'It would not be untrue to say that to the general public in Great Britain modern German art is unknown.'

THESE words with their classic British circumspection were written in 1938, the first sentence of Herbert Read's Introduction to a Pelican Special written by Peter Thoene, which was published to coincide with 'the London opening of the famous Munich exhibition of "degenerate" German art'. Such a statement is still largely true today. Until recently the national museums hardly collected German art and temporary exhibitions have focussed on specific movements or individuals rather than on any broad overview. The organisers of the current exhibition of expressionist and post-expressionist painting and sculpture at the Royal Academy should, therefore, be congratulated for collecting together in Britain an unprecedentedly wide-ranging selection of work made since 1905. This starting date marks the formation, in Dresden, of Die Brücke [The Bridge], an idealistic guild of young artists who, inspired by Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Munch and Whitman, broke the rigid yoke of middle-class convention and painted like 'savages' in an attempt to express authentic emotion.

AS the artistic representation of living things had been forbidden by the Prophet, painting in the Muslim world of necessity avoided grand public statements and was confined rather to small portable forms such as manuscripts and albums, executed under the patronage of those potentates educated enough to have developed their aesthetic sensibilities and powerful enough to brave the wrath of the pious. This private nature of the art made it totally dependent on the patronage of kings and princes, and by and large the finest work was commissioned by the most discerning and refined of patrons, in whose manuscript ateliers great painters could add their work to that of their artistic peers, the calligraphers, illuminators, gilders and binders. The product was that most exquisite of literary creations, the Persian illuminated manuscript. The great-est patrons not only supported their artists in all their necessities, but actively shaped their work to their own taste.

THE topic of rococo book illustration seems so contradictory as to be self-destructing. For the rococo is a style of decoration, external and ornamental; book illustration is primarily internal and essential, a pictorial translation of a verbal text. Can these different functions be combined? Then too, in general the rococo as decoration has been only grudgingly extended to the other arts. Some critics, on the other hand, seek to expand the definition beyond the decorative and visual arts. They find it in the comedies of Marivaux and even the poetry of Voltaire, who has been awarded the startling label of Rokokomensch.