Art by Slabs .sx Pieter Brueghel the Elder :sx Hay-Making .sx Introduced by Jaromir Sip .sx ( Spring Books , 21s .sx ) .sx Artists' Prints in Colour .sx Introduced by Hans Platte .sx ( Barrie and Rockliff , 6 gns .sx ) .sx Indian Art in America .sx By Frederick J. Dockstader .sx ( Studio Books , 8 gns .sx ) .sx The American Muse .sx By Henri Dorra .sx ( Thames and Hudson , 3 gns .sx ) .sx The Visual Experience .sx By Bates Lowry .sx ( Prentice-Hall , 3 gns .sx ) .sx Picasso's Picassos .sx By David Douglas Duncan .sx ( Macmillan , 7 gns .sx ) .sx IS IT quite so odd that nearly the best of this particular pride of art books- or shiny slabs of art- is the cheapest , the least shiny , the least pretentious , on the worst paper ?sx I do not see that a publisher could better the directness of the book on Brueghel's Hay-Making .sx A great objective painting is reproduced in colour :sx then on a large scale two dozen sections of the painting are also reproduced ( in colour ) , and fitted to a brief account of Brueghel addressed not to anxious culture-vultures all wanting their cut from the fashionable but still queer wonders of art , but to adult appreciators who already accept art as one accepts philosophy or macaroni .sx The example of Italy taught Brueghel to be sparing in expression , to be concise and limit himself to essentials , due proportions and things true to nature .sx He reduced human figures and everything else to basic geometrical forms and made them serve his intentions .sx Every close-up of scenes from Brueghel's Hay-Making adds to our conviction that the basis of his use of abstraction was profound understanding of nature , of the surface of the earth , its vegetation , the animal world , men , and finally even of the objects fashioned by human hands .sx Good .sx The enlarged details or close-ups left this reviewer more astonished than ever and more delighted than ever by the quantity of world absorbed by Brueghel , and the quality of absorption and then of its ordering and rendering .sx Artists' Prints in Colour , from Germany , introduced and edited by Dr. Hans Platte of the Kunsthalle at Hamburg , is classy to a degree .sx Again it is not a packaged slab , but a well-designed , well-printed , well-introduced selection of sixty colour prints by sixty artists , all made since the war .sx The first is by Matisse .sx Others are by Moore , Jean Bazaine , Gustave Singier , Lynn Chadwick , Nicolas de " l. The introduction is in part a sophisticated comment on the abstract art of this century , from Kandinsky until now , one of the best I have read .sx 'The important thing is to be quite clear that the work of art can never come into being without some connection with the environment .sx . The question of the visible object then loses its significance , since our world does not find its fulfilment in the realm of the visible .sx ' In part the introduction comments on the shift in prints from black and white to colour , from the graphic towards painting , and the way in which this shift is related to our epoch's appetite for colour ( including colour printing by machine) .sx These two books and the next ones show some unhappy differences between publishers' Europe and publishers' America- at any rate in the popularisation of the arts .sx Indian Art in America slides at once into the class of the shiny art slab .sx This may seem unfair :sx it does inform , it does have a grown-up purpose , it does illustrate many superb objects ( seventy colour plates ) , such as the painted shield covers of the Crow Indians .sx But it begins to buttonhole and brainwash with prefabricated superlatives .sx Its standards are shaky ( thin Rackham-like confections by modern Indian watercolourists , self-condemned in the splendid traditional company around them , are just as highly praised) .sx Also it is an atrocious piece of colour-book composing , text against plate , or plate against text .sx Art books often recall that distinction Berenson made ( to a late director of the Victoria and Albert Museum ) , that museum officials were either pimps or eunuchs .sx The eunuch art-book often , at any rate , retains the dignity of art :sx it leaves the peruser to judge on the evidence .sx The pimping art-book has art to sell , insinuatingly , and for a purpose , like The American Muse , which has in fact a tradition to sell , and one which doesn't exist , in painting ( how could it ever have formed in a " new " ) .sx This brainwasher and blinder depends on serving up the same tiresome primitives , the same tiresome bits of sub-European kitsch by the Peales , the Bierstadts , the Coles , the Washington Allstons , suitably followed in this century by the celluloid rubbish of Marin , O'Keefe , Dove and many others down ( I should say myself with a firm defiance- though the substance has changed from celluloid ) to Jackson Pollock .sx Those who are curious about the stuff and the attitude ( which Americans would do better to forget ) will find a chilling eyeful in this American Muse , allied to literary excerpts- Cotton Mather to Gertrude Stein- all transferred from an exhibition in that rather brown or liquorice public gallery , the Corcoran in Washington .sx It is another ugly piece of ungraceful typography and book-making .sx The German editor of the elegant book on colour prints remarked that in the end ( I should say at the beginning as well ) the spectator has to stand entirely alone in front of the picture .sx But not if Dr. Bates Lowry gets him .sx If he does , the spectator will stand or sag in front of the picture with The Visual Experience :sx An Introduction to Art pressing down on his mind as if that mind were a particularly soft and soggy galantine .sx This is another conditioner :sx Come and learn about Art , Mr. , Mrs. or Miss Home-Study .sx I will teach you to reconcile Kurt Schwitters and Cotman , Sassetta and our Pollock , in 234 plates and 260 pages of long abstract words about recession and planes and unity .sx 'In judging the quality of a work of art'- attention , please- 'on the basis of the type of experience that it offers us , we leave the relatively objective area of judgment that we have defined as artistic ability and enter the more subjective area in which we evaluate the significance of the artist's intuition .sx ' At which the statue- as in Daumier's cartoon- prodigiously yawns , and then adds a raspberry as well .sx An American wrap of this same nature entirely surrounds the largest slipperiest slab of Picasso's Picassos .sx Without its rhetoric or gloss , here you have a colour album of those paintings by Picasso , from 1895 to 1960 , which he keeps for himself .sx They have been photographed by an American author-journalist-photographer , who talks of 'the Maestro,' and treats Picasso in his text like a super-goose who lays golden eggs , starting off his gossip-text by saying ( and if this doesn't justify him , what does ?sx ) that 'no painter of this century's Midas-touched art world has seen more of his colours and canvas change to gold .sx ' A colour-photo as frontispiece depicts the Maestro attitudinising in a Spanish cloak and a Scottish tweed hat , by candlelight , and makes him look like a new Watts , OM , or like God taking the part of Gladstone in a charade .sx However , this frontispiece can be torn out , and with ingenuity all of the journalistic slobbering over the paintings and personality which journalists used to ridicule , can be cut away with a pair of scissors- when there will be left for enjoyment in the normal unpompous calm of the arts , 202 plates , various and bizarre , in which Picasso's liberated shapes and excitingly applied and inventively combined colours play some of their very sunniest compositions .sx GEOFFREY GRIGSON Interlacery .sx China .sx By William Watson .sx ( Thames and Hudson , 30s .sx ) .sx The Seljuks .sx By Tamara Talbot Rice .sx ( Thames and Hudson 30s .sx ) .sx The Vikings .sx By Holger Arbman .sx ( Thames and Hudson , 30s .sx ) .sx A VERY mixed batch , one would think , this latest trio from the admirable 'Ancient Peoples and Places' series edited by Dr. Glyn Daniel .sx A glance through the plates- around seventy per volume- discloses odd family resemblances .sx Cousin to the Chinese dragon seems the Viking sea-serpent .sx Half-Chinese , again , look the Uighur faces staring from Seljuk reliefs .sx And everywhere lurk animals in company with lengths of geometrical interlacery which might well have crawled down from the Steppes .sx To run through the books in their chronological sequence is to get a sharper perspective .sx Mr. Watson , in his detailed archaeological survey of China Before the Han Dynasty , follows the progress of sinanthropus through the stone-age centuries to the sudden flowering of an unsurpassed bronze age under the Shang and the Chou .sx Whence came this finesse in casting alloys , and iron , too , long before iron was forged or wrought by the same people ?sx What connection is there between the spiral-painted urns of Kansu and the similar pieces from Turkestan and the Caucasus ?sx Archaeology cannot yet answer a number of outstanding conundrums in this field .sx But it offers no support for older theories that the early Chinese derived their ideas from as far west as the Near East , or that they were essentially pacific and thereafter static .sx As their weapons and vessels attest , they were addicted to bloodthirsty sacrificial rites and were constantly armed to the teeth .sx When they cribbed a socketed axe from Tomsk or a spearhead from Minusinsk , they improved it .sx Of the Tartar bow they made a spring-gun with a bronze trigger , to fire blunt-nosed bolts .sx But their exchanges with the North-West , 'the region of horse-raising and fraternisation of Chinese and nomad,' must often have been fruitful .sx Among the nomads who harried the Shang were the Turkish-speaking tribes whose later descendants , the Ghuzz , by the eighth century AD controlled all Central Asia .sx Through Transoxiana their Seljuk branch advanced from Samarkand and Bokhara upon Syria , Iraq and Persia .sx In her history of The Seljuks of Asia Minor , Mrs. Tamara Talbot Rice considers the achievements of the Islamised group which settled in Rum , the Byzantine Anatolia .sx Again our old views need reorienting .sx 'That the Seljuks brought nothing but chaos and destruction to Asia Minor is not borne out by the facts .sx ' Indeed , under the Sultanate , claims Mrs. Rice , 'the Seljuks set out to provide their country with a sound economy and elaborate social services .sx ' In this 'veritable welfare state' the arts flourished .sx Her plates show the splendours of Seljukid architecture .sx She also devotes several pages to Rumi and Sufism ; but the reader will search her index in vain for the name of the great Persian Jelal-al-Din , which appears here disguised in contemporary Turkish orthography as 'the Mawla Celaleddin .sx ' In an earlier volume in this series , Mrs. Rice , who is Russian by birth , took as subject the Scythians .sx Despite chronological difficulties , it is they who have been suggested as the link between the arts of Central Asia and the Steppes , and so ultimately with certain traits in the Scandinavian and Celtic cultures .sx In his geographical history of the Vikings , Professor Arbman shows how the Rus , or the Swedes of Muscovy , traded in Black Sea ports and sent caravans into Baghdad .sx The more familiar ventures of the Vikings in Britain and Ireland , as well as their more controversial incursions into the New World , are here made vivid .sx The introduction by Mr. Alan Binns , who translated the Swedish original , is invaluable .sx Once more we are urged to modify our traditional view of these pirates , whose prowess as artists , whatever one thinks of the sagas , remains far from negligible .sx The interlacery of the Jellinge pattern can have no direct connection with interlacery remote from it by thousands of years , thousands of miles .sx Horse-raisers think in terms of plaits and straps as seafarers dream of ropes , hawsers and knots .sx These restless rangers of the abstract wastes revivified the people they raided and once settled , brought a new twist to the old strands of culture , craft and art .sx HUGH GORDON PORTEUS Alan R. Taylor's Prelude to Israel , now published in this country by Darton , Longman and Todd at 18s .sx , was reviewed in the Spectator in its original American edition on June 24 , 1960 .sx Records .sx Values of the Studio .sx By DAVID CAIRNS .sx IT is right that recording companies should attempt to make their recordings of opera as dramatic as possible , and natural that promoters should vaunt the realism that is achieved .sx