Youth Blowing on Charcoal: El Greco

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22337, 26 February 1938, Page 20

Youth Blowing on Charcoal: El Greco

"The past changes as rapidly as the present," says Mr Goldscheider, "and it is the past as it appears to us to-day that I have tried to reproduce in this volume." Revaluation of the past and its work is continuous; but if it is a process in which what has earlier been rated highest may lose validity and interest for the living generation, archaeological and "intellectual" research steadily bring forward unknown or neglected works which, whatever their period, seem "bound up with our own time." The truth in this is admirably illustrated in Mr Goldscheider's collection, which ranges from the third millenary, 8.C., to the mid nineteenth century,

and his brief notes point and illuminate the sympathy, the correspondence which constantly appears between the aim and technique of artists long dead and of moderns, even the most revolutionary. Renoir in Greece, Matisse in Egypt, Cezanne's hand and eye anticipated in a mummy portrait of the second century A.D., an Italian mosaic which makes the 800 years to Van Gogh a short step, a bronze crucifix from Werden on the Ruhr (1060) which surprises the hasty scorner of Ep-

stein, say, into thoughtful silence: such are the discoveries to which this book carries the reader. It is. discovery, also, of a less particular kind but no less valuable to find on page after page of this book the intelligible, directly appealing beauty of work in so many styles, from ages so far apart and inspirations so diverse, ranging from the purest formalism to the profoundest realism. Mr Goldscheider is to be congratulated on the success of an experiment so instructive and delightful; and the publishers, on making available to the English public at so low a price one more example of the fine printing of the Phaidon Press.