Cleared of Cant

APPRECIATION: PAINTING, POETRY & PROSE (215 pp.)--Leo Stein--Crown ($2.50).

Gertrude Stein's elder brother Leo, now in his 70s, had delivered this book to the publishers before her death (TIME, Aug. 5). If she had lived, it might have provoked her to Steinesque limpidities in reply, for Leo's range of appreciations does not extend to his sister's works, nor to her enthusiasms. Their estrangement was known all over the Left Bank in the '20s, though one day as they passed on a Paris street, Gertrude so far forgot herself as to nod in recognition--and was then so overcome (so the story goes) that she wrote a poem beginning "She bowed to her brother. . . ."*

The Pleasure of Lookery. Brother Leo's essays and reminiscences are valuable in their own right as an honest, amused and only slightly crotchety effort to put the whole matter of "modern art" in a clear perspective (despite the title, there is little talk of poetry and prose). His confidence in his own impressions of art falls little short of the exaltation reached by Gertrude, but it is based on a lifetime of attention to art and artists and a healthy struggle to apply Dr. Johnson's dictum: "Clear your mind of cant." Whatever else is true of the U.S. expatriate company of which the Steins were members, they learned a good deal about the pleasures of looking at things, inciuding things on canvas.

Leo Stein left Paris behind 20 years ago, has since lived in & about Florence. His typically salty reflection: "Some pious Catholic friends thought I ought to be grateful to God because I had during the German occupation and the fascist republic escaped all perils. I said to them that there had been 6,000,000 Jews murdered. Was I to be grateful to God that only 6,000,000 had been murdered and not 6,000,001?"

But Stein's book is not about recent events nor political ones; it is concerned mainly with the historic freshness in painting that he came across as a young American in Paris 40 years ago. His friend Bernard Berenson, the top authority on Italian art, told him to look at the Cezannes at Dealer Ambroise Vollard's in 1904; soon afterward he discovered Matisse and Picasso. He and Gertrude had just settled down at 27 rue de Fleurus, the address Gertrude later made famous. But according to Leo she brought no pictures home until 1911 or 1912; he himself built up the Stein collection. "I was the only person anywhere, so far as I know, who in those early days recognized Picasso and Matisse."

The Pleasures of Cookery. Leo's fraternal rancor against Gertrude is rarely expressed, and then only indirectly, as when he recalls that when they were children "everything Gertrude tried to cook turned out badly, but I made bread and apfelstrudel--which is very difficult. . . ." But he declares that Gertrude didn't take up Picasso until Picasso had gone wrong, i.e., cubist. Leo's case against cubism is cogently argued.

Picasso, he thinks, had to exploit his own trick ideas to keep going, and now "seems to be ending as he began--a great illustrator." For Matisse, Critic Stein has real admiration for "eternally revolving the artist's eternal problem--how to 'realize.' " Very few critics have been able to tell a layman precisely what this means, but Leo Stein has a good shot at it. He says it depends on composition, and composition, to be successful, has to be so complete that every detail in a picture is essential and implies every other. He sensibly adds that this may be true for the observer only on occasion: "Every artistic enterprise, whether by the artist or the audience, is a gamble, and nothing can make it otherwise. . . ."

Other Leo Steinisms:

P: "Art and genius are both common everyday things and are not essentially different in their little and their great occasions. . . . A dainty package is a simple form of the same kind of art as Mondrian's."

P: "Art is no place for snobs . . . [for whom] art is holy, just as the flag is holy for people who care little for the land or the people."

P: "A little active practice in seeing goes much further than a great deal of concern with art taken passively. . . . The beauty of the world is immensely increased; it becomes all, potentially, beautiful."

* She bowed to her brother.Accidentally.When she saw him.

Often as well.As not.

She did not.Bow to her brother. When she. Saw him.

This could happen.Without.Him.

Everybody finds in it a sentence that pleases them.

--Portraits and Prayers

(Random House, 1934).

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