Temperaments: Artists Facing Their Work

In five wholly engaging essays, all previously published in the New Yorker , Hofstadter deciphers art as its maker's second self, a mirror of the artist's temperament, life-style and tastes. Son of historian Richard Hofstadter, the author hobnobbed with all of the artists profiled. For painter Avigdor Arikha, who made drawings to keep his sanity in a Nazi concentration camp, art is still a means of survival. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who pursues a quest for total visual awareness, seems a contradictory figure, both anarcho-Buddhist and well-bred gentleman possessed of ``a sort of blank awareness of the target, as in Zen archery.'' We also meet French modernist pioneer Jean Helion, cannibalizer of his own styles; R. B. Kitaj, an American not-at-home in London; Leon Kossoff, another Londoner, who lives in permanent upheaval and relishes his outsider status; and abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn, an unbohemian Californian. Hofstadter joins the front ranks of commentators on modern art with these sensitive, probing portraits. Illustrated. (Apr.)