Volume 35, Number 15 · October 13, 1988
Portrait of the Artist
By William H. Gass
Painting as an Art
by Richard Wollheim
Princeton University Press, 384 pp., $45.00
The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were inaugurated by Jacques Maritain in 1952, and in subsequent years, Kenneth Clark, Herbert Read, Etienne Gilson, E.H. Gombrich, and Siegfried Giedion gave public talks at the National Gallery which, expanded and rewritten for publication in the Bollingen Series, made significant theoretical and historical contributions to the understanding of the arts and their interrelations. During the decades that followed, many important figures in the field gave their best to these presentations, and the set for 1984, which Richard Wollheim was asked to give, has now been published. It is one of the more accomplished volumes, not only in its philosophical elegance, clarity, and grip, and in its apt selection of illustrations, but also in the provocative and revelatory quality of the text when it turns to particular works, although a reader unfamiliar with contemporary philosophical discourse may find this characterization difficult to apply, since the argument of the text is dense, continuous, and often technical. One can find something to question and contend in nearly every line—a circumstance which leads to the best sort of intellectual exchange.
Review, 7713 words
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