Cultural Corridor

In his Story of Mankind (1921), Story of the Bible (1923), Van Loon's Geography (1932), Ships (1935) and other books, Hendrik Willem Van Loon has avoided the full light of adult criticism by seeming to write not quite for adults, has thus been able to remain one of the great inestimables of the literary world. Critics who resent being spoon-fed from the vast Van Loon pudding are easily convinced by the Van Loon illustrations that his books belong in the nursery. Some children feel vaguely dissatisfied with Artist Van Loon's inky snarls and scratches. Between these critical extremes, chuckling down history's and culture's corridors, Mr. Van Loon and thousands of good-natured readers have continued to ramble hand in hand.

In The Arts* last week Hendrik Willem Van Loon presented his most ambitious and earnest chronicle. Fat as its author but not so weighty, cut down from an original 1,800 pages to less than 700, this book embodies "the story of painting and sculpture and architecture and music as well as all the so-called minor arts from the days of the caveman until the present time." Bulk of The Arts' material, however, is concerned with the plastic arts. Like a fond Dutch uncle with the skill of an expert lecturer, Mr. Van Loon begins with the premise that artists are fairly ordinary fellows, only a little better sensitized than most, and that art comes from man's impulse to show the Creator what he can do. He deplores the division between arts and crafts, believes an artist is and should be regarded as merely an exceptional craftsman.

If they accept these homely observations, readers will soon find themselves becoming as comfortably at home with the ages as Author Van Loon himself. He cosily assures them that the temples of ancient Greece were "as simple as a garage, and a one-car garage at that, for every temple was the home of one single Deity." Up through the centuries the author of The Story of Mankind mounts again, telling in words of one syllable whence the Etruscans presumably inherited the arch, what the Romans did with it, why the churches of the Middle Ages were made so tall, how joy went out of art with Christianity and was imported back from Moorish Spain to Provence, how painting began in Italy, became oil painting in Flanders. Dogmatic homilies together with disarming confessions of his own amateur standing appear in every chapter. If the reader wants to know something about Chinese art, advises the sensible lecturer, let him get Chinese brushes and ink and try it. Scattered throughout the book are no less than 180 drawings ranging from scraggly diagrams to colored sketches of a Dutch harbor intended to show how painters of different schools depicted it. Caption: "As for the nonobjective virtuosi, they, of course, had the easiest time of all, for they could just as well have done the job in the barroom of the Players' Club."

* Simon & Schuster ($3.95).

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