Outline of Art*
MEN OF ART—Thomas Craven—Simon & Schuster ($3).†
¶ "We can easily imagine what the old Florentines, renowned and feared for their sharp tongues and fierce wits, might have said on seeing their beloved city besmirched with a mob of insolent Black Shirts, and how the masters of art, accustomed to designing banners, uniforms and all sorts of processional devices, would have sneered at so stupid and colorless an emblem as that worn by the followers of Mussolini. . . . Florence is still one of the fairest cities on earth . . . but she is, as we say, a dead town, without spirit, imagination or courage."
¶ "To the outside world Spain is the only country in Christendom that has devoted herself, at the cost of everything that is modern, decent and enlightened, to the preservation of her romantic soul."
¶. "Yet the long reign of George III embraces all the great names in the history of British art; and after this astonishing fruition of national genius, there is no more painting of importance."
¶. "Matisse, growing old, turns out pretty sentiments for the American trade; and Picasso, to judge by his prize-winning exhibit at the Carnegie Institute, is a candidate for the Academy. The present condition of French painting is not one to make the heart rejoice."
Such provocative statements speckle almost every page of Thomas Craven's philosophy of painting which the Book-of-the-Month Club this month offers its lodge members. Lay readers should not be discouraged; if Mr. Craven's conclusions are sometimes questionable his book—useful as a reference work in any library—always holds the attention, stirs the imagination.
Mr. Craven's method is to trace the development of painting by a series of critical and biographical sketches of great painters, applying continually his test for true art: vitality, gusto, a passion to interpret life. It is as good a standard as any other but leads inevitably to the conclusion that lusty Rubens was one of the greatest artists who ever lived; and that patrician Velasquez, who "painted the King's face in precisely the same spirit as his modern kinsman Monet painted haystacks," was little more than an expert technician. The 500 pages of the book are a learned sausage stuffed with much meat. Author Craven has spent three years writing it, studied original sources all over Europe to prove his points.
The Author, Thomas Craven, 42, is a red-haired Kansan, as unassuming in private conversation as he is dogmatic on the printed page. He has been a reporter in Denver, a schoolmaster in California and Porto Rico, a deckhand in the West Indies, an unsuccessful painter and poet. His essay, "Have Painters Minds?" in the American Mercury for March 1927, brought him into contact with such critical bigwigs as Britain's Roger Fry, France's Elie Faure. Today the entire U. S. art world pays attention to him.
Further Adventures of Clim
THE MAGNET—Maxim Gorki—Cape & Smith ($3).
For a country that officially does not exist (to the U. S.), Soviet Russia is doing pretty well in gross tonnage of literary exports. Maxim Gorki's latest (839 pages) ups the total by at least a couple of pounds. A continuation of Bystander (TIME, April 14, 1930), The Magnet carries the story of Clim Samghin, myopic Russian intellectual, a few hundred thousand words nearer its goal.
But Clim is only a peg, and a square one at that, through whose uneven peregrinations up and down the cribbage board of pre-War Russia you are made aware of the extent of the scene, the background vastness of Russian life. Clim never wanders far from Moscow nor from his self-interested, skeptical observer's viewpoint, but the scores of characters that throng the story come from many outskirts, are of every tinge of political conviction, agnosticism or despair. Clim's history winds through real events, from the coronation of the late Tsar through the Russo-Japanese War to the Bloody Sunday (Jan. 22, 1905) in St. Petersburg—the dress-rehearsal for the 1917 Revolution. Recognizably real figures hover on the edges of the action: Lenin, Trotzky; you hear Feodor Ivanovitch Chaliapin's mighty bass lifted in revolutionary song in a Moscow restaurant.
Through everything Clim makes his cold and dubious way: the university, journalism, a law office. He marries Varvara, mainly for intellectual reasons, and cares very little when her love is chilled into seeking warmth elsewhere. Clim is really a parlor liberal, but even parlor liberals were looked at askance in Tsarist Russia, and he several times runs foul of the police, once goes to jail. Not from any excessive love for his fellow-man but because he has a head on his shoulders Clim begins to side with the revolutionaries. No longer just a bystander, he begins to feel the pull of the unseen magnet sweeping over Russia.
The Author, Consumptive, gaunt Maxim Gorki (Alicksei Maximovitch Pieshkov) has survived 63 years in spite of his disease, in spite of one attempt to commit suicide. A bystander like his hero, he took no part in the Revolution but is in good odor with the Soviet Government. Plain Russian Communists like him (although he spends nine months a year at his Italian villa) and have bought over 2,000,000 copies of his books in the last four years. Speaking no English, he does not know the phrase "moral turpitude," but on his single visit to the U. S (in 1906) he met many a chilly shoulder because the lady he was seen with was not his wife.
Super-Thriller
THE GLASS KEY—Dashiell Hammett— Knopf ($2).
Out of the glassy sea of crime fiction this book bursts up like a breaching sea-serpent. . . . If you have a sneaking suspicion that the general run of detective stones are drab, mechanical, unconvincing —in short, not so well done as they might be—read The Glass Key and have your suspicion confirmed. Defenders of the old-line detective story might object that The Glass Key is less a detective than a crime story. But whether you are a squeamish voyager among books or so hardened that the roaring forties seem like the doldrums, this book will be a portent and a welcome one.