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The slimness of this volume belies the wealth of information it contains, as author Louis Rose interweaves the rich ideas of Freud with those of several notable art historians of the early twentieth century. He focuses on the period beginning with the decade before World War I and ending in the years immediately after World War II. The author addresses a variety of issues important to those interested in art criticism, cultural history, and psychoanalysis, tracing them in the works of Freud, Ernst Kris, Aby Warburg, Emanuel Loewy, Fritz Saxl, and Ernst Gombrich. The scholarly character of the volume is notable; 145 pages of text are followed by 39 pages of chapter notes and bibliography. Rose himself refers to the book as an extended essay, and indeed each of its five chapters is essentially an essay in itself. The chapters are titled “Image-Making and Movement,” “Mental Pictures and Visual Art: Aby Warburg and Emanuel Loewy,” “Reenactments: Sigmund Freud,” “Rhythms of Renewal: Ernst Kris and Fritz Saxl,” and “A Memory of Greece.” Thought-provoking and replete with historical facts, the book is densely written and makes considerable demands on the reader. Although at times its main themes are obscured by myriad details, the effort expended in reading this stimulating book can be quite rewarding.
Chapter 1, “Image-Making and Movement,” explores the creation of the illusion of movement in artistic and mental images. Rose describes the consideration at the turn of the century of links between artists' individual creations and cultural products such as myth, ritual, and theater. The author notes that the writers he discusses explored how the artistic images “preserved the remnants of enactments and dramatizations from the past,” using the term mimesis to refer to “the survival and regeneration of those dramatic fragments” (p. 18). Of interest from the