art by slabs . Pieter Brueghel the elder : hay-making . introduced by Jaromir Sip . ( Spring books , 21 s ) . artists &apos; prints in colour . introduced by Hans Platte . ( Barrie and Rockliff , 6 gns ) . Indian art in America . by Frederick J Dockstader . ( Studio books , 8 gns ) . the American muse . by Henri Dorra . ( Thames and Hudson , 3 gns ) . the visual experience . by Bates Lowry . ( Prentice-Hall , 3 gns ) . Picasso &apos;s Picassos . by David Douglas Duncan . ( Macmillan , 7 gns ) . is it quite so odd that nearly the best of this particular pride of art books - or shiny slabs of art - is the cheapest , the least shiny , the least pretentious , on the worst paper ? I do not see that a publisher could better the directness of the book on Brueghel &apos;s hay-making . a great objective painting is reproduced in colour : then on a large scale two dozen sections of the painting are also reproduced ( in colour ) , and fitted to a brief account of Brueghel addressed not to anxious culture-vultures all wanting their cut from the fashionable but still queer wonders of art , but to adult appreciators who already accept art as one accepts philosophy or macaroni . the example of Italy taught Brueghel to be sparing in expression , to be concise and limit himself to essentials , due proportions and things true to nature . he reduced human figures and everything else to basic geometrical forms and made them serve his intentions . every close-up of scenes from Brueghel &apos;s hay-making adds to our conviction that the basis of his use of abstraction was profound understanding of nature , of the surface of the earth , its vegetation , the animal world , men , and finally even of the objects fashioned by human hands . good . the enlarged details or close-ups left this reviewer more astonished than ever and more delighted than ever by the quantity of world absorbed by Brueghel , and the quality of absorption and then of its ordering and rendering . artists &apos; prints in colour , from Germany , introduced and edited by Dr Hans Platte of the Kunsthalle at Hamburg , is classy to a degree . again it is not a packaged slab , but a well-designed , well-printed , well-introduced selection of sixty colour prints by sixty artists , all made since the war . the first is by Matisse . others are by Moore , Jean Bazaine , Gustave Singier , Lynn Chadwick , Nicolas de Stae&quot;l . the introduction is in part a sophisticated comment on the abstract art of this century , from Kandinsky until now , one of the best I have read . the important thing is to be quite clear that the work of art can never come into being without some connection with the environment &amp;hellip; . the question of the visible object then loses its significance , since our world does not find its fulfilment in the realm of the visible . in part the introduction comments on the shift in prints from black and white to colour , from the graphic towards painting , and the way in which this shift is related to our epoch &apos;s appetite for colour ( including colour printing by machine ) . these two books and the next ones show some unhappy differences between publishers &apos; Europe and publishers &apos; America - at any rate in the popularisation of the arts . Indian art in America slides at once into the class of the shiny art slab . this may seem unfair : it does inform , it does have a grown-up purpose , it does illustrate many superb objects ( seventy colour plates ) , such as the painted shield covers of the Crow Indians . but it begins to buttonhole and brainwash with prefabricated superlatives . its standards are shaky ( thin Rackham-like confections by modern Indian watercolourists , self-condemned in the splendid traditional company around them , are just as highly praised ) . also it is an atrocious piece of colour-book composing , text against plate , or plate against text . art books often recall that distinction Berenson made ( to a late director of the Victoria and Albert Museum ) , that museum officials were either pimps or eunuchs . the eunuch art-book often , at any rate , retains the dignity of art : it leaves the peruser to judge on the evidence . the pimping art-book has art to sell , insinuatingly , and for a purpose , like the American muse , which has in fact a tradition to sell , and one which does n&apos;t exist , in painting ( how could it ever have formed in a new country ? ) . this brainwasher and blinder depends on serving up the same tiresome primitives , the same tiresome bits of sub-European kitsch by the Peales , the Bierstadts , the Coles , the Washington Allstons , suitably followed in this century by the celluloid rubbish of Marin , O&apos;Keefe , Dove and many others down ( I should say myself with a firm defiance - though the substance has changed from celluloid ) to Jackson Pollock . those who are curious about the stuff and the attitude ( which Americans would do better to forget ) will find a chilling eyeful in this American muse , allied to literary excerpts - Cotton Mather to Gertrude Stein - all transferred from an exhibition in that rather brown or liquorice public gallery , the Corcoran in Washington . it is another ugly piece of ungraceful typography and book-making . the German editor of the elegant book on colour prints remarked that in the end ( I should say at the beginning as well ) the spectator has to stand entirely alone in front of the picture . but not if Dr Bates Lowry gets him . if he does , the spectator will stand or sag in front of the picture with the visual experience : an introduction to art pressing down on his mind as if that mind were a particularly soft and soggy galantine . this is another conditioner : come and learn about art , Mr , Mrs or Miss home-study . I will teach you to reconcile Kurt Schwitters and Cotman , Sassetta and our Pollock , in 234 plates and 260 pages of long abstract words about recession and planes and unity . in judging the quality of a work of art - attention , please - on the basis of the type of experience that it offers us , we leave the relatively objective area of judgment that we have defined as artistic ability and enter the more subjective area in which we evaluate the significance of the artist &apos;s intuition . at which the statue - as in Daumier &apos;s cartoon - prodigiously yawns , and then adds a raspberry as well . an American wrap of this same nature entirely surrounds the largest slipperiest slab of Picasso &apos;s Picassos . without its rhetoric or gloss , here you have a colour album of those paintings by Picasso , from 1895 to 1960 , which he keeps for himself . they have been photographed by an American author-journalist-photographer , who talks of the maestro , and treats Picasso in his text like a super-goose who lays golden eggs , starting off his gossip-text by saying ( and if this does n&apos;t justify him , what does ? ) that no painter of this century &apos;s Midas-touched art world has seen more of his colours and canvas change to gold . a colour-photo as frontispiece depicts the maestro attitudinising in a Spanish cloak and a Scottish tweed hat , by candlelight , and makes him look like a new Watts , OM , or like God taking the part of Gladstone in a charade . however , this frontispiece can be torn out , and with ingenuity all of the journalistic slobbering over the paintings and personality which journalists used to ridicule , can be cut away with a pair of scissors - when there will be left for enjoyment in the normal unpompous calm of the arts , 202 plates , various and bizarre , in which Picasso &apos;s liberated shapes and excitingly applied and inventively combined colours play some of their very sunniest compositions . Geoffrey Grigson . interlacery . China . by William Watson . ( Thames and Hudson , 30 s ) . the Seljuks . by Tamara Talbot Rice . ( Thames and Hudson 30 s ) . the Vikings . by Holger Arbman . ( Thames and Hudson , 30 s ) . a very mixed batch , one would think , this latest trio from the admirable ancient peoples and places series edited by Dr Glyn Daniel . a glance through the plates - around seventy per volume - discloses odd family resemblances . cousin to the Chinese dragon seems the Viking sea-serpent . half-Chinese , again , look the Uighur faces staring from Seljuk reliefs . and everywhere lurk animals in company with lengths of geometrical interlacery which might well have crawled down from the Steppes . to run through the books in their chronological sequence is to get a sharper perspective . Mr Watson , in his detailed archaeological survey of China before the Han dynasty , follows the progress of sinanthropus through the stone-age centuries to the sudden flowering of an unsurpassed bronze age under the Shang and the Chou . whence came this finesse in casting alloys , and iron , too , long before iron was forged or wrought by the same people ? what connection is there between the spiral-painted urns of Kansu and the similar pieces from Turkestan and the Caucasus ? archaeology can not yet answer a number of outstanding conundrums in this field . but it offers no support for older theories that the early Chinese derived their ideas from as far west as the near east , or that they were essentially pacific and thereafter static . as their weapons and vessels attest , they were addicted to bloodthirsty sacrificial rites and were constantly armed to the teeth . when they cribbed a socketed axe from Tomsk or a spearhead from Minusinsk , they improved it . of the Tartar bow they made a spring-gun with a bronze trigger , to fire blunt-nosed bolts . but their exchanges with the north-west , the region of horse-raising and fraternisation of Chinese and nomad , must often have been fruitful . among the nomads who harried the Shang were the Turkish-speaking tribes whose later descendants , the Ghuzz , by the eighth century AD controlled all central Asia . through Transoxiana their Seljuk branch advanced from Samarkand and Bokhara upon Syria , Iraq and Persia . in her history of the Seljuks of Asia Minor , Mrs Tamara Talbot Rice considers the achievements of the Islamised group which settled in Rum , the Byzantine Anatolia . again our old views need reorienting . that the Seljuks brought nothing but chaos and destruction to Asia Minor is not borne out by the facts . indeed , under the sultanate , claims Mrs Rice , the Seljuks set out to provide their country with a sound economy and elaborate social services . in this veritable welfare state the arts flourished . her plates show the splendours of Seljukid architecture . she also devotes several pages to Rumi and Sufism ; but the reader will search her index in vain for the name of the great Persian Jelal-al-Din , which appears here disguised in contemporary Turkish orthography as the Mawla Celaleddin . in an earlier volume in this series , Mrs Rice , who is Russian by birth , took as subject the Scythians . despite chronological difficulties , it is they who have been suggested as the link between the arts of central Asia and the Steppes , and so ultimately with certain traits in the Scandinavian and Celtic cultures . in his geographical history of the Vikings , Professor Arbman shows how the Rus , or the Swedes of Muscovy , traded in Black Sea ports and sent caravans into Baghdad . the more familiar ventures of the Vikings in Britain and Ireland , as well as their more controversial incursions into the new world , are here made vivid . the introduction by Mr Alan Binns , who translated the Swedish original , is invaluable . once more we are urged to modify our traditional view of these pirates , whose prowess as artists , whatever one thinks of the sagas , remains far from negligible . the interlacery of the Jellinge pattern can have no direct connection with interlacery remote from it by thousands of years , thousands of miles . horse-raisers think in terms of plaits and straps as seafarers dream of ropes , hawsers and knots . these restless rangers of the abstract wastes revivified the people they raided and once settled , brought a new twist to the old strands of culture , craft and art . Hugh Gordon Porteus . Alan R Taylor &apos;s prelude to Israel , now published in this country by Darton , Longman and Todd at 18 s , was reviewed in the spectator in its original American edition on June 24 , 1960 . records . values of the studio . by David Cairns . it is right that recording companies should attempt to make their recordings of opera as dramatic as possible , and natural that promoters should vaunt the realism that is achieved . 