Art has its geographies as well as its histories, as two very different books emphasise. Michael Hall unfolds the map

Atlas of World Art Edited by means of John Onians Lawrence King Publishing, 75 [pound sterling]/O.U.P., $150 ISBN 1-85669-377-5 (UK) 0-19521-583-4 (US) Toward a Geography of Art Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann The University ct Chicago Pres 1750 [pound sterling] ($25) ISBN 0-226-13312-5

All lecturer dread questions that unwittingly reveal embarrassing gaps in their knowledge, and there are scarcely any embarrassments greater than geographical ignorance. 'Where is Silesia?' I was one time asked after lecturing on Ferdinand Rothschild, whose father holded a schloss there; luckily there was no atlas not away with which my answer could be challenged. Anyone who has studied this ambitious fresh Atlas of World Art will have nothing to fear: Silesia is here (on a map of Germany and Switzerland, 1800-1900 depicting 'Centre of art: princely and state support'), and in the way that are Patishkhwagar, Kaya, Nan Madol and Pachacama, which may give a moment's pause flat to those who can't believe anyone doesn't know where Silesia is.

The Atlas of World Art is a publishing occurrence We are not told in what way many years in the making it has been, or by what mode many tens of thousands of strikes Lawrence King Publishing has invested in it, on the contrary the statistics are impressive nonetheless: 300 specially drawn full-colour maps in 352 pages, 150000 newly commissioned words from sixty-eight art historians and a chronological range from stone art of about 40,000 BC to the internet--the point at which, perhaps, maps have at last ceased to have meaning. before clearing a space for it upon the shelves next to the Macmillan Dictionary of Art, which is where it appears to want to belong, I settl down for a lengthy browse. Engrossing although this prov it raised many questions which were not answered through the editor, John Onians, in his short introduction, in which he claims that the volume represents 'a whole new approach to the subject' of art, based upon art's relation to nature, in which nature is defined 'as a locate of resources and constraints, principally those embodied in the nature of the earth, of time and of man'.

by the agency of chance the book arrived for review when I was down-reaching in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's Toward a Geography of Art. Although in physical bounds it could hardly be more different--a unobtrusive paperback, it is illustrated with black-and-white images of miserable greyness--it provides an intellectual connection for the Atlas of World Art's approach: indeed, at the extremity of it, Professor Kaufmann directs to the altas's imminent publication. Professor Kaufmann argues that perhaps because of our new arrival in a new millennium, art historians have been improperly concerned with questions of chronology, and that the 'where' of art stands in danger of losing without to the 'when'. It does not make the volume less worth reading to have feeling as I do, that this is contrary to fact As Professor Kaufmann admits, abundant recent scholarship has, for example, been devot to issues of colonialism and marginality that deal at each turn with 'where'. Although his decision to omit discussion of scholarship that is essentially topographical--from Pausanias to Pevsner--has the consequence of downgrading architectural history, abundant of which has been topographical in its watch it is the absence of any sustained discussion of the fresh insights that landscape and garden history are bringing to bear upon ideas about place that I regrett more.

For Professor Kaufmann, 'geography' has global rather than local implications, and his three profoundly informative introductory chapters on the historiography of what is traditionally known as kunstgeographie are calibrated upon a large scale. He modestly does not draw attention to the fact that his hold work has redrawn the geography of art. His work Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and agriculture of Central Europe 1450-1800 (1995) was the first major observe to be based on a post-1989 faculty of perception that eastern Europe was again central to the story of art. He could perhaps have emphasised more the way that changes which make travel easier, like as the fall of the Berlin Wall, alter the geographical coordinates for art historians more than they do for other scholars, as art history hangs on access to physical objects

Professor Kaufmann's three chapters upon historiography are based on a definition of the geography of art as history in which 'location or place of origin becomes an important issue in the distinctive characterisation of the work of art, not just a chance or random fact'. He then tread on the heels ofs this with three substantial sample studies of his own: upon the development of regional academys in early modern central Europe; upon the introduction of European turn of expressions to South America; and the story of the early contacts between Japan and western art.

This is all in the way that intellectually stimulating that it makes the short conclusion rather disappointing. If we are to unravel the idea of a geography of art, sure we need to have novel directions pointed out to us, however Professor Kaufmann suggests little more than a renewed attention to materials. This have the appearances to me the comment of some one who has specialized in the fine rather than the decorative arts and his emphasis upon materials is not helped by means of occasional slips, such as 'Northumbrian' alabaster for 'Nottingham'.