SIGHT AND INSIGHT (191 pp.)Alexander EliotMcDowell, Obolensky ($3.50).
Art is communion. This idea binds together a sheaf of reflections on the nature, meanings, and ends of painting by TIME's Art Editor Alexander Eliot (Three Hundred Years of American Painting). Highly personal, aphoristic, poetic, Sight and Insight shuns critical pedantries in art to speak of bigger thingslife and death, God and man, the wisdom of children, the power of dreams, love, fate, and the human soul.
In approaching a masterpiece, show simple courtesy, suggests Author Eliot: let the painting speak first. This demands "a kind...