THE WAY ART HAPPENS

How art makes history and history makes art is the thematic peg on which aesthetician Louis Paul hangs a short but scintillating study of world-wide sculpture and painting from the primitive past to European Impressionism. Admittedly only an introduction and one arranged principally to attract the teenage student, the book's scholarship, subject matter and illustrations have enough taste and thoughtfulness to interest the general reader as well. Among the descriptions of socio- cultural developments, you'll find the Egyptian pyramids and the immortality of the soul; the Orientals seeking on canvas Buddha's contemplative harmony; the anti-mysticism of the Greeks and the glorification of the body; Justinian bankrupting the Byzantine treasury and building St. Sophia till there was not enough loot left to light the altar lamps; Christian iconography and the Gothic spirit; the reciprocal rise of materialism and humanism in the Italian Renaissance; Louis XIV's rococo court; and finally, the 19th century entrance of both the bourgeoisie and the bohemian and the attendant myth-making publicity (""The quickest way to acceptance and fame was to become the object of a cult or fad better still, to die""). Da Vinci, El Greco, Monet and Cezanne get the brightest spotlighting.