Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
A Magical Critic
By Frances A. Yates
Form and Meaning: Essays on the Renaissance and Modern Art
by Robert Klein, translated by Madeline Jay, by Leon Wieseltier, with a foreword by Henri Zerner
Viking, 263 pp., $19.95
Robert Klein was a Rumanian Jew, born in 1918. As was to be expected from this time and place of birth, his life was not an easy one. Before the out-break of the Second World War he studied philosophy in Prague, science in Bucharest. After the outbreak he first did military service, then compulsory labor for Jews; after the liberation of Rumania, he engaged as a volunteer in the war in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. In 1947 he won a French government scholarship to study in Paris which was afterward withdrawn. From 1948 to 1962 he supported himself in Paris by odd jobs, which included dish-washing, while working for a diploma in aesthetics with a thesis on Giordano Bruno. He was employed as secretary and research assistant by Augustin Renaudet and Marcel Bataillon. In 1962 he became attached to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and worked with André Chastel on various projects. He was professor of history of art at the University of Montreal for the academic year 1965-1966.
Review, 3229 words
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