Search

This article presents information about the book "The Recognitions," by William Gaddis. At least one of the themes of this book is the falseness, the liqueness, of the type of recognition gained by artists in Western society. The chief character is a painter of implied genius who fakes paintings by the early Flemish masters, or rather paints new works in their style and then forges the signature. The book contains quotations in Latin, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and descriptions of thunderstorms, hospitals, electric railways, monasteries, radio programs, papal agents, parochial villages, and the capitals of Europe.

The article features the life and work of Quakertown, Pennsylvania-based sculptor George Papashvily. The artist was raised on a farm in Caucasus, become an apprentice to a harness maker at age nine, and joined the Czar's Army at 14. He came to the U.S. in 1922. He went East with his writer wife in 1935 and discovered that he wanted to be a stone sculptor. Papashvily's creative process, major influences, artistic style, and the theme of his work are also discussed. His body of work includes "Ewe with Lamb," "Horses," and "Animal Rock."

The article highlights prints created by European and American artists that depict the horrors of war. French artist Jacques Callot created a series of etchings titled "Les Miseres de la Guerre" in 1633 in the midst of the Thirty Years' War, while Spanish artist Francisco Goya's "Los Desastres de la Guerra" depicted the plundering of the French armies during Napoleon's invasion of Spain. After World War II, wood engravings by Hans Jelinek of Austria that portrayed how Nazi forces slaughtered the inhabitants of the Czech village of Lidice in 1942.

Less publicized than the "brain drain" of England's scientists has been the visitation of its artists to these shores. Part of the growing exodus from Europe, as an indirect result of Paris, France' forfeited vitality, the English painters are remarkable, not only in numbers, but in their enthusiastic and facile rapport with the New York scene. For New York art, with a pretty tyranny, tends to render impotent images whose only fault may be that they are less brazen than its own. The history of new British art, at least that which quickens interest at Buffalo, New York, dates back to about 1959. European artists draw inspiration from American art.

Focuses on the holidaying of Americans in Europe. State that the average American holiday hardly bears thinking of; Report that the Continental attitude of mind is that it is not important for a man to be disinfected but it is important for him to have at least two hours for lunch, even if he has to work until seven to make up for it; View that Europe is not made for the American, entirely by the apparent intensity and brilliance of the artistic phenomena he observes in full action at a time when art is dead in the U.S.; View that shore in which winter becomes the pleasure ground of all the Americans and Europeans one doesn't care for, is the focal point of European culture.

Paul Rosenfeld's new book so admirably named "The Port of New York" sets out to persuade the reader that here and now in the U.S. there has appeared a deep, indigenous culture capable of holding its own against any that is present in the older countries of Europe. The thing has been largely achieved, so it seems to Rosenfeld, by the work of some fourteen of his own contemporaries, writers, painters and musicians. There is something about Rosenfeld's work that is extremely reassuring. One may be irritated by his partiality, by a certain self-indulgence in his style, but one cannot fail to recognize this critical writing as a very rare and valuable influence upon the life of the U.S. today.