ISSUE: Summer 1944
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heritage, and he is on their shoulders, poised in ft world of his own. Readers familiar with T. S. Eliot’s translation of the small epic “Anabasc” will be especially grateful for this volume, for it makes dear the fresh poetic vision and idiom out of which the nobler poem grew.
Norton $2.50
Garcia Lorca, by Edwin Honig.
New Directions continues its excellent Makers of Modern Literature Series with this study of the background and development of Lorca’s very pure art. Mr. Honig, after describing the influence of Atabic-Andalusinn poetry, Gongora, gypsy “deep song,” and folk ballads on Lorca, proceeds to a discussion of each of the latter’s plays and volumes of poetry, offering good translations of many illustrative passages. He demonstrates effectively that Lorca’s genius found its fullest expression in the folk dramas, and he detects throughout the poet’s work a mystical “quest for spiritual permanence through sensual reality.” His intelligent attempt to explain much of Lorca’s obscurity as a dramatization of the “struggle between abstract and concrete forces” is only partially successful, bow-ever, and he leaves Lorca’s poetic symbolism as much a mystery as ever.
New Directions $1.50
GENERAL
The Paintings and Drawings of Velasquez. Edited by Enrique Lafuentc.
The Phaidon Press, though now exiled from Vienna, goes on turning out the most handsome art books of popular price that are to be had. This edition reproduces the more than a hundred authentic works of Velazquez, plus a number of interesting disputable paintings. Many of the plates are from new photographs, especially those showing details of large canvasses. Lafuente, a leading Spanish art historian, contributes scholarly notes for each picture, and in an excellent introduction discusses Velazquez’s Baroque aesthetic, justly stressing the importance of his anti-idealist setting-free of the in-
dividual. He contradicts the familiar statement that Velazquez’s cold technique of realism ignored individual personality; and one may discover a more overpowering confutation in the great portraits themselves, of Philip IV, his family, courtiers, jesters, and dwarfs.
Oxford $6.60
Letters to His Son Lucien, by Camillc Pissarro: edited by John Rewald.
From 1883 to his death in 1903, these weekly letters of Pissarro to his son not only tell of his own struggles, opinions, and prejudices, but reflect the whole spirit of the Impressionistic movement. Published for the first time, they bring together a body of valuable documentary material. Black and white drawings by both father and son have been used to complement the text. Mr. Rewald’s scholarly editing and friendship with Lucien unite to make this a pleasing and authoritative collection. Pantheon $6.60
Modern Negro Art, by James A. Porter.
Mr. Porter, a teacher of art at Howard University, offers a full account of the Negro’s share in the development of art in America. Fie begins with slave craftsmen and artists, goes on to describe the struggle of Negro artists in the years following the Civil War, and rightly reserves the best part of his book for a detailed treatment of tbe flourishing of Negro art in the twentieth century. The eighty-five halftone plates offer good examples of the work of Henry 0. Tanner, Malvin Gray Johnson, Richmond Barthe, Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, and many others.
Dryden Press $3.26
A Fitting Habitation, by Agnes Rothery.
A house demands a great deal from its occupants in the shape of gifts and guests before it takes on personality and he-comes literally “a fitting habitation.” This is a lively personal account of how a series of habitations in Connecticut, New York, and Virginia became, each in its own way, “fitting.” The account is a sentimental one, but the story as told demands the sentiment.
Dodd, Mead $2.76
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