BOOK REVIEW HOLIDAY SPECIAL SECTION : The Decline of Genius

For us it all began with Giotto. Zeuxis and Phidias are too remote and the Romans and Byzantines don’t count. A sumptuous and definitive volume on the works of Giotto, accompanied by the penetrating text of Francesca Flores d’Arcais, has recently been published with 350 illustrations, of which 200 are in remarkably faithful color. And it all came to an end for us with Picasso, whose work has been so extensively explored and analyzed that we are astonished to have yet another superb book about his art, this one on his early landscapes, with more than 300 illustrations, two-thirds of them in color, and pertinent texts from various critics. In between these two are a remarkable number of beautiful publications recently produced to delight the aesthetic appetites of both general readers and knowledgeable connoisseurs.

Foremost among these is the “The Paintings of the Prado,” that inexhaustible and indispensable treasure house. In addition there are valuable studies of Carpaccio, Parmigianino, Delacroix, Kandinsky and Chagall as well as more general works on art collecting in the 17th Century and Surrealism in exile (where it expired).

The catalogue of the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, first published in 1990 and republished this year by Stewart Tabori and Chang, is an astounding collection of 827 paintings reproduced in color, accompanied by incisive and erudite comments by Robert Rosenblum, the distinguished critic of 19th-Century and 20th-Century art. The Musee d’ Orsay contains 19th-Century works only, but these include many of the best-known and most beloved paintings ever executed, and the museum itself is, to quote Rosenblum, “the most glorious and comprehensive compilation of French painting in the world.” Beginning with Delacroix and concluding with Derain, there are works of genius by the score.

“Art Today” includes a candid but apologetic text by Edward Lucie-Smith. It introduces itself with paintings of the 1960s and leads us through a chaos of “styles” up until the day before yesterday. Needless to say, the differences between the contents, significance, purpose, aesthetic nature and spiritual attainment of the works of art pictured in these two books is so profoundly dissimilar as to confound meditation. However, some glimmer of meaning (albeit perverse and pessimistic) may nevertheless emerge from consideration of the artistic abyss that separates a century of creative glory from the most horrendous 100 years since our ancestors--without education or ambition--painted prehistoric animals in all their majesty upon the walls and ceilings of secluded caverns.

A genius is someone who possesses an exceptional innate capacity of intellect, especially as shown in creative and original work in art, literature or music; a person, in short, whose contribution to the culture of his era is unique, definitive and spiritually momentous. Such people do not come along every day. It is ridiculous to suppose that the history of art rises in a continuous progression of great achievements from Giotto to Picasso. There are many arid, mediocre stretches, some uplands and a few summits. These last, it must be said, have invariably been characterized by a profound commitment to the human individual’s nobility, integrity and irreplaceable importance, and it has always been the foremost concern of genius to add to the sum of mankind’s reverence for mankind.

Proof of this is abundant in the collections of the Musee d’Orsay. One need mention only the works of the greatest--Manet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, Gauguin and Van Gogh--to realize that the wonder of the human condition led them to expend their genius upon works that illumine the beauty and pathos of the everyday lives of ordinary men and women. Didn’t Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt do the same? Alongside this glorious constellation are many works by artists of lesser stature, like Chintreuil, whose magnificent landscapes are, in the words of Rosenblum, “a resonant hymn of praise and wonder before the varied majesties of nature.”

But the Musee d’Orsay is a didactic and encyclopedic institution, exhibiting consequently not only masterpieces but also works by the men of vulgar and vainglorious temperament--Bougereau, Cabanel, Gerome, Couture et al.--against whose hegemony the artists of genius were compelled to do battle. It is more than a mere curiosity to contemplate these enormous and hideous paintings, for it instructs the inquisitive mind to beware of fashion and to seek aesthetic value in a fusion of intellect and heart conceived from the standpoint of eternity.

If what began with Giotto did, indeed, end with Picasso, it ended before Picasso’s own life did, for in this final quarter-century he left behind a deplorable show of decline and disarray. This, alas, was influential. All criteria of creative integrity, intellectual self-discipline and spiritual responsibility went out the window.

Which brings us to the volume of Lucie-Smith, “Art Today.” Today is to be understood as including the final 40 years of our appalling century, and the jacket copy of this sad but definitive book describes the lamentable epoch as the most controversial and perhaps most thoroughly confusing in the whole history of the visual arts. But also the richest!

How can that be? At the very outset of his critical analysis Lucie-Smith writes of “the deliberate cynicism and emptiness that were to become so striking a feature of the avant-garde art of the late 1980s and early 1990s.” Does this make for richness? The frantic search for originality at any price, for novelty, for surprise, for shock, for outright disgust, has utterly obliterated what was once considered vivifying tradition. What has become of the redeeming humanism that still gave grandeur to the works of Alberto Giacometti? His example is admired but ignored. We find ourselves in a cultural slough of despond compared to which the relatively barren 19th Century in Italy seems a golden age.

No artist who can imaginably compare with the painter of Dr. Gachet’s portrait, the Bellelli family or “The White Horse,” to name only a few, has been born since the end of World War I. And the only artist of a distinction touched by genius still at work today, though nearly as blind as the elderly Degas at age 86, is an Italian-Croatian painter named Zorau Music, not even mentioned by Lucie-Smith, who has space to spare for the sly contempt of Andy Warhol’s machine-made facsimiles and the bombastic mannerism of Botero’s obese mannequins.

“Art Today” is valuable because it illustrates a virtual loathing for the aesthetic values upon which our civilization has founded its greatest achievements, and it is interesting because tomorrow, God willing, it may demonstrate the lengths to which men and women ignorant of genius may have been prepared to go to clear the way for someone laboring in a secret corner of the Earth to restore to us the awe and joy that we long to receive from works and genius.

****

PAINTINGS IN THE MUSEE D’ORSAY, By Robert Rosenblum (Stewart Tabori and Chang: $59.95; 686 pp.)

PAINTINGS OF THE PRADO, By Jose Buendia et al (Bulfinch Press: $100; 652 pp.)

DELACROIX PASTELS, By Lee Johnson (George Brazilier: $75; 191 pp.)

SPANISH STILL LIFE FROM VELASQUEZ TO GOYA, William B. Jordan and Peter Cherry (Yale University Press: $45; 224 pp.)

ART TODAY, By Edward Lucie-Smith (Phaidon: $49.95; $29.95 pb; 688 pp )

CARPACCIO, By V. Sgarbi (Abbeville: $95; 271 pp.)

PICASSO: Landscapes 1890-1912, Under the direction of Maria Teresa Ocana (Bulfinch Press: $75; 342 pp.)

GIOTTO, By Francesca Flores d’Arcais (Abbeville: $95, 383 pp.)