Writing About Art
THE ENGLISHNESS OF ENGLISH ART. By Nikolaus Pevsner. (Architectural Press, 16s.)
LORENZO LOTTO: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS. By Bernard Beren- son. (Phaidon Press, 63s.) RAPHAEL. By Adrian Stokes; SAMUEL PALMER. By Robert Melville. (The Faber Gallery, 12s. 6d. each.)
DR. pEVSNER'S Reith Lectures, in an expanded version, have been handsomely presented by the Architectural Press. Some of his critics have maintained that, in spite of his reservations, his refusal to be dogmatic or exclusive, or just because of that, he has been chasing a phantom and has fallen into a slough of inconsistencies. This is surely unfair both to the question posed by these broad- casts and to their author, but I believe nevertheless that the particular character of Dr. Pevsner's historical method and his own artistic interests have prevented him from making the most persuasive definition of the Englishness he sought to uncover. He is a historian of style and his lectures are founded upon that study, presented here in popular terms, and upon his shrewd assessment of English social and personal behaviour. This is, however, not the same thing as social history, and the peculiarities of English art, especially in the.-past 250 years of taste, can only be gauged when the two studies go hand in hand. Having expressed this general criticism and added to it a wish that his examination of English painting had been as consistently search- ing and personal as his view of our achitecture, I can give nothing but praise to a study which was valuable far beyond the limita- tions of its title.
The Phaidon edition of the complete work of the Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto also reminds us that the results of art historical research need not be unreadably presented, for it is based upon an early text by Bernard Berenson, first published in 1901 and now revised. This new edition was originally occasioned by the large Lotto exhibition of 1954 and it is not difficult to discover in the shifting strains and eccentricities of this artist's mannerism the reason for, his current popularity among scholars and connoisseurs. In the light of this revival and of the present conditions of art .history, Berenson's original text and the new introduction, as vivacious as the earlier, read all the more piquantly. 'I shall have recourse,' he writes, 'only when required by my purpose, to philological and antiquarian lore, seldom indulging in faintly irrelevant research for the fun of it.' How remarkable indeed is the quality and humanity of this man's judgement which can now, as fifty years ago, be appreciative of the characteristics which now give Lotto his popularity, the thinness, the two-dimensional of his forms, his tendency to 'hop about like the knight on the chess board' from one style to another, his inventiveness and originality as an illustrator but his inability in his compositions to transcend the illustrator's gift.
The long-established Faber Gallery has always been a pnzzling publishing enterprise. The quality of its colour reproductions has seldom been high-class and the choice of plates has sometimes seemed to frustrate the intentions or the enthusiasms of those who have written the brief texts. The present Raphael volume is confined to easel pictures and the Palmer contains two paintings which do little credit to his precious and limited genius. The series deserves most credit for having sponsored some excellent essays and the two under review are distinguished examples. M r. Stokes is one of the most individual and interesting of our writers on painting, sculpture and architecture; his essay is brilliantly suggestive. Mr. Melville /has not such an ability to reveal and explain an artist's formal powers but he is admirably responsive to the poetic undertones of any work and when, as in the case of Palmer, these are essential and complex he can be a most persuasive and sympathetic interpreter. Dr. van Puyvelde's account of the Van Eycks and the problem of their identity should com- mand +the respect of all but those who are professionally ranged against him in this intricate and somewhat tiresome problem, but the quality of the large plates is extremely variable, the worst
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