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THE EYE OF MAN: FORM AND CONTENT IN WESTERN PAINTING, Selden Rodman, hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, stated first printing, signed and inscribed by the author, richly illustrated with B/W photos of paintings, 1955. BOOK CONDITION: fairly good. The text block and illustrations are in good condition, with no tears or dogears, but there is underlining and marks in the margins of some pages. The bookplate of a prior owner is affixed to the first free endpaper. Not a library book or remainder. The grey and black boards are in good condition (slight bumping of spine). The dust jacket is in fair condition (chipping, tears, scratches, discoloring inside). 10 x 7 ¼, 182 pages, 27 ounces XX [From the dust jacket flaps] This is the book on modern art that a new generation has been waiting for. In these pages, inflated artistic reputations are punctured, the heads of revered critics topple, sacrosanct movements are exposed to the glaring test of their capacity for reflecting and creating life. But, most important, Mr. Rodman describes the achievements and aims of a new group of painters who express human and spiritual values without sacrificing the vital knowledge attained by the great formalists from Cézanne to Matisse. THE EYE OF MAN argues powerfully for that dynamic, expressive art which avoids the pretentiousness of purely formal painting without content, and which never is debased to the level of mere illustration. Asserting that our age has carried private painting to extremes that have caused an almost complete lack of communication between artist and public, Selden Rodman passionately affirms the place of recognizable content and spiritual values in painting. In the course of his argument, Mr. Rodman reassesses Western art from the Byzantines to the present and analyzes from a fresh viewpoint the works of the great pictorial spokesmen for humanity: Giotto, Gruenewald, El Greco, Rembrandt, Goya, Daumier, Van Gogh, Orozco, Rouault, and Shahn - artists whose meaning and vitality have lately suffered from the rewriting of art histories by formalist aestheticians. Keyed to the text are 100 magnificent black-and-whites of famous paintings. XX SELDEN RODMAN has been working up to this most important of his books for over twenty years. In 1931, the year of his graduation from Yale, he went to Europe to write a book about Piero della Francesca and never wrote it. He edited a political magazine for a decade and in 1946 wrote HORACE PIPPIN: A NEGRO PAINTER IN AMERICA. In that year he began the association with Haiti's new painters that resulted in his RENAISSANCE IN HAITI and his initiation of the mural painting movement there. The great series of tempera paintings in the Cathedral St.-Trinité which he directed in 1950 - 1951 has been acclaimed a masterpiece of religious mural art unequaled since the Italian Renaissance. In 1951 his PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN AMERICAN, a brilliantly unorthodox biography of Ben Shahn, posed for the first time the problems of an artist of expressive content in a formalistic age. He has also written HAITI: THE BLACK REPUBLIC and THE AMAZING YEAR.
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