Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Year 1934. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> THE English are supreme among European nations in litera-ture and we pay the price for that by being of less conse-quence in pictorial art. Since the English character tends to express itself in words illustration rather than direct expression through formal relationships is the inevitable result. The Englishman confronted with a human being reads his character: he does not so naturally observe the architecture of his body. This makes him a great novelist and a lesser painter because he is deeply sensitive to just those qualities which are inessential and often dangerous to the visual arts. If Hogarth for example had been less of a novelist his aesthetic qualities would be much easier to recognize. As it is we must laboriously isolate them before we can really appreciate them. Again we are a moral-or at least a moralising-race. Puritan-ism is in our blood and it infects our art. Pictures for their own sake as things of sensuous beauty are “vanities;” as images of spiritual conceptions they are “idolatries.” These characteristics account indirectly for the two out-standing features of our art our aristocratic portraiture and our landscape. (SP)