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Library Journal Review

This is a book about visual art written for the nonvisual person by an apparently nonvisual person. Former philosophy professor, noted for his biographical work on his mentor Ananda K. Coormaraswamy, Lipsey found an inspiration that puzzled him in the breakthrough exhibit and catalog The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 ( LJ 3/25/87). His book on the subject plods along; dwelling on Pollock's alcoholism and seeing ``Seekers and Brats'' where one should read Postmodernists. Private symbolism may indeed lie behind the efforts of first-generation abstract artists, but Lipsey does not vivify this fact. Serious collections should opt for The Spiritual in Art . Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Goucher Coll., Towson, Md. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Conceding that "spiritual remains an old-fashioned word of vague meaning," Lipsey attempts, nevertheless, to tease out its profound implications for those modern artists and modern movements whose spiritual interests are documented in their writing. Centrally considered are "spiritual" artists from Cezanne to Kadinsky, Mondrian, Klee, Matisse, Noguchi, Pollock, and Georgia O'Keeffe, as well as the "spriiritual" aspects of 20th-century movements from Cubism, Orphimism, and Constructivism to Abstract Expressionism. Although it is true, as Lipsey suggests, that much of modern art is deformed or trivialized in discussions that reduce it to pure form or pure process, his assertions about the symbolic or expressive nature of art, particularly abstract art, lack novelty and specificity. His writing has the tone of 1950s art magazines, telling of the heroic efforts of (modern) artist-"seekers" to penetrate beyond or beneath mundane realities to triumphant transcendence and deploring the easy success of young (postmodernist) "brats" in the marketplace and the popular media; in spite of the stridence of the latter, Lipsey claims that authentically spiritual art is alive and well in the present. The book includes black-and-white reproductions of works, notes to chapters, index, and bibliography, indicating that this is an essentially modernist look at modern art, entirely outside the pale of recent art theory and its reconsiderations of modernism in the postmodernist present, such as Rosalind E. Krauss's The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986), and The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. by Hal Forster (1983). -W. B. Holmes, University of Rhode Island

Kirkus Book Review

Lipsey (Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work) compellingly demonstrates here that 20th-century art set out to be an art of spiritual content. He has gathered a literary record of artists' diaries, interviews, and writings, as well as 120 illustrations of significant works of masters from CÉzanne through Brancusi, Noguchi, and Rothko. Readers are able to see for themselves both how this spiritual content has been manifested--and to what degree it has been overlooked in the current ""postmodern"" confusion. Lipsey is eloquent and knowledgeable in his presentation. Without an ax to grind, always respecting the varied intentions of the artists themselves, and never lapsing into jargon, he illuminates the movements that fueled this search--from Theosophy and Buddhism to Jungian thought and humanistic psychology. While of unusual value as a retrospective study, his work is unique in its goal of ""gathering working materials for the future."" In essays on the role of chance in the artistic process, the apprenticeship tradition, the worlds of the marketplace and the studio, Lipsey's care is for artists working today and in the future. Kandinsky's The Spiritual in Art, written near the beginning of the century, sounded a note; this book shows how this note has been amplified and elaborated through the decades. Lipsey's search for ""eloquent signs of the reality of ourselves and our world"" is an invaluable reminder of the purposes and possibilities of modern art. Exemplary. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.