Seeing Is Believing

In fashionable art circles today, "illustration" has become a dirty word, and "literary" a sneering epithet. The proper province of art is thought to be merely art. a non-representational play of shapes and colors. Last week Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum staged an exhibition of pictures from its archives that graphically refutes the modern proposition of art for the artist's sake.

Among the 160-odd illustrations in the show, one highlight was a little chiaroscuro woodcut attributed to Titian, which served as the frontispiece to an edition of Aretino's poems published in 1537. Titian surely would not have looked down on such an assignment; his greatest paintings were also illustrations--mainly of the Bible and of pagan myths. Whether actually Titian's or not. the Met's woodcut of a poet dreamily worshiping his muse shows a humanistic spirit typical of the 16th century, when artists took life itself for their province, describing it largely in terms of the human face and figure.

A World One Knows. In the same tradition, Sculptor Aristide Maillol's woodcuts for a 1924 edition of Virgil's Eclogues reduce the human figure to a flattish, quietly harmonious arrangement of ink lines, yet retain the emotive power of illustration. The observer automatically identifies himself with Maillol's figures; looking at the illustrations, he moves in a world he knows. Villon's new illustrations to the same cycle of poems (see below) employ color and perspective to create an even more recognizable, i.e., convincing, world.

Convincingness, the sine qua non of illustration, led even Mobile-Maker Alexander Calder to resort to the recognizable for his illustrations of a recent edition of Aesop's Fables. Calder's depiction of a vain crow being adorned with peacock feathers by his feathered friends has more wit than force, and looks more like a bent-wire construction than a drawing, but any child can grasp it and enjoy it.

A Vision Remembered. The 19th century was a great age of illustration, as of literature, although the British writers of the time were inclined to ignore the fact. Lewis Carroll never reconciled himself to Tenniel's drawings for Alice in Wonderland, which seem so right as to be almost inevitable. Tennyson, who did not care for art, was simply indifferent to the best efforts of Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt to illustrate his poems. William Thackeray, Edward Lear and W. S. Gilbert were better pleased, for they illustrated their own work.

In France of the same period, great painters turned easily to problems of illustration. Eugene Delacroix, a Romantic from his flowing locks to his patent leather pumps, found a congenial subject in Hamlet. Honore Daumier brought his genius for social satire to a masterpiece in the same genre: Don Quixote. And Edouard Manet made a lithograph after Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven that would have delighted would-be-Parisian Poe's anxious heart.

But the power possible to illustration was best shown at the Met by Albrecht Duerer's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. From the lurching rush of the rider with the bow to the devouring slowness of death on a stumbling nag, each rider has a different pace and strikes a separate terror. Duerer's Apocalypse, with 15 woodcuts, appeared in 1498. It was the first book ever illustrated and published by an artist on his own initiative. Duerer presents the chaotic, supercharged visions of John of Patmos in a manner sharp enough to hurt and grand enough to stun. Looking at Durer's illustrations, the reader comes to believe wholeheartedly in John's visions and remember them forever.

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