Art: New History

Most students agree that Victorian histories of art are as distorted as early maps which were drawn as if the earth were flat. A half century’s discoveries in archeology, anthropology and the psychology of esthetics have demonstrated that the world of Art is round, big, and far more comprehensive than the area bounded by the Greeks at one end and grandfather’s favorite engravings at the other. The remarkable History of Art of Elie Faure, who died fortnight ago, actually a long, interpretative essay, left still undone the work of writing a factual history of art from an enlightened, modern point of view. This week a large, clear book by Critic Sheldon Cheney* seemed to fill the bill.

Unlike another recent art historian, Hendrik Willem van Loon (TIME, Oct. 4), Critic Cheney has stuck to the visual arts and has in fact written about them, not confining himself to their “background.”‘ Showing a desirable respect for his material, he has also illustrated his book with nearly 500 reproductions of works of art, rather than with sketches of his own. The Cheney history has positive virtues of completeness, modesty and readability, avoids alike the arrogance of parochial “moderns” and the bluster of hidebound conservatives.

New regions by which the art map has been enlarged are geographic—Chinese, Japanese and Indian art; and temporal— the prehistoric art of the cave dwellers, the Sumerians, Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians. These Author Cheney illuminates at length, scrupulously giving facts, interpretation and speculation for what they are worth. In this perspective, European art and artists assume new proportions and come under new categories. Reasons appear for praising El Greco more than Botticelli and Raphael. But though Author Cheney thus revaluates Western art by a universal standard of “formal values,” he recognizes the greatness of illustrative, objective art. By the time a reader arrives after 900 pages at Matisse and Derain, Braque and Picasso, he neither needs nor is given any disproportionate talk on these artists.

—A WORLD HISTORY OF ART—Viking ($5). Scribner’s ($7.50).