The Harvard Art Review

The express purpose of the Harvard Art Review, the University's first student art magazine, is "to be a channel of communication between the Harvard-Boston community and the nation at large," by drawing "upon the best of academic scholarship and professional criticism from throughout the nation and the world."

The format is impressive, but slick to the point of slipperiness. The expensive paper and the professional-looking ads look like a page out of Art News. The quality of the prose is high, but the articles are overburdened with a preponderance of art 'philosophizing that is not terribly meaningful. In general, the magazine tends to emphasize the virtuosity of each contributing author rather than the intrinsic importance of the subject itself.

The photographic essay, on Calder, by the editor Peter Van Wyck Brooks, exemplifies this tendency. His photographs are artful and interesting but Calder's sculpture is only the unifying backdrop for Brooks' photographic compositions. The charmingly personal article on the Herbert Lee Collection also misses the boat. It will certainly interest all of Mr. Lee's friends, but because the emphasis is on the Lee rather than the paintings, the article will fail to elicit widespread interest.

Unexplained jargon and complicated prose epitomize the article by Lance-Jeffrey Luschnig on Iqbal Geoffrey. The most frustrating part of this article is the author's adamant omission of all references to the paintings and to specifically what he sees there. Four beautiful reproductions of famous works of modern art illustrate T. Lux Feininger's Notes on Modern Art; but the article never refers to these illustrations.

The best qualifies of the magazine come out in the last ten pages. The reviews at the end, if a little too systematic in their flattery of potential advertisers, competently survey the high points of the current Boston gallery scene. David Howard's interesting and well written essay on Aesthetics With-in Social Form calls attention to the fascinating relationship between the cultural structure of a community and the aesthetic environment in which it exists. Chip Chapel's interview of Alcalay, Georgians, Neuman, which follows Howard's article, is also first-rate.

Harvard has long awaited a student art journal and though there is much to be criticized in this first issue it contains the germ of a marvelous idea. More student work, more concentrated focus on what is of interest to this community, and above all a greater effort to understand the specific qualities that interact in each work of art could make subsequent issues of the Harvard Art Review a significant contribution to the cultural breadth of this community.