MUSEUMS OF THE MIND: MAGRITTE'S LABYRINTH AND OTHER ESSAYS IN THE ARTS by EllenHandier SpitzReview by: Ophelia Georgiev RoopArt Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 14, No. 2(Summer 1995), pp. 55-56Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948746 .

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Art Documentation, Summer 1995 55

have they been superseded by later studies? While Williams has written an entertaining chronicle of a long vanished, golden pe riod of letters and arts, her greatest accomplishment may have been to underline how much a serious and scholarly biography of Miguel Covarrubias is needed.

Peter Stern

Rutgers University

WOMEN IN FOCUS A HISTORY OF WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS / Naomi Rosenblum.?New York, NY: Abbeville Press, 1994.?356 p.: ill.? ISBN 1-55859-761-1; LC 94-6713: $60.00.

Rosenblum's mission is to portray the diversity of women

photographers, stressing individual approaches to the medium rather than creating a stereotype of a woman photographer. Since

the inception of photography, women have practiced the art as

professionals and amateurs, but they have been overlooked in the photographic literature. In recent years, as women's history has

been addressed, women photographers have begun to get their due. With more women in curatorial positions and more women

art historians, publications about and exhibitions on women pho

tographers have multiplied significantly since the 1970s. Rosenblum's survey is well timed, and she has the subject exper tise to do justice to the topic; Rosenblum is a photo historian/ critic who wrote A World History of Photography (New York, NY: Abbeville, 1984; rev. ed., 1989), as well as other scholarly works.

The scope of this volume insures that the book will serve as a useful reference tool as well as a comprehensive survey. Rosenblum

references over 200 women photographers. Although develop ments in Europe and America ran parallel, the focus in this publi cation is on the United States. Women who were born after 1950 are excluded.

A History of Women Photographers is divided into four chro nological periods: 1839-1890, 1891-1920, 1920-1940, and 1940 1990. Rosenblum's scholarship sheds new light on aspects of the history of photography. She focuses attention on the role of women from 1839-1890, not only as technical assistants to their husbands but as portrait photographers in their own right. This group in cluded Elisabeth Francart Disderi, Hannah Maynard, and Lydia Bonfils. Rosenblum also investigates the role of women photogra phers in the commercial sector of advertising and journalism, not

ing that in the period from 1940-1990 the distinctions between photojournalism and social documentary are easily blurred. Some

of the more contemporary issues Rosenblum raises and discusses include landscape photography, feminism, and nude portraiture.

Rosenblum asks whether women see/interpret differently. For ex

ample, are women more sensitive or intuitive, avoiding suggestive poses favored by many male counterparts?

The biographies and bibliographies are significantly useful parts of the survey. Brief information, including life dates, birth place, education, influences, and major accomplishments, has been

compiled by Jain Kelly for each of the artists cited in the book. The bibliography, compiled by Peter E. Palmquist, includes cita tions by and about individual photographers as well as subject specific biographical directories, surveys, anthologies, and essays. One of the earliest citations, and likely less well-known writing on women and photography, is Catherine Weed Barnes's "Photog

raphy from a Woman's Standpoint" (1890). The type, design, and quality of reproductions is excellent.

Thirty-six color reproductions and 263 black-and-white reproduc tions are essential components. Many of these images have not been widely reproduced, and they suggest a fresh and sometimes

unique view on the history of photography. This is an important addition both to public and academic library collections.

Dorothy Franco State College, PA

3

ART (PSYCHO)ANALYZED MUSEUMS OF THE MIND: MAGRITTE'S LABYRINTH AND OTHER ESSAYS IN THE ARTS / Ellen Handier Spitz. New Ha ven, CT: Yale University Press, January 1995.-203 p.:-Ill.?ISBN 0-300-06-29-7 (cl., alk. paper).- LC 94-12347: $30.00.

With its intriguing title and cover illustration of Magritte's The Blank Signature, this book would command immediate atten tion on the shelves of any book store or library.

This is a collection of essays that uses psychoanalysis to in terpret various works of art. The very apropos title was suggested to the author by a passage in Claes Oldenburg's Store Days. A

museum of the mind, the author maintains, is "a place where im

ages from the past are preserved in an inner cache or a treasure

trove from which none of us, artist or otherwise, can escape."

Approximately one-half of the book contains essays psycho analyzing a number of Magritte's works. The underlining philoso phy is that Magritte's work was profoundly influenced by his mother's suicide, occurring when the artist was almost 14 years old. The author makes a strong case for interpreting all of Magritte's attitudes towards women, relationships, and life and death as an

expression of the trauma suffered from the loss of a mother. In the second half of the book the author takes us on a

psychoanalytical romp across disciplines, with individual essays interpreting the concept of the absurd, Chekhov's play, The Bear, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, the film Dead Poets Society, the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Greek tragedy Antigone, a Hopkins sonnet, a discourse on aesthetics for children, and the Czech opera for children, Brundibar. The style and use of

language are absorbing. Although the approach is clinical, the book has general appeal and would be of equal interest to a lay person or an art historian.

From these pages, the author emerges as a gifted scholar and an individual with enormous interdisciplinary cultural knowledge. She has written on this theme previously?Art and Psyche and

Image and Insight?and the current work is a continuation of her fascination with the same subject. Therein lies the problem with this book. The psychoanalysis, totally excluding the possibility of other factors shaping an artist's output, overwhelms with didacti

cism. This questions the validity of interpreting the arts, and in deed, of interpreting everything in life through psychoanalysis. It is important to note that psychoanalysis is no longer the panacea it was at one time. Simply put, psychoanalysis is out and the hith erto Marxist view that psychoanalysis is the opium of the bour

geoisie is gaining popularity. Semiotics, with its broader base of interpretations, is quickly becoming the preferred method.

How much is added to an individual's enjoyment and appre ciation of Magritte's art by seeking strictly psychoanalytical sub liminal meanings in every detail of it when, as even the author

indicates, Magritte's preference was for his work to maintain a

degree of mystery? The impression is that inadvertently the au thor wants to make the reader accept psychoanalysis as the only

approach to interpreting not only art but everything in life as well. Point in case is Magritte's The Great War, which the artist insists has nothing to do with the war but represents "the eternal struggle between the gaze and objects." In spite of this, Spitz persists in

trying to convince otherwise.

Curiously, in discussing the concept of the absurd, Spitz does not mention the most obvious - the theatre of the absurd. Nor are

any of the significant plays or playwrights in this genre mentioned. This omission is even more glaring, since instead, as a representa tion of the absurd, the author discusses Chekhov's play, The Bear,

which eludes psychoanalysis. Russian literature lends itself more to interpretations in its particular cultural and socio-political

con

text. More fitting, perhaps, is the psychoanalytical approach to the film Dead Poet's Society, but by the time this essay is reached, a certain weariness overtakes the reader, and at book's end there is a

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56 Art Documentation, Summer 1995

feeling of ennui from being bombarded with psychoanalysis. Perhaps the book would have a different effect if the indi

vidual essays are read, as Spitz suggests in the introduction, ran

domly by choice and not in the order in which they are printed. Still, the book is valuable if viewed as a source that adds another dimension to the interpretation of works of art.

Ophelia Georgiev Roop Herron School of Art-IUPUI

ART AND CULTURE DIMENSIONS OF THE AMERICAS / Shifra M. Goldman ?Chi cago, IL: University of Chicago Press, January 1995.?494 p.: ill.?

ISBN 0-226-30123-0 (cl.), ISBN 0-226-30124-9 (pa.); LC 94-7458: $80.00 (cl.), $29.95 (pa.).

Shifra Goldman is a leading critic and scholar of Latin Ameri can and Latino art in the United States. This collection of 33 es

says, which covers 20 years of writing from the early 1970s to the present, is a rewarding mixture of researched historical essays, criticism from gallery and studio visits, interviews with artists, and theoretical speculations on art and its intersections with soci

ety and politics. Goldman has done more than shed light on lost Mexican murals and the rise of the Chicano art wave of the late 1960s; she has attempted the difficult task of constructing a social

history of art about modern Latin America. The fragmentary na

ture of such a task, she admits, is best illustrated by the disparate chapters that make up her book; she does not pretend to have

adequately covered the topic but merely to have provided an in troduction to the problems.

Goldman's perspective is both undisguised and uncompro

mising: "In impoverished and destabilized countries like many in Latin America, politics addressed to social change is the lubricant that makes life possible. And that lubricant is often provided by culture and the arts, though never by them alone." Goldman frankly admits that her historical art research and her political convic tions are in conjunction with one another; her goal of redressing social inequalities begins with the dependent and colonialist posi tion in which Latin America and Latino art finds itself in relation to European and European-derived "First World" art. The analyti cal focus for many of Goldman's essays derives from "dependency

theory" (now viewed as somewhat outdated by Latin American

social scientists) and the concept of cultural imperialism. As a

consequence, many of her essays have an angry, even hectoring

quality about them; to proceed from the premise that all Latino artists in the United States have suffered the injustices of racial, social, economic, or cultural oppression is to occupy an unassail

able moral high ground. Yet Goldman's political awareness also

permits her to place Latin American art within political and social contexts of enormous ferment and change. Authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, and

Nicaragua have practiced real repression against their own intel

lectuals and artistic communities. Goldman has rescued and cel

ebrated the efforts of progressives to challenge these dictatorships with the weapon of art.

Goldman's essays range widely in subject: lost murals by Siqueiros in Los Angeles, a splendid review of the Mexican mural ist movement, knowledgeable explorations of the Chicano poster and mural movement, women artists in Latin America and the

United States, art and politics in the 1980s, and resistance to dic

tatorship in Chile. She begins with a vivid summary of historical currents in Latin American and Latino art from the end of the

Mexican Revolution (1920) into the angry 1960s, noting that Latin American art reflected European interest in primitivism and antirationalism and, more importantly, a desire to recover Native

indigenous traditions. Latin American art of the postwar years (after 1918) combined European avant-garde currents like post- Impres sionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism,

and Constructivism, with Native American and African themes

and motifs. A preoccupation with the political and social roles of art gave way in the 1960s to neofiguration, an art of existential

anguish that has partly supplanted social realism and abstraction. Performance, mail, and conceptual art have also flourished, pro

viding artists with new methodologies and languages with which to express their lives. Goldman also writes in an autobiographical

mode, recounting her personal odyssey as the descendent of Eu

ropean working-class Jewish immigrants into the worlds of Latino and Latin American art.

All of Goldman's essays reflect her highly politicized convic tions. Although this occasionally gives her writing a tone of ear nest missionizing, Goldman clearly sympathizes with the struggles of subordinate communities to express themselves through pub lic and private art. Goldman has also been able to adapt her 1960s radicalism to the 1990s; as the bipolar Cold War world gives way to a complex world of interdependent linkages, Goldman contin

ues to fight the good fight against the cooptation and commercial ization of formerly exotic Third World art into the prevailing struc tures of (cultural) power. Her role as a champion of Latin Ameri can, and even more importantly, Latino art, gives this important collection of essays (abundantly and handsomely illustrated) an

urgency and relevance in the current struggles over

multiculturalism and meaning in the United States. Peter Stern

Rutgers University

I 1

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED (Subject to Later Review)

REFERENCE Art, Artifact & Architecture Law I Jessica L. Darraby.?New York, NY: Clark

Boardman Callaghan, February 1995.?1 looseleaf binder.?ISBN 0

87632-221-6; LC 94-32104: $115.00.

Canadian Art, Volume Two (G-K) I edited by Pierre B. Landry and Claire

Champ.?Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1994.?412 p.: ill.?ISBN

0-88884-638-X: $74.95 (pa.).

Dictionary of Scottish Art & Architecture I Peter J. M. McEwan.?Wappingers Falls, NY: Antique Colllectors' Club, Ltd., March 1995.?626 p.: ill

ISBN 1-85149-134-1: $99.50.

Directory of Art & Design Faculties, U.S. and Canada, 1994-951 CMS Publica

tions.?Missoula, MT: CMS Publications, 1995.?525 p.?ISBN 1

881913-01-5: $55.00 (pa.). The Sea Ranch I Kathryn M. Wayne and John V. Maciuika.?( CPL Bibliogra

phy Series)?Chicago, IL: Council of Planning Librarians, dist. by Ameri

can Planning Association, 1994.?29 p.?ISBN 0-86602-307-0: n.p. (pa.). Women Artists: An Historical, Contemporary and Feminist Bibliography I Sherry

Piland.?(Second Edition)?Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994.?497

p.: ill.?ISBN 0-8108-2559-7 (cl., alk. paper); LC 93-27248: $59.50.

SERIALS Art-das Kunstmagazin Nr. 3, March 1995 / Englewood, NJ: German Language

Publications; Monthly: Annual Subscription $90.00.

design and applied arts index on CD-ROM, 1987-1994, CD-ROM two I Edited by Chris Mees and Lesley Mees.?Mayfield, England: Design Documenta

tion, 1994.?1 CD-ROM, 1 manual.?2 issues/yr.: Annual subscription ?795.00.

Electronic Link Magazine, Vol. 1, Number 3, Sept.-Oct. 1994/Ontario, Canada:

Applied Arts Inc.?ISSN 1195-7778; Quarterly: Annual Subscription

$18.00, $27.00 (outside Canada and U.S.).

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