Jawlensky: Heads, Faces, Meditations by Clemens WeilerReview by: OTTILIE TOLANSKYJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 120, No. 5192 (JULY 1972), pp. 545-546Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41370904 .

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JULY I972 NOTES ON BOOKS

The Age of Illusion: Manners and Morals 1750-1848 By James Laver Londoni Weidenfeld and Nicolson , 1972. £3.00 net 'Stark insensibility!' Dr. Johnson's bark rever- berates across the years, and although he was not applying the words to the age in which he lived, how apt they are to it. For it was one which was blind to suffering, or, if not blind, indifferent. Food was elaborate, dress ridiculous, sport cruel, punishment unreasonable, and what graceful but beastly people so many of Mr. Laver's chief characters seem. French, English, or any other nationality, they seem as a whole quite unworthy of their best writers, architects, musicians and thinkers. This, of course, is so in every era, but the gap seems wider in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century than in almost any other.

Mr. Laver styles an arbitrarily chosen ninety- eight years an age of 'illusion'. This brings the reader up against the problem of how this key word should be defined. It is one about which Johnson took trouble, so it is worth turning to his great Dictionary, still a guide to the under- standing of his time, to see how he has it. 'Mockery; false show; counterfeit appearance; errour.' It is 'errour' that we seem to stress to-day, but of mockery and the rest there is plenty in Mr. Laver's pages, and very amusing it sometimes is.

Nothing could be more pleasant than to put together an anthology of the extravagancies of any given period, particularly one in which such a mass of good graphic material is available, and Mr. Laver has indulged himself freely, em- phasizing that it was from France that the lead generally came. Moreover, he is extremely com- prehensive, though he does not allow himself space for treatment in depth. His chapters are given to Society and Religion (and he is specially good on the Wesleys, and the Anglican Church in general) ; he continues with Crime and Punishment; Sports and Pastimes; Coffee Houses and Clubs; 'Taking the Waters'; The Pursuit of Love, and then proceeds through various other topics such as gastronomy, and through miniature portraits of a number of out- standing characters like Philippe d'Orléans, to Romanticism and Revolution as it came upon Europe in the 1840s. As the New World, and its effect on the Old, is also included, it becomes clear that the author has tried to squeeze a library's worth into a modest book.

As a causerie, it is well done, and a brilliant surface is delightfully captured. Stories like that of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace and the storming of the Bastille are re-told with verve, but although he will have learnt much, a reader will not put the book down with the conviction that any single theme has been ex- ploited, even succinctly, very far. As an intro-

duction to the diversions of an era, it has much to recommend it, since it is scholarly and civilized in tone. For more profound reflections, it is necessary to turn elsewhere, and Mr. Laver gives every help to the student through his valuable bibliographies.

OLIVER WARNER

Jawlensky: Heads, Faces, Meditations By Clemens Weiler London^ Pall Mall Press , 1971. £15 net This interesting publication looks at the life and work of Alexej Jawlensky (1864-1941) in the context of the artist's own directive to himself. As one of the four founders in 1909 of the movement known as the 'Neue Künstler- vereinigung' - significant because it later gave birth to the 'Blaue Reiter' - Jawlensky played an important part in his lifetime, gaining the respect and admiration of such brilliant con- temporaries as Hodler, Klee and Kandinsky. A selected bibliography pays tribute to his work, but Clemens Weiler, Director of the Museum in Wiesbaden (where Jawlensky lived from 1921 until his death), here presents Jawlensky's artistic development in the light of his place in twentieth-century art, stressing its unique singularity of purpose and the purity and circumspection with which Jawlensky ap- proached his work. The exceptionally beautiful reproductions of paintings loaned by museums and galleries carry the artist's comments, which are drawn from his memoirs and published here for the first time. They are of particular value as, unlike Klee and Kandinsky, Jawlensky produced no theoretical writings. A selection from letters and comments of friends is also published in this volume. The whole makes fascinating reading, revealing a deeply religious experience realized through painting. Jawlensky has written of his work 'Kunst ist Sehnsucht zu Gott' - Art is a longing for God. In the light of this conviction, his artistic aims crystallize to one theme above all, the human face, in which he found the best means of expression for his Eastern piety and mysticism.

Jawlensky was born in Russia of the Russian nobility but moved to Munich as a young man. There he came under the influence of Expres- sionism, which was sweeping Central Europe before and after the First World War in an intense and all-embracing movement. Though Jawlensky's work can be put into the general context of this movement, it is entitled to separate consideration, innocent as it is of the more savagely angular, highly emotional style of the Expressionists with their sense of tragic unease and despair. Purity of form and emphasis

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS JULY 1972

on colour, upon which he seized (in his own words) 'with a lover's passion', characterize his work, in the development of which he made use of the stylistic means current in his time, from Expressionism to Cubism to Constructivism. In this last discipline he found the simplification he needed for the formal elements of the human head and an intensified means of expression for his increasing awareness of the spirituality of colour and form.

Jawlensky had many contacts with other artists during his life, and his memoirs and letters speak of his friendships and travels to and from Russia with a simple candour and innocent warmth of heart. And yet his nature was essentially solitary and mystical. This mystical spiritual element reached its culmination in the last ten years of his life when, though tragically crippled by arthritis, he painted the series of small panels he called the Meditations. In these the severity of the Constructivist heads has given way to a less rigid formula and the earlier full-bloodedness of colour is reduced to glowing modulations which seem to radiate light as in the stained glass windows of a fchurch. Jawlensky had arrived at a modern ikon, a religious meditative image more necessary and valid to-day than ever. The present book is surely a welcome and civilizing reminder of this.

OTTILIE TOLANSKY

Geometry in Pictorial Composition By Brian Thomas Newcastle upon Tyne3 Oriel Press , 197/. £ 3 net Anatomy for Artists By Reginald Marsh New York , Dover Publications , 1971. London , Constable i £1.75 Geometry, like statistics, can, it would appear, prove anything. Take almost any painting, ancient or modern, and I guarantee that it would be possible to superimpose some simple geo- metric shape on it, thereby proving the artist's knowledge of mathematics.

I am one of those referred to in the introduc- tion to Geometry in Pictorial Composition. Here, in the second paragraph, Brian Thomas writes : 'Many people, including a number of living painters, believe that any geometry that may be detected occurred unconsciously as part of artists' natural instinct for design.' I am pre- pared to agree that some of these artists, being architects or mathematically disposed at a level similar to that of the house decorator, may have regularized the compositional aids discovered fortuitously. Also, I am prepared to go along with him when he criticizes modern theorists

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RAY RUSHTON I art is well and truly buried.

who have ťpropunded geometrical frameworks of fantastic complexity', although here again many of the Renaissance artists, who are his main source of inspiration, flushed with the intellectualism of their age would have been capable of the effort required.

So, while prepared to admit that the author in his compromise approach has a good, if rather obvious, thesis, I am afraid his equilateral triangles, squares, rectangles, diagonals, radiat- ing lines, circles and ellipses, seem too arbitrary for conviction. Every portrait painted, for example, can be made to fit a triangle; taking into account the conventions in figure-placing in Christian paintings, the result compositionally was almost always of this form. Equivalent reasons can be found for almost every other shape and, if one cannot place these construc- tions on a particular work of art, then one looks around until such a work is found. There is plenty of choice.

All order is, I suppose, mathematical, which is why the subject came into being in the first place. That which is involved in the ordering of a piece of art work is no exception. To labour the point is a little like proving that the pigment is oil, tempera or watercolour.

The Renaissance, with its overall humanizing influences, in its art also laid great stress on the figure, taking up avidly the mens sana in corpore sano attitude of the ancient Greeks and having done with the 'flayed image', body-hating, spirit-finding, other-worldliness of the Middle Ages. Small wonder, then, that Reginald Marsh writes in the preface to this paperback reprint of his Anatomy for Artists (and, incidentally, the only piece of prose other than captions in the whole 210 pages) that artists of the Renaissance have never been surpassed for life painting and drawing and indeed hardly challenged - citing impressively, if not originally, Leonardo, Man- tegna, Dürer, Michelangelo, Raphael, Tinto- retto, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt. 'Strangely enough', he writes, 'in spite of the advance in medical anatomical knowledge since the Renais- sance, the art of drawing and the use of anatomy has declined'. This is not very strange really, as in the period of decline in Renaissance inspira- tion the body is becoming, once again, of lesser importance than the mind, and a new mysticism is being born, which began with psychology and the Dada- Surrealist movement, a movement which has won new popularity of late.

But to move on to the book itself, Anatomy for Artists is the reproduction of an artist's sketchbook on the subject, split for convenience into sections headed Front, Side, Back, Head, Arms-Hands, Legs-Feet, Proportions, and end- ing with a section of life sketches in pen and ink line. This is a book which has proved its usefulness over the years from 1945. It will go on proving its usefulness until what is a dying

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