend of Man Trampling Underfoot His Most Insidious Enemy' (a dog stamping on a serpent, itself 'in part a pragmatic addi- tion, intended to secure support of Bashaw's weighty marble belly'). Bow- wows that daddy definitely wouldn't buy you. Dogs invite sentimentality — G. K. Chesterton said we should not treat the dog as if he were spelt backwards. Briton Riviere's `Requiescar — a blubbering bloodhound watching over his dead mas- ter, a knight in silver armour — is a world-beater of mawkishness. And of course Landseer is well represented. `So potent were the artist's icons of Newfound- lands that the black-and-white variety he depicted came to be called a "Landseer".'

But the masterpieces of dog art are here too, and Rosenblum does justice to them in pictures and words — though some may think him perverse in preferring Goya's 'A Dog', presumably for its modernist, ab- stract quality, to Turner's glorious 'Dawn after the Wreck'. The dog in Turner's painting is utterly unsentimental — rather like the silhouette of a baby crocodile — though Ruskin could see it as 'exhausted, its limbs failing under it, and sinking into the sand . . . howling and shivering'. Rosenblum shows a masterful chalk draw- ing by Lautrec of the bulldog Bouboule, who was said closely to resemble his (Bouboule's) mistress Mme Palmyre, the proprietor of a well-known lesbian res- taurant. Those who visited the Lautrec exhibition at the Royal Academy earlier this year will know how many more equally superb drawings and lithographs of dogs by Lautrec could have been added. By a lucky coincidence, both Manet and Renoir painted the same dog, a Japanese Chin owned by Henri Cernuschi, an early collec- tor of Far Eastern art. Renoir almost dissolves the dog in feathery brushwork; in Manet's painting, both the brush-strokes and the dog are more challenging. For Rosenblum, Manet's dog is 'palpable'; Renoir's 'sweetly evaporates'.

There are lots and lots of dogs in art. To cut down the numbers to manageable proportions, Rosenblum rather ruthlessly decided to limit himself to 'works that focused on dogs alone, permitting people to appear, if at all, only in secondary roles,' for example at the invisible end of a leash. This self-denying ordinance has deprived him of some of the most enjoyable paint- ings of dogs — the one curled up with the pots in Goya's 'El Cacherrero' (The Crock- ery Seller); that held by a servant-girl in Giacomo Ceruti's 'Woman with a Dog'; that with the huntsman in Adriaen Beelde- maker's `De Jager' in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and that in Scott Prior's 'Nan- ny and Rose' in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. But for the 'people not allowed' rule, Cecioni's 'Defecating Dog' statue could have been contrasted with the bizar-

re and equally inexplicable defecating dog in Adam Pynacker's 'Landscape with Sportsmen and Game' in the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Even accepting Rosenblum's terms, there are some dogs on their own that one would have liked to see included. As so often in a book with pretensions to univer- sality, no oriental artist is illustrated: an engaging candidate would have been the 'Puppy with a Feather' by the Li Dynasty Korean artist Yi Om (Tusongkyong) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And three European examples I would have found irresistible are: Jan Brueghel's studies of dogs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; James Ward's 'Spaniel', Art Gal- lery of South Australia; and (allowing some artistic licence — well, dog licence anyway) 'Dogs in a Thicket' from 'The Unicorn Defends Himself' in the Flemish Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry (Metropoli- tan Museum of Art, New York).

Rosenblum is rather less knowledgeable on dogs than on art. A little expert advice about the breeds would have enhanced the book's authority. For example, in writing about George Stubbs' White Poodle in a Punt' (c.1790), Rosenblum, using a ghastly verb which occurs three times in the book, says: 'We intuit that the animal, its four feet resting on a floating boat rather than on secure soil, is anxious about its tempor- ary helplessness.' Well, here his intuition serves him ill: a glance at the Encyclo- paedia Britannica would have taught him that 'The poodle was developed as a water retriever, and the distinctive clipping of its heavy coat was initiated to increase the animal's efficiency in the water.' Has Dr Rosenblum never heard the expression 'He took to it like a poodle to water'?

'Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog 'by Philip Reinagle, 1805 (Paul Mellon Collection)

Rosenblum is just fine as long as he keeps to pre-20th-century works. Once he starts writing about modern art, he is . . . I hesitate to use the term 'barking mad', since this is a collective frenzy, one of those delusions, like the belief in witch- craft in earlier centuries, which affect large numbers of people. Sometimes he just goes through the weary motions of contempor- ary art criticism, like a dog retrieving a plastic frisbee for the umpteenth time. So, in the case of Klee's 'She Howls, We Play' (I would like to rename it 'She Plays, We Howl'), we have to hear about the artist's 'magically vibrant ground of disembodied colour' (read: red smudges) and about 'the same light touch mixed with profound empathy that characterises all his work'. Rosenblum adds, apparently without a smidgen of irony, 'Klee's titles are often essential clues to understanding what we see.' I wonder what Klee's interpretation of 'Dignity and Impudence' would have been: a large coloured grid beside a small coloured grid, perhaps? Andy Warhol's portrait of his miniature dachshund Amos is 'overlaid with phantom shadows, dou- bled contours, and synthetic colour tints that produce a haunting, almost Bacones- que afterimage'. (John Richardson, quoted by Rosenblum, said that Warhol's dachs- hunds were 'the only living things to share his bed'.) To Rosenblum, Duane Hanson's 'Beagle in a Basket' — the title alone sounds like some particularly nauseating fast food — isolates 'a cluster of ugly and unhappy facts about American life'.

But for real pedigree poop, listen to Rosenblum on Neil Winokur's ineffably silly triptych 'Nero': To the left and right of the sitter are two attributes, favourite chewy rubber toys in the form of a lamb chop and a lady's foot, both of whose red calligraphic accents elegantly match Nero's thin collar while offering a trickle of animation against the grounds of solid colour rectangles that Winokur uses as a foil to his sitters and their attributes.

The late Barbara Woodhouse was once asked by a television interviewer whether she had ever applied her dog-training methods to humans. Yes, she had. 'I was in a non-smoking carriage on the under- ground. Opposite me were three youths, i all smoking. I said: "Put it out!" "Put it out!" "Put it out!" [waggling a minatory finger] — and they did!'

Dr Rosenblum, too, is moving on from dogs to young humans. He is, reportedly, working on a book about The Child in Art. This news has provoked the art critic Peter Fuller to ask: 'What next? The Christmas Pudding in Art?' Well, why not? Provided not too many puds have been painted by Lichtenstein and Warhol, I would trust Rosenblum to draw out the profounder implications of the apparently trivial sub- ject. It will be more plum than duff, and just think how well it will go down with the Christmas market. Reach for your chequebook, Lord Weidenfeld.