Architect Turned Cartoonist

CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES (224 pp.) -- Osbert Lancaster -- Houghton Mifflin ($4).

"My criteria," says 40-year-old Artist Osbert Lancaster, the urbanely acid political cartoonist of London's Daily Express, "remain firmly Anglo-Saxon . . . [My] standards of judgment are always those of an Anglican graduate of Oxford with a taste for architecture, turned cartoonist, approaching middle age and living in Kensington."

In 1944 Lancaster packed his criteria and went off to Greece, where the British government had assigned him to the Athens embassy as first secretary. After 18 months he returned to London with his standards intact and a sheaf of sketches of what he had seen. The result is a handsomely and pointedly illustrated travel book that will even delight readers to whom the word "Acropolis" recalls nothing but a tiresome, quickly forgotten history lesson.

Some of his crispest observations are leveled at the political nature of the Greek people. Writes Lancaster: "In a country where everyone from the shoeshine boy ... to the cotton millionaire . . . regards himself, quite rightly, as uncommon and unique, the coming of the century of the common man is likely to be indefinitely postponed . . ."

Politics, Lancaster found, is a Greek passion rather than an onerous civic burden, and politicians "enjoy a regard which . . . can today be claimed solely by the more popular American film stars." Occasionally, the passion leads to refinements probably not dreamed of in Marshall Plan philosophy. At an orchestra rehearsal, "the composer of the work in progress having informed the orchestra that the next 25 bars of his tone-poem represented the triumph of democracy over Fascism, all the strings got up and cheered and the brass and percussion walked out in a rage." The woodwinds (who in Greece "are almost always Liberal") compromised by sitting quietly.

Lancaster wears his considerable knowledge of Greek history and architecture without pretension, and his first-rate drawings in line and color make Classical Land, scape a far more attractive guide than the standard authorities. What gives Lancaster's book its special quality is the easy and pertinent shuttling from present to past and back to the immediate. His Anglo-Saxon standards, it turns out, left him with plenty to admire--from the Byzantine intrusions on the classic architecture so revered by the purists, to the Greeks themselves, whom he found lazy, but rarely rude or stupid.

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