Giovanni Segantini, by Hans Zbinden. Schweizer Heimatbiicher 43/44. 60 pages, with ten plates in color and 31 in monotone. Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1951. Price, $2.25.

Although the artist Segantini is forever associated with the Engadine, he was Austrian by birth and received his slight training in Italy. Yet in his short life (1868-99), much of it in poverty, he painted the immense broken-color studies that culminated in the triptych “Werden, Sein, Vergehen,” a triumph of Swiss mountain painting and the glory of the Segantini museum at St. Moritz. The Maloja was his workshop and his last resting place. His early death was due to exposure and the peritonitis that followed a ruptured appendix—a generation too early for the surgical skills which might have saved him. This book makes evident the grandeur and nobility of his purpose.

J.M.T