School for Heroes

SIGHT AND INSIGHT (191 pp.)--Alexander Eliot--McDowell, Obolensky ($3.50).

Art is communion. This idea binds together a sheaf of reflections on the nature, meanings, and ends of painting by TIME's Art Editor Alexander Eliot (Three Hundred Years of American Painting). Highly personal, aphoristic, poetic, Sight and Insight shuns critical pedantries in art to speak of bigger things--life and death, God and man, the wisdom of children, the power of dreams, love, fate, and the human soul.

In approaching a masterpiece, show simple courtesy, suggests Author Eliot: let the painting speak first. This demands "a kind of reverence, a still gratitude, but definitely not admiration. The moment one stops to say. 'Isn't that lovely!' one is in danger of losing the way." Beauty's shadow is significance: "Every great painting shows something seen plus something seen into . . . sight and insight." If the surface story is only half the story in a painting, the "latent content" is the other half, the question the artist answered without consciously asking it.

The Sun Philosophers. No technique-detective or brushstroke spy, Author Eliot is instead one of the sun philosophers who value the lights that men and artists live by. Light is the sensuous hero of Sight and Insight: "Velasquez' light is like transparent golden bees swarming the honeyed shadow, while Rogier van der Weyden's is like water over marble . . . even when stealing into Vermeer's darkest interior by a narrow window, light is welcomed as a lover. The far corners whisper hello to light. Instead of humping their backs like angry cats the shadows under the furniture are purring. A lady smooths a tablecloth: light smooths it for her and gently holds her hand upon it, saying, 'This usual busy morning is forever.' "

One form of light makes Author Eliot bridle, the "cruel" light of "scientific restoration": "Major paintings are handed over to men in white smocks clutching scalpels and chemical swabs ... If there be fifty nailheads in a painted cask, they want to see all fifty. So they strip away . . . Hardly a single master has escaped intact, but Rembrandt appears to have suffered most of all, both in America and in Europe. His celebrated Night Watch at Amsterdam is now a Day Watch" Some other Eliot reflections:

P: "Merely symbolic art--art requiring a key--is always a door to a closet, whereas great art is an open door to great experience."

P: "The critic who makes judging a matter of principle--who keeps criticizing instead of trying to understand--is rather like a man with a cane, alone in a garden, decapitating weeds and flowers alike. Anything that has size or mystery about it stands in danger of him."

P: "By holding the stars upon his head, Heracles gained the apples of immortality. And it is true that a sense of eternity--if not immortality--will often spring from contemplating ageless powers: stars, mountains, oceans, man."

What a Man May Feel. What lessons do the great creators teach? The imitation of greatness and the intimation of immortality, answers Eliot, echoing thinkers from Goethe to Carlyle and Nietzsche. "Was not Homer a greater hero than Hector?" he asks. "He was a hero born not to slaughter other heroes but to create them, and to give them immortality. His created heroes show the astonishing size of what a man may feel and do. Thus they create new heroes in life."

If art at its profoundest level is a school for heroes, what is the hero's role? He is the touchstone of man's fate, argues Eliot. "We know our fate is of each moment, we know it is eternal, and we know what it is. Ever since classical times we have known what man's fate is. We have known it in our hearts and we have acted upon it. Man's fate is to be free."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.