Books: Passionate Painter

VINCENT VAN GOGH—Julius Meier-Graefe—Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Critics, the sacred geese whose panicky cackling rouses the citadel of plain men against the night attack of some threateningly new idea, are sometimes better than that. In Science, such men as J. W. N. Sullivan (TIME, Sept. 5, 1932; Oct. 23), in Art and Literature, Julius Meier-Graefe, are not so much sentries as interpreters. Bilingual, they can read the barbaric ensigns of these seeming foreigners and translate them into symbols that will not frighten the commonest sense. Interpreter Meier-Graefe's biography of crazy Painter van Gogh is...