Jack Burnham, “Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century” (George Braziller, 1968); 402 pages, 135 illustrations in black and white.

BEYOND MODERN SCULPTURE IS a strange book. It seems to be about a very modern type of sculpture which employs materials related to science and technology. As such it is aggressively up-to-date and indeed looks to the future, as the title implies (assuming “beyond” means “ahead in time,” not “over in the next county,” or some such). But if Beyond Modern Sculpture was really about technologically implemented light

Sidney Geist, Brancusi, A Study of the Sculpture (Grossman Publishers,
New York, 1968), 248 pages, illustrations.

Toward the end of his life Rodin was asked how it felt to be the greatest sculptor of the last century. He replied that this was no great honor as there were so few great sculptors in his time. To say that Sidney Geist’s book on Brancusi is the best on a modern sculptor beggars his achievement, for there are so few good books to begin with. What has hindered our understanding of modern sculpture is not the lack of a bibliography or its neglect by historians in favor of painting, but

André Bazin, What is Cinema?, ed. Hugh Gray, (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1967.

There things are . . . Why manipulate them?
—Roberto Rossellini

Cinema is a manipulation of reality through image and sound.
—Alain Resnais

OF ALL THE BOOKS on film which have been issued these past two years, in desperate anarchy from the major publishing houses, the selection of essays assembled by Mr. Hugh Gray from the critical writings of André Bazin is, as might have been expected, incomparably the best. It is, in fact, the only book with any claim at all to intellectual distinction, as it alone

Barbara Rose, American Art Since 1900, illus., Praeger.

In trying to evaluate Barbara Rose’s book, American Art Since 1900, one thing to keep in mind is that the book was written for the Praeger World of Art series. These books are not addressed to a public of any special seriousness and they are not intended to be very closely read. It is unfair to expect very much of them, and since they usually corroborate this modest view I doubt if Miss Rose’s book would have been reviewed at all in this magazine if she were not a regular contributor to it. Certainly it is a routine production, but my opinion

The Academy, Art News Annual #XXXIII, ed. Thomas Hess & John Ashbery (Macmillan, N.Y. 1967), 176 pages, illustrations.

Failed art, as prevalent as forgettable conversation, rarely provides a critical issue. We are success oriented, not inclined to devote much attention to the downbeat and the also-rans. But, (leaving aside simple deficiency of talent), the latter often fall into commingled categories—the sentimental, the rhetorical, and the academic—which are quite worth studying as phenomena that may shift their perimeters at any moment. For every gesture or sensibility in art is now shadowed

Paul Strand, The Mexican Portfolio (Da Capo Press For Aperture, Inc.), 20 hand-pulled gravure plates, 4-page text in portfolio with slipcase, 12 1/2” X 16”, edition of 1000 numbered and signed copies.

Paul Strand’s Mexican Portfolio, an incredibly beautiful group of photographs taken during the early thirties, was issued in 1940 in a limited subscription (250 copies) edition. The volume has been unavailable in any form since that time. This year, Aperture, Inc., publisher of the quarterly of photography, has produced a new signed edition of 1000 copies for the Da Capo press. The portfolio includes

Store Days By Claes Oldenburg. Something Else Press, Illus., Color, 152 Pages, 1967.

The writings of Claes Oldenburg printed in Store Days consist of fragments, notes, philosophical observations, and scripts, dating from the Store of 1961 and the Ray Gun Theater of 1962. As he sketches his ideas, Oldenburg does not outline a coherent theory so much as he suggests an attitude toward theory. He thinks abstractly: “I operate, idea-wise, far above the ground,” but he counters the abstractions with an earthy factualness: “I have a compulsion . . . to relate myself to what is on the ground” (62). An

Photographers on Photography, edited by Nathan Lyons (Prentice Hall [in collaboration with George Eastman House]), 256 pages, illustrated.

MR. LYONS HAS FASHIONED HIS BOOK in three parts: complete texts of the photographers’ articles; a carefully researched section of biographical notes and bibliographies; and his own comment, which consists solely of selected reproductions from the writers’ photographs.

These three sections are not independent; they interact to provide statement, context, demonstration and their permutations, the whole forming a symposium, an extremely successful example of that

Edward Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (Privately Printed, Los Angeles), 27' long (when unfolded), boxed.

TWENTY-SIX GASOLINE STATIONS (see Artforum, v. II #3, pg. 57) turns out to have been the first of a series of “little books” privately produced by Los Angeles artist Edward Ruscha. It was followed by Various Small Fires and Milk (photographs of various small fires and a glass of milk at the end), Some Los Angeles Apartments (photos of some Los Angeles apartment buildings) and now, Every Building on the Sunset Strip (photographs of every building on the Sunset Strip). As in the

Arnold Hauser, Mannerism (Knopf, New York), 1965. Two volumes.

Naturalness—what poverty of spirit.
Clarity—what thoughtlessness.

The author of these lines is not Oscar Wilde or Huysmans but Gongora, one of the extreme exponents of the taste for artificiality in the period to which Arnold Hauser’s new book is devoted. Its title is nothing less than “Mannerism: the Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art.” It is a matter of record that for Mr. Hauser art is an expression of ideology and that his approach to it is sociological. In “The Social History of Art” he applied these views to

The Widening Stream, poems by Richard Mack, photographs by Wynn Bullock (Peregrin Publications, Monterey, California), 1965. 2000 copies printed.

Because Wynn Bullock has worked in the same geographical region and often in the same forms, his work has too often been eclipsed by the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. Both Adams and Weston are more prolific photographers, and Bullock’s carefully considered seeing can in no way compete with Adams’ flamboyant grandeur or Weston’s flamboyant sensuality. Bullock’s work has been seen occasionally in group shows in the Bay Area—perhaps he is best

Aaron Siskind, edited and introduction by Nathan Lyons, with essays by Henry Holmes Smith and Thomas B. Hess (Eastman House), 1965. 74 pages, 44 photographs.

AARON SISKIND, ALONE OF THOSE major artists whose germinal works constituted the ground for the central esthetic dialogue of the postwar age, chose to work solely in the photographic medium. The complete relevance of his accomplishments in photography to those in the other art disciplines have caused him to occupy that unique position which has been vacant since the death of Stieglitz.

His historical credentials for this position are of course