International studio (42.1910)

Holiday Art Books

From "Romanesque Architecture"

PARMA CATHEDRAL, ITALY

lives among such surroundings. "Of these how
many," he asks, "can we attract to our museums
and art exhibitions, except on rare occasions and
with a somewhat wearied desire to acquire a taste
for art from which nearly every element of their
lives or past ancestry has kept them, as from a thing
apart, the concern of a few?"

Prof. John C. Van Dyke, in his crisp and virile
little book, "What is Art?" (Charles Scribner's
Sons), views the matter of our general art interest
from a different standpoint and draws with some
heat a different picture. The thing that troubles
Professor Van Dyke is not a lack of interest, but
what he conceives to be a misdirection of that use-
ful quality. "Was there ever before such a pother
about art?" he asks—"and most of it about some-
body else's art."

His final chapter, "Art Appreciation," reminds
one of the pithy abjuration of Europe given cur-
rency by the late Frederic Remington. Of "the
unending discussion and gossip about Renaissance
art" he writes:

"It spreads from the antique shop and the deal-
er's store to the drawing room and the dinner table;
it floats in from the museum and the lecture plat-
form; it breaks out in the daily press and the
monthly magazines and it is served up at the clubs
and the theaters. Critics and connoisseurs give ap-
preciations of it before pink-tea audiences, mu-
seums give exhibitions of it, auction rooms and
dealers' shops have sales of it. Every one is afraid
some fine shade of it will get away unseen or unf elt.
In the summer season thousands of our people
study it in the Vatican, absorb it in the churches
and chase it through the galleries of Italy. What
eyes they have for old palaces with towers askew,

xxvrn

From "Rosa Bonhetcr." Copyright by D. Applcton fe3 Co.

STUDY OF A BULL, BY ROSA BONHEUR

for sagging bridges and wharves, for quaint door
knockers and picturesque chimney pots ! They re-
vere antiquity and have a standing quarrel with the
native because he does not do likewise. The Ro-
man who wishes to improve the city where he lives
and objects to its being regarded as a mere museum,
and he, himself, as a mummy in a glass case, is said
to be a savage, a descendant of the old invading
Goths; the Venetian who wants a little more
rapid transit than a gondola affords, and puts a
motor boat on the Grand Canal, is an unspeakable
degenerate. What better could either or any of
them do than live for the past? What right has
Italy with such a history to be modern?"

Professor Van Dyke is caustic, sarcastic, yet emi-
nently sane. His book should do us all good.

Ernest A. Batchelder presents in "Design in
Theory and Practice" (The Macmillan Company)
a discussion of esthetic principles addressed pri-
marily to art workers, and therein perhaps of the
more value to the general reader. The book is
thoroughly illustrated with detailed drawings and
diagrams pointing up the text. Though the author
reiterates the old saw that as to art we are a young
country without traditions—a notion which it is
high time some one should candidly examine and
explode—his theories are based on sound study and
he writes with the directness of an active worker.
His diagnosis of our general ailment is a plea for
experience which shall be more practical. He says:

"In our study of design to-day we turn to the
studio for traditions rather than to the shop. We
approach the subject from a point of view diametri-
cally opposed to the development of design in its
periods of finest production. We begin by draw-
ing, painting and modeling; we accumulate studies