Mekhitarian Arpag. Egyptian Painting

Rizzoli, 1978. — 166 p.This book might be entitled “Scenes from the Painted Tombs of the New Kingdom at Thebes, Selected Chiefly by Reason of Their Appeal to Contemporary Taste.” Avowedly an old-fashioned and unwieldy tide, yet it describes the scope and purpose of the book as explained at greater length by the author in his introductory passages. The handsome volume docs not attempt to give a full history of Egyptian painting nor even of Egyptian painting in the New Kingdom. It is confined chiefly to charming and appealing genre scenes and suggestive preliminary sketches from the Theban tombs. These sketches are indeed often strangely modern, though many of them, if finished, would surely have taken, on the hieratic quality which the author deplores as academic. In its very limitation, however, the book has great value, for it is bound to attract a public which, in the unhappy cliche of M. Mekhkarian’s translator, is “allergic” to many of the traditional subjects of Egyptian art. While the paintings of the New Kingdom are not the noblest achievements of the Egyptian artist, the very nature of the medium invited him to a freedom from established forms which was quite in keeping with the spirit of the age, and his work often shows, accordingly, a spontaneity and freshness rarely met with elsewhere in Egyptian art and perhaps more easily comprehended by the modern mind than are the austerities of the great masterpieces.