ART BOOKS : English Gardens, Russian Icons, American Moods

The two most interesting volumes to be plucked from this season’s crop of art books are not in the conventional sense books about art. One of them is, in fact, about gardening; the other is what amounts to the first official English-language survey of the Russian Orthodox Church’s incomparable iconographic heritage.

Though their publishers clearly intended something more serious, both books have the additional virtue of suggesting useful reflections on two significant movements in contemporary life.

Gardening, after all, is part of a complex of current preoccupations--like cooking, domestic architecture and a renewed interest in so-called traditional values--that, together, constitute what might be called the revival of private life. Whether this trend derives from social exhaustion, the final triumph of narcissism or the realization of a decent sense of our own limits, we Americans increasingly are a people concerned with how we will live our own lives, educate our own children and provide for our own futures. Anyone who doubts this need only look at our major corporations’ rush to capitalize on the “cocooning” phenomenon. Mikhail Gorbachev may no longer believe that history is economically determined, but it’s an article of faith among marketing directors.

Similarly, that which against all odds has remained an object of belief among the people of the East is a matter of considerable interest in this era of glasnost and perestroika. One of the least understood aspects of the historic upheaval now underway in the Soviet Union is precisely what place Gorbachev’s new thinking will make for the ancient traditions of the Russian church. As orthodox communism declines, Orthodox Christianity may reassert itself as a focal point of cohesive social values, national identity and, perhaps, of the messianic aspirations great powers seem inevitably to assume. Moscow, after all, was the “Third Rome” centuries before it was the capital of the Socialist Motherland.

Historical speculation is fascinating, of course. But fully realized historical fact is far more satisfying. And in this regard, British architectural historian David Ottewill has made an altogether admirable success with The Edwardian Garden (Yale University Press: $50; 230 pp., illustrated; 0-300-04-338-4).

Today, when we think of an “English garden” it is invariably those of the Edwardian period we have in mind. Given that fact, it is hard to believe that Ottewill’s history actually is the first comprehensive survey of the personalities, ideas and artifacts of this influential movement. His accomplishment, however, is sufficiently magisterial that no other will be required for years to come.

This handsome, oversized volume from the Yale University Press was designed by Gillian Malpass and printed in Hong Kong, facts worth noting because of the unusually adroit integration of Ottewill’s intelligent, but unpretentious text with the book’s 125 excellent colorplates and 180 black-and-white illustrations. Many of the latter are period photographs and reproductions of the architects’ and designers’ working drawings.

When juxtaposed with contemporary photos, as they often are, these lend real substance to the architect Francis Inigo Thomas’ pointed admonition: “To design a garden is one thing, and to garden it so as to obtain the desired effect is another.”

Vita Sackville-West aptly described the Edwardian gardeners’ approach as one which combined “maximum formality of design with maximum informality of planting.”

As Ottewill recontructs it, the Edwardian school of garden design began in a controversy rooted in that very dichotomy. By the late 19th Century, the principles of the Arts and Crafts movement were widely held among forward-looking Britons concerned with aesthetic issues. Among the many simple pleasures the movement commended to its followers were those of country living and the garden. Simplicity, however, is often a rather contentious thing, and controversy erupted over what kind of thing this new sort of garden ought to be.

On the one side were the architects, who--rather unsurprisingly--insisted that the new gardens ought to be designed by architects as integral complements to the houses they surrounded. On the other side were the professional gardeners, who argued that principles derived from the experience of wild and cultivated nature ought to prevail over formal design.

The greatest and most influential of the Edwardian gardens were a synthesis of these two views as achieved in the inspired partnership of the “amateur artist-gardener” Gertrude Jekyell and the her one-time pupil, the architect Edwin Lutyens. They were in many ways an odd couple: Lutyens, in fact, apparently cared little for the physical experience of gardens; each was a design problem to be solved before moving on to the next. It was a trajectory that inevitably lead away from the Arts and Crafts movement and into classicism. Toward the end of his career, he caustically remarked that if one of his wealthy clients had come into possession of the Parthenon, she doubtless “would have added a bay window to it.”

Jekyell, from whom Lutyens obtained an appreciation of natural building materials he never lost, cared for little else but gardens. The principles she enumerated in her many elegant writings remain for gardeners around the world the conscience of their endeavor. “Planting ground is painting a landscape with living things,” she wrote, “and as I hold that good gardening ranks within the bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity.”

Edifying as all this may be--and it is--it is impossible to overlook the historical parallels between the Edwardian era and our own, which has come to be marked not only by a frantically acquisitive interest in Arts and Craft artifacts, but also an extravagant revival of formal garden building.

Ottewill summarizes the Edwardian historical context thusly: “The purchasing power of the pound rose steadily. . . . There was an accompanying rise in consumption. Owing to the introduction of the mass market this was no longer confined to the wealthy, but the working mass of the population was a little worse off during the Edwardian period compared with the 1890s. In general, the situation allowed a small elite to amass, more quickly than ever before, immense personal fortunes. . . . Many businessmen acquired at least a semblance of landed status by building a new house or enlarging an old one. The combination of surplus resources and a plentiful supply of labor enabled both groups to indulge in the luxury of gardens on a scale never to be seen again.”

These, of course, were people on the edge of apocalypse.

While Ottewill fixes the Edwardian garden convincingly within an aesthetic and historical context, Father Vladimir Ivanov’s Russian Icons (Rizzoli: $75; 219 pp., illustrated; 0-8478-0952-8) is rather confusing in its implications. Father Ivanov, an orthodox priest and chairman of the Ecclesiastical Archeology Department at the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy, is an internationally known authority on icons. His book, which is meant to commemorate the 1,000th anniversary of the introduction of Christianity into what is now the Soviet Union, is visually stunning, containing 160 color reproductions of icons dating from the 12th to the 20th Century. According to the volume’s notes, 100 of the icons pictured have never before been published.

Within the context of Father Ivanov’s explication, however, responding to these images as something other than an arresting curiousity becomes problematic.

Among practicioners of the three great monotheistic religions, only Christians make religious images. In the West, those images are not only part of, but central to the great artistic tradition. Father Ivanov argues rather insistently that Russian icons stand outside this tradition--that they are not simply objects worthy of veneration; that they possess inherent powers to protect the faithful; and serve as a kind of gateway through which the believer may obtain direct access to “the divine prototype.” With this in mind, Father Ivanov insists that iconographers be judged not according to their painterly achievements, but on their fidelity to tradition and the creator’s manifestation of a “tested knowledge of spiritual situations.”

Taken in this way, Russian icons present the same problems of critical interpretation as tribal or other primitive art: To take them out of the context of their creation is to deny a full understanding of their meaning; allowing them to remain there is to make them all but unintelligible to our aesthetic.

Admittedly, most Westerners who care about such questions have had their understanding of Orthodoxy, particularly Russian Orthodoxy, spirituality shaped by the publications of the church in exile and by the works and translations of Orthodoxy’s influential converts, such as the late Archimandrite Lev Gillet and the former Timothy Ware, now Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. The spirituality of those believers formed within the Soviet Union may differ from these, particularly in its points of emphasis.

Perhaps Father Ivanov simply intended to simplify his text for a secular, Western audience. Even so, some ommissions are surprising. For example, despite several glancing references to what I take to be the Athonite doctrine of the Uncreated Light and its importance to Russian iconography, the name of the concept’s author, Gregory Palamas, never appears. Is this because he remains a controversial and divisive figure among Western theologians?

Similarly, the discussion of the 19th-Century Russian situation lacks any reference to that great anthology of spiritual texts, “The Philokalia,” to “the unceasing prayer of the heart” or Jesus Prayer and to perhaps the greatest exponent of both, Theophan the Recluse. All three exerted a decisive influence on 19th-Century Russian spirituality and it is difficult to understand how they could not have had some impact on icon painting. If the contemporary Russian church no longer considers them of great importance, it would be interesting to know why.

Most disturbing, however, is Father Ivanov’s description of 20th-Century icon painting. Suffice it to say that it does not ever mention the Communist Party, the imposition of Soviet power or the state-sponsored persecution of religion believers. In a historical narrative this is something of a defect.

From this evidence, it appears that the Patriarchate of Moscow no less than the Kremlin stands to benefit from a little glasnost.

Historicism seems to be breaking out all over this spring, and among its other notable offshoots are a pair of impressive explorations of the work of Francisco Goya. The more formidable of the two, Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment, Alfonso E. Perez Sanchez and Eleanor A. Sayre, co-directors of the traveling exhibition (Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown: $65; 407 pp., illustrated; 0-87846-299-6, cloth;) is the catalogue designed to accompany the exhibition of the same name currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (It previously has been reviewed by Times Art Critic William Wilson) As the title implies, this volume employs more than 400 pages, an equal number of illustrations and well-constructed essays by an impressive array of Spanish and American Goya specialists to document the influence of the Enlightenment’s philosophical and political preoccupations on Goya’s art. As the political children of that era, Americans will find this discussion of particular interest.

A briefer, though intellectually bracing alternative, is provided by Janis A. Tomlinson’s Graphic Evolutions: The Print Series of Francisco Goya (Columbia University Press: $29.95, cloth; $15, paper; 67 pp., illustrated; 0-231-06864-6, cloth). Tomlinson is a Columbia University art historian and, while the five essays compiled here are intended for a scholarly audience, they will be of great interest to anyone devoted to this artist or, for that matter, the graphic arts.

While not denying the significance of Goya the social critic, the author explores the evolution of his graphic work as it responded to the discernable individual impulse of the artist. This is intelligently and nicely done, indeed.