The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 188

Boston Sunday Globe February 23, 19G9 80-B wnKuWMiHn miiimmufkwu MV-WMmli0Vm. ainmw 1 Jill) tit' -fm I I I New fiction shelf Smashing good novel MONUMENT to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs as planned by Louis I. Kahn. Today's architecture Monuments- anachromism of the times7 RICHER THAN ALL HIS TRIBE, by Montar-rat. Marrow, 372 $6.95.

Kipling would applaud the pukka sahib attitude of Monsarrat regarding the chance of any emerging Black Commonwealth nation making it without the benevolent English lion's protectionthat is, they all will end up "brutish rather than This gloomy pessimism about African self-determination, made abundantly clear in Monsar-rat's best-seller "The Tribe That Lost Its Head" (1956), is realized in this equally-foreboding sequel, which, his publisher chortles, is "already a whopping best-seller in England." Political musings aside, this is a smashing good novel Monsarrat possesses that literary flair for absorbing and transmitting the sense of his subject in its feel, smells, colors and sounds. His characters sweat and wiggle, strut and bleed, under a sun which isn't just hot, but burns with a dry, come works to terms with such The ordinary reaction within modern architecture questions whether the memorial should be nonfunctional. In 1951 Eric Mendelsohn designed an assembly hal for Riverside Drive as the original proposal for such a memorial in New York. A memorial serving a living purpose suggested reconstruction and hope qualities that are purportedly revealed in the brilliance and glassiness of Kahn's design. Nevertheless, a conviction that a memorial serving the living is desirable remains an evasion of Kahn's own terms.

Does his nonfunctional monument represent, perhaps, the seizing of an opportunity to explore architectural form unconstrained by use? Mies van de Rohe availed himself of such an opportunity in his famed Barcelona Pavilion. But one finds Khan's formalism studiously banal. Its bilateral symmetry is a worn convention. Kahn assembles the small glass units neither with a sense for the logic of their combinations nor with a desire to exploit the potential variability of their combinations. With the The art world Townley and others immediate than the fright and despair over man's for-g llness and shortsightedness about such terrors.

If a public monument receives its authenticity from some critical level of public concern, the time for a monument that speaks to man about the dangers of an existence lived wholly in the present has superseded the time for a monument to the single theme of the Jewish martyrs. An excess of for-getfullness becomes the present theme of what was once a seemingly indelible recollection. Kahn succeeds in evoking the quality of an existence devoid of reference to anything that would give meaning to life. In Kahn's monument, everything is the same, insubstantial. The relationship of the small glass units one to another is indefinite and unin-dividuated as dumb, cold, and unreflexive as the piles of bodees that they symbolize.

The irony of the monument's small scale is telling, too. Despite the austere and seemingly portentous form, each block is smaller than a small room. Even the scale of this empty present is diminutive. Kahn has achieved a stage-like situation which may evoke in a visitor the emptiness of a present without adequate external references. I would assert that a contributive exploration of architectural form could have been made simultaneously.

Finally, the desirability of advancing both these ends within the context of a useful place has not been disproven. an like trees or plants, monu mental architecture will find crowded in upon any odd lot in any district. Only when this space is achieved can the new urban centers come to life." These men thought almost wholly of places of public assembly: museums, theaters, churches, concert halls, and places for public ceremonies and festivals. Developments such as Boston's new government Center embody thoughts similar to the Nine Points. Despite its excellence within this class, the Government Center still solicits doubts about the desirability of monumentalizing each institution and creating large places for public ceremony that are destructive of more frequent and continuous human activities in the city center.

By contrast, Sert's Holyoke Center and his Harvard Married Student Housing in Cambridge show a concern fori ife-as-lived, but can hardly be seen as fulfilling the "Nine Points on Monumentality." In any case, the Nine Points do not directly confront the more limited case of a non-functional memorial such as that for the Jewish martyrs. How are we to Book dividend From: BRITAIN'S FUTURE, by David Callto. Horizon, N.Y., $8.50 gridded granite paving and large glass blocks, Kahn defines repetitive cubes and files of space that are the mere counterparts of the cubes and files of glass. By such routines, the completion of several operations yields only a little more of the same a non-synergetic effect already too familiar in modern architecture. Kahn's memorial is an exploration of abstract elements, but it opens no new opportunities for architecture.

Now, it may be argued that monumental expression lies beyond questions of human use or the development of form that Kahn seeks, for example, a dramatic evocation of the terror of events not to be forgotten. During and just after World War II, the Nazi's perpetration of genocide against the Jews profoundly shocked the vast majority of people. Such collective feelings form the base for a memorial that is more than anecdotal. What shocks us today is the realization that a new generation knows the Nazi's actions only as history and the appearance of ominous signs that we have not learned from past experience. At this later date, the specific terror to be recalled is less young whodunit fans just whetting their appetites.

Also recommended: "A Dirty Business," by Leslie Edgley; G. P. Putnam's Sons, N.Y., 182 "A Capital Crime," by Alexandra Roudybush, Crime Club, Doubleday, N.Y., 192 $3.95. MYCROT HOLMES By EDGAR J. DRISCOLL JR, Stiff Writer In an age when so much goes against the grain, it is a pleasure to contemplate the work of Hugh Townley.

He knows how to use wood in a most artistic way. This is more than brought home in a handsome major exhibit of the Bristol, R.I., artist's oeuvre now filling the galleries of the DeCordo-va Museum in Lincoln. One of New England's best known and most original sculptors of the grainy stuff, Townley is seen in some 62 sculptures and some 40 prints and drawings. All of them were done in the '60s the" majority of them in the last two years. Abstracts all, with the exception of a handful of toy animals, his sculptures are as rich and varied in imagery as are the woods he uses in mixed array.

As someone said of him during a showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art three years back: "His forms are as full of surprise, imbalance and unexpected connections as life itself." The statement still stands. A professor 1 of art at Brown University, Townley uses a wide assortment of warm colored, richly textured woods. Oiled, weathered, rough, smooth, By STANFORD ANDERSON The concept of monuments embarassed modern architects. Rebellious architects are unlikely candidates for such establishment commis sions as monuments; but beyond that it is the suspicion that monuments are an anachronism in our time. Lewis Mumford, for one, claimed that monumentality has been made virtually impossible by our deflation not only of traditional symbols but of the very concept of a symbol.

Each competition or commission for a monument reopens the question. Louis Kahn's design for a memorial to the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis is no exception. On a site in Battery Park, New York, Kahn proposes to buil'd a 66-foot square granite platform upon which will be placed seven near-cubes arranged symmetrically about two major axes. Each block is 10 feet square, 11 feet high built up from smaller solid glass units. The central block is open and inscribed; the six outer blocks are closed.

In Kahn's words, "the one the chapel speaks; the other six are silent." In 1943, Jose Luis Sert, now dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Design, the painter Fernand Leger, and the historian Sigfried Giedion made one of the few attempts to advance a sympathetic attitude toward a modern monumentality. One of their Nine Points 1 reads: "Sites for monuments must be planned. This will be possible once replanning is undertaken on a large scale which will create vast open spaces in the now decaying areas of our cities. In these open spaces, monumental architecture will find its appropriate setting which now does not exist, monumental buildings will then be able to stand in space, for THE HAUNTED MONASTERY, by Robert van Gulik. ChaAtt Scribner't Son, N.Y., 160 $3.95.

Since Robert van Gulik died a year ago, this novel may well be the last in the Judge Dee series. Of course, it is possible that Scribner may have a few more Dee stories waiting in the wings. Such things happen. Fleming died a few years back, and the James Bond thrillers are still rolling off the printing press. Judge Dee must be considered an exception to the Last History then has presented Britain with a dramatic reversal of fortune.

Accustomed to looking outward, where does she turn now? To alien Europe, to overpowering America, to a heterogeneous Commonwealth or inward to her own crowded island? It is a most trying time, one that might easily derange a less sensile people. If Britain is to achieve a new position worthy of her past glories and present talent, it will require leadership unusually endowed with creative political imagination. Unfortunately, imagination is an unfashionable faculty in the rather niggling analytical atmosphere of present English culture. But, at this critical moment in their history, the British may again find in themselves those imaginative and practical talents that were able to create the first stable constitutional state in Europe and join it successfully to a vast empire. DAVID CALLEO Dinamaula himself, once the strong, honest tribal leader, is corrupted, intoxicated with power, wooed by his new friends to throw out the British.

As the last of the Britons pack up their tennis rackets and load their Rolls Royces aboard the steamer, Bracken delivers his final warning to a bemused Dinamaula, doodling over a chart of ballistic-missile air mileage be-tween his capital and those of the Western powers. "You're in the driver's seat now, and no one dares say a word to you you're having your good time now. They all did, didn't they Nkrumah, Sukarno, the Nigerians they all had a wonderful time until the bills came in and the whole thing blew up?" On this note Monsarrat closes, but leaves the novel-istic door ajar for the finale of what could be a trilogy on his version of the Third World and its ultimate chances for life. Those chances are not nearly as promising or healthy as his authorship. ROBERT A.

McLEAN of the Bristol Hospital in Bristol, Ct. it is of birch, cherry, walnut, oak and maple, and is charged with very real energies all its own. Through Mar. 23. Back on Newbury st.

one finds: Bright, sunny, warmer -than Maytime colors lighting up the off-white walls of at least five Newbury-st. galleries. They remind one of Swinburne's line: "When the hounds of Spring are on Winter's traces Three of the artists involved in tossing these welcome bouquets our way these snow-laden February days are women. The other two, obviously, are male. The gals are Marilyn Powers of Brookline, now at the Joan Peterson Gallery; Catherine Zimmerman, also of Brookline, who is showing at the Eleanor Rigelhaupt Gallery; and, Robin Renner of Providence, at the Bo-tolph Gallery.

Incidentally, all three galleries are run by distaffers. So, too, are the Guild of Boston Artists, where Charles Demetropoulos of the Back Bay is back with his latest one-man; and the Obelisk Gallery, where abstracts by Frank Roth of New York city are on view. At the Guild, we were sorry to learn that Mary McLaughlin, its able manager who has been with it for 45 years, has retired. Mrs. Mary Denardo of Beverly and Rockport has taken her place.

In her latest solo, Miss Powers, wife of another prominent artist, Jason Ber-ger again presents fluid light-filled landscapes thoroughly expressive of a Summer in the sun. In this case Mexico. She also presents several loosely, lightly brushed portraits in the same, free-wheeling style. Her line is agitated, her forms sketchy but basically assured. Her color is delightfully fresh and invigorating.

And her spirited compositions have real carrying power to. them. While the figurative still figures in Miss Powers' work, say not so for Miss Zimmerman, a Smith college grad. She plies the hard edge, abstract vein. And in an incressingly in-depth, three dimensional way.

She still uses bands or strips of color for her modus operandi. But the bands (or strips) wider this time around and vary in width from stem to stern. Also, her color harmonies are simpler, purer and less busy-busy. It is through her juxtaposition of them that she seems to be breaking through to the 3-d. It's a singing show.

Colleen Moore in a new kind of role! How Women Can Make Money in the Stock Market Why cast star as Colleen husband, leading fast. So fascinating introduction the woman her 'dusty African intensity.1 His plot line is a taut, high-tension wire, predictable but suspenseful. The island kingdom of Pharamaul, which Monsar-' rat rescued from bloody civil war in his 1956 novel, is becoming independent in auspicious ceremonies as the sequel opens. Exiled leader Dinamaula has returned, restored to power by plebiscite, determined to make his black nation a symbol of the New Africa. British Comr.

David Bracken, who stays on as Dinamaula's chief secretary and friend, is gradually eased out by his native assistant, a bundu ward boss; and the white police commissioner is supplanted by a hulking native sergeant, who makes colonel overnight and seems destined to head the eventual military junta to depose Dinamaula. International politicians move in, including a Soviet technical advisory mission and a Red Chinese trade group. There seems little chance for PharamauPs survival, in a deepening mess of corruption, atrocity, intrigue and racial hate. light and dark, they are of birch, oak, maple, mahogany, walnut, rosewood, cherry; pine and lignum vitae, to name a few. These he saws, hews and chisels into intriguing shapes and symbols of his own making some circular, some oval, some spiky, some rectangular, some square, and so on.

Then he assembles them in" fanciful, abstract manner. The joints are unconcealed and plainly mortised, pegged, spliced or glued. Of his work, fellow sculptor Richard Lippold has said, it is "an engaging combination of ruggedness and elegance, of sly wit and grave undertones, of affection and detachment John Bauer, director of the Whitney Museum, New York, likens the 45-year-old Indiana-born artist's works to "the sturdy rafters in an 18th century barn They have the same beauty of strength, function and hand-wrought skilL He has wed an old craft, its roots deep in the American past, to a completely modern vision." Of especial interest in this showing (Townley has been exhibiting on Newbury st. for more than a decade) is a huge 9 by 20-ft wall relief commissioned for the lobby ins artist was engraver Samuel Maverick. Early in the 19th century he had published many newsworthy events ahd his prints were eagerly "borrowed" by Staffordshire potters for transfer printing.

The famous "Landing of Gen Lafayette" at New York in 1824, commemorated the beginning of the Marquis 13-month American tour, was used as a central design on a lovely dinner service for 12 by the famed Clews Bros, of Colridge, Eng. English pottery makers carefully watched each other's activities. If a design appeared popular, they didn't hesitate to copy it. interestingly, they drew the line at copying at a plate's edge and were careful not to infringe on another's distinctive border motif. In that way perhaps they eased their conscience when lifting a competitor's central design.

Fortunately for collectors today this is the one way that we are able to identify the unmarked works of many of the potters. An idea of a few current retail prices in antique shops for Staffordshire with American views may be helpful to collectors. In my opinion prices are high. Plates range all over the lot. A nine inch pink plate "View at Conway, N.H., $45; a six inch light blue "Valley of the Shenandoah," $30; a 10 inch dark blue "Capital Washington," $65; a eight and one-half inch blue "Na-hant near Boston," $80; brown cups and saucers "Fishkill on the Hudson," $12; blue State House, Boston, $50.

Teapots prices vary: blue, morning glory border, $50; blue Boston State House, $125; a dark blue "Washington at Mt. Vernon," $200 It may be well to again point out that these depict historic American events or places and are quite desira- ble to collectors. Old Staf- fordshire pieces that were made for English consump- tion can be bought a great deal cheaper. i 4 2 beg C7 C7 FLYING SAUCERS AND MARTIANS! Art fhey real or unreal? Compiled by George Eartey ENCOUNTERS WITH ALIENS The first collection of UFO stories everl Includes top writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Mildred Clinger-man, Robert F. Mack Reynolds, Lee Cor-rey, etc.

Intro and bibllo by Ivan T. Sanderson. $4.95 At your bootedter, or sand to: SHERBOURNE PRESS 1640 8. Lt Clantgt Blvd, Lot Aneto MOW Collecting antiques of Judge Dee series? 1876: the bu rule. He was an ancient Chinese detective, a real life character who lived during the Tang Dynasty.

He was old school, vintage fiction against an authentic background and, by right, he should never have achieved popularity in a fictional world dominated by private eyes, hard and soft boiled, and super spies on the sexy side. Regardless, Judge Dee was a solid seller, and he had developed a cult all his own. And he will be missed. He was a master of the unusual. Best 1 1 In "The Haunted Monastery," the good judge finds himself stranded during a violent rainstorm in a Taoist cloister in a desolate mountain region.

During his stay at the monastery, Judge Dee is called upon to solve three murders. Enroute to the solution, he is confronted by such strange figures- as the Embalmed Abbot, who sits in state in an underground crypt, and an elusive soul known as the Morose Monk. This is haunting stuff, a real chiller. It is highly recommended, particularly for Seller List hi By CHARLES CHISHOLM How did antique collecting start in America? For years this question has interested many collectors. Certainly the Centennial Exposition of 1876 had much to do with inspiring Americans to look nostalgically back into the past and perhaps collect a few memorabilia of days long gone.

Interestingly, an English pottery creation had much to do with the "collecting bug," that began in America in 1876. On display at the Exposition was a fine collection of blue English Staffordshire. On this ware were transfer-printed scenes that lifted American hearts: battles, events, historical buildings, landscapes and people of the American past. In 1878, an informal little booklet was published, the first written for China and pottery collectors. Entitled the "China Hunters Club," it featured an article by William Prime, who wrote: "Whatever disdain the collector of Dresden or Sevres may look down upon these blueprinted crockeries (Staffordshire) the day will come when specimens showing our first railways, the of our statesmen, soldiers and sailors, the opening of our canals, the.

various events of our wars, and our triumphs in peace will rank in historical collections with the V9vi rif fJrooo Most blue Staffordshire featuring historic scenes was made between 1818 and i848. Many of the early scenic views were "borrowed" from travel books: Sketches were purchased from ican artists by some Staffordshire potters, and others commissioned British artists to go to America and record their impressions in pen and British artist Basil Hall, traveled extensively throughout the United StatM and 1968 ttionZJO United corto. HARPER Feature Nicholas And Alexandra Massie .125 3 The Doctor's Stillman Quick Weight Loss Diet Baker 95 The Deal Marshall "9Sj 1 The President's Plane Is Missing Serling TheKIansman Huie 11 1 i 1 Shoes Of The Fisherman West I Rosemary's Baby Levin I ii Seventh Avenue Bogner A Girl Called Jules Milani The Magus Fowles a famous and popular movie a financial adviser? Because Moore was trained by her a founding partner of a investment firm. She learned will anyone who owns her A to guide a perfect to the market, even for who has trouble balancing checkbook. $4.95 at booksellers el DOUBLEDAY wilhknowl.

edge, perception, lucidity, eloquence and passion." neison clueck, N.Y. Times Book Review Mas terful israei 8 0reign m5nister who has been called a blend of Shakespeare and Churchill, gives his personal evaluation of the forces, events and personalities that shaped Jewish berkov, Cleveland Plain Dealer Stiffing The best short story of a long-lived people at present in print." i John barkham, Saturday Review Syndicate 543 pages 120 pages of photographs cjR. iVSO, now at your bookstore tf? BEHRMAN HOUSERANDOM HOUSE New and Recommended The Tower Of Babel Morris L. West U.25 Stop-Time Frank Conroy 195 I Soul On Ice.MWKH, Eldridge Cleaver il.95 Man Of La Mancha Dale Wasserman 60f 1969 Foreign Car Prices 1.00 -made over 40 etchings. for the potters.

On A mun nail lugiuy by the potters as an Used Car Prices, Spring 1969 11.00 1 "I -in I.