A plan for public education in art is responsible for this handsomely illustrated and well-written volume. The sponsors were various organizations, like the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education and the articles, all contributed by recognized authorities on their several fields, were originally radio talks.

The treatment of such arts as painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, and the motion picture, is bound to be cursory in a survey so short and, compact as this, but while the expert may not be wholly satisfied by many generalizations, the general reader will find much information presented in an easily digestible form. Thus in the space at his disposal Mr. Cahill, for example, summarizes American achievement in painting and sculpture more succinctly than it has ever been summarized before (within the memory, at any rate of this reviewer). If he is too severe with Whistler, or too lenient and even worshipful to Winslow Homer, Mr. Cahill at least gives good reasons for his preferonech, and he never lets the historical and nocini nilliett get out of night; he is obviously a nationalist who believes in an indigenous American art, not subservient to European tradition or contemporary whim, but integrated with the actualities of the society in which it is conceived. Like everybody else nowadays, Mr. Cahill sees through the "fatal facility" of Sargent; on the other hand he is not intinridated by the pretensions of modernism. "There is no health in introspection," he wisely says; "the cultivation of sensibility has become a blind alley." He recognizes that present interest in the Mexicans and mural painting generally has a psychological or sociological cause: "The one clear note in contemporary American painting is a new emphasis upon social and collective expression. Subject and 'human interest' have definitely been reinstated in art." His recognition of that fact leads him to give the satirists like O. Soglow and Hugo Gellert their due as interpreters of the American scene.

Mr. Cahill's essay on American sculpture is not so full as one would wish, and it leaves the reader with the feeling that Mr. Cahill is too much of an eclectic in his tastes, that he is too anxious to hear all sides. Hence, at the end notably, and in many other places elsewhere, he seems to be merely cataloging names--the sonorous cognomens of Abastonia St. Leger Eberle, Minna Harkaway, and Renee Prahar are included in the head-roll of those women sculptors who "have done good work"; the names of the Bright Young Men are also quite as resonant: Albino Cavallito, Oronzio Maldarelli, and Polygnotos Vagis. One would have liked more criticism.

Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., treats of the work of H. H. Richardson, the architect of Sever and Austin Halls here, and considers the skyscraper as one of our distinctive contributions to world-culture. Often Mr. Hitchcock sounds like Ruskin or Lewis Mumford, as when he speaks as a "functionalist": "The new Classical buildings at Washington, the new Gothic or Georgian buildings at the leading universities . . offer no new picture beyond that of the intentions of the nineties. All are splendid, expensive, and meaningless."

Philip Johnson, whose province is interior decoration, described the "functional modern approach" of his art, which is now governed almost despotically by the principle of utility. That principle needed to be evoked after the clutteration of the mid-Victorian home. We shall never experience the dubious joy of accumulating useless and ornamental junk. In fact, Miss Catherine Bauer, whose article deals with houses and cities, has no doubts about the passing of the self-contained, isolated home, man's castle, and she is all for communal housing. To the romantic the apartment house is of course far from desirable; he likes to know his neighbors because they live next door or a few rods down the street, and is grieved not to know them because they live--twenty suites of them--under his same roof. Housing is a realist art, however, the care of the statesman, and since it marches with economics, modern housing progresses or recedes, according to the economic system.

Some arts like stage design (discussed ably by John Mason Brown) and the movies (the subject of Miss Iris Barry's article) are not "pure," but are hybrids which owe their genesis to the blending of several arts. Mr. Brown is right in observing that the modern stage designer leaves little to our imaginations, since "the stage designer's aim is to make the setting an inseparable witness of the scene,' a 'silent character' without which the drama would be incomplete." And Miss Barry states baldly the problem of the movies: ". . . whether it shall remain as now largely a diversion in which mere photography and second-hand theatre play all too large a part, or whether it shall develop fully its unique methods of expression."

Lincoln Kirstein's article on photography shows a keen awareness of the inherent limitations of the art, and the dangers to which it is likely to be a prey when it tries to peach on the preserves of landscape or portrait painting.

Considered as a whole, the book is remarkable for being readable without sinking to levity and triviality, and comprehensive without lapsing into pedantry.