Abstract

Our Holiday Lists

This article presents information on books included in this issue. Author Hans Belting's "Likeness and Presence: The Image Before the Era of Art" is the most exciting book on art. It concerns itself with a millennium of devotional images when the criterion on of artistic success was not whether a picture resembled, say, the Holy Virgin but whether it brought about miracles, whatever it may have looked like. Author Bruce Altshuler's "The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century" reconstructs most of the major such exhibitions, beginning with the Salon d'Automne of 1905, when the Fauves aroused critical outrage in the Hilton Kramers of the Belle Epoque; then, show by show, the book takes us through German Expressionism, Minimalism and Conceptual Art.