Deck the Shelves for $4.95 and Up
A Christmas of art, nature, history and chuckles
OVER $75
Giorgio Vasari was the Boswell of the 16th century art world. He was also its Sammy Glick. As a painter and architect he outhustled many of his betters for commissions in the courts of Florence, Rome, Naples and Bologna. Vasari had an inflated opinion of his talent as a painter, so it is something of an irony that he is remembered chiefly for his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, an informal, even gossipy collection of biographical studies of the great and near great of Italian art. This boxed three-volume re-edition, translated by Gaston Du C. de Vere (Abrams; 2323 pages; $225), is of high quality on the inside with gemlike tip-ins, though a touch tacky on the outside with spines of imitation leather. Real cloth would have been classier.
In 1894 a surplus of ivory coming out of the Congo prompted the Belgian government to offer the material free to sculptors. Many accepted, and the ivory statuette soon stood tall in the art deco movement. Isadora Duncan by Alberto Savinio (Franco Maria Ricci; 184 pages; $125) shows just how exquisite some of these miniature sculptures became. All works pictured here were inspired, in one way or another, by the blithe spirit of American Dancer Isadora Duncan. Artists like Demeter Chiparus and Friederich Preiss, whose names are familiar today only to collectors, shaped ivory as if it were butter; the dancing figures they carved were adorned with bronze and stood or reclined on bases of marble or onyx. Many of the statuettes hover at the brink of kitsch, but their brilliant colors and glowing surfaces (clearly reproduced in the tipped-in illustrations) must be seen to be believed.
From their printing shop in Lower Manhattan, Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives taught 19th century America to see itself. Their lithographs re-created urban and rural growth, disasters, the opening of the West and a vast anthology of occupations and pastimes. The Great Book of Currier & Ives' America by Walton Rawls (Abbeville Press; 488 pages; $85) is ponderous to heft but impossible to put down. Author Rawls' text is a lively history of these remarkable illustrators, their entrepreneurial triumphs and their battles with an alarming new enemy, the photograph. Better still are the more than 400 illustrations, culled from the 7,000-plus -- lithographs that Currier & Ives issued.
Kilims, or flat-woven rugs, have long been considered the s poor relatives of the Oriental knotted pile rugs that have proved to be one of the best --though specialized--hedges against inflation in recent years. Kilims by Yanni Petsopoulos with Michael Franses (Rizzoli; 394 pages; $85) gives these weavings their proper due. It should be welcomed by both collectors and decorators, the former because the author has provided clear and much needed scholarship on origins and techniques, the latter because of the rare and glorious examples of kilims from Anatolia, the Caucasus and Persia that are reproduced in the book's spectacular color photos.
$30-$75
Drawing may be defined as the "art of representing the colored mass of objects or recording one's inner visions on a thin flat surface by means of lines which do not exist in nature." That, at least, is the explanation offered in Drawing by Genevieve Monnier and Bernice Rose (Rizzoli; 278 pages; $75), and it seems as good as any. The 365 illustrations (100 of them in color) span virtually all of drawing's long history. The text offers not only an informative historical survey but also a technical guide to the various kinds of materials that artists have used.
Housed in a building that itself appears capable of flight, the National Air and Space Museum is unquestionably the biggest tourist attraction in Washington. C.D.B. Bryan's The National Air and Space Museum (Abrams; 504 pages; $50) should prove just as big an attraction on the coffee table. One reason this book works is its photography, done with knowledge and passion by Michael Freeman, Robert Golden and Dennis Rolfe, whether showing a venerable DC-3 as it makes its way through the heavy traffic suspended from the museum's raf ters, capturing the streamlined power of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter or catching an earthrise on the moon.
The Broadway musical is a kinetic compound of electrically charged energy, precision team work, spectacular razzle-dazzle, and the visceral urge to make that golden killing. Drama Critic Martin Gottfried astutely captures all of that and more in Broadway Musicals (Abrams; 353 pages; $45). After nearly 20 years on the aisle, he provides a knowledgeable guided tour through every avenue and aspect of hits from Oklahoma! to A Chorus Line. In this era of scrimp and save, the 395 black-and-white and color photographs are some thing of a rarity.
Celts probably never possessed so grand a vision as seen in The Celtic World by Barry Cunliffe (Mc Graw-Hill; 224 pages; $39.95). But grand they were. Their language and culture spread across the ancient world from Anatolia to Iberia, from the Danube to the edges of the British Isles. They were artisans of genius, yet they fought like madmen, striking a respectful fear in ancient chroniclers by sacking Rome in 390 B.C. In this sweeping, lucid and amply illustrated history, Barry Cunliffe becomes their bard, celebrating the fact that the Celts endure.
Written by the British art critic and historian Ian Dunlop, Degas (Harper & Row; 240 pages; $37.50) is by far the best introduction to the life and work of the painter of boulevards and ballet dancers now in print. A student of Ingres's and the great contemporary of Manet, Flaubert Sand the Goncourt brothers, Degas was one of those ocular witnesses without whom the cultural life of France in the 19th century cannot be understood; and no writer has done a better job of placing this tetchy, formidable genius, with his astonishing powers of observation iand his bitter tongue ("Whistler, you behave as though you have no talent"), within the milieu of his time. Dunlop writes with warm understanding of Degas's paintings, discussing them without jargon; and his plain, elegantly turned prose does much to catch the "mysterious and fugitive beauty to many of his pictures which is apt to disappear under the scholarly microscope."
In Drawings and Digressions (Potter; 264 pages; $35), Larry Rivers offers candid reminiscences about his life and work, drugs and wives. As a playful realist, Rivers stood apart from the abstract expressionism that dominated the New York art world of the '50s. His individualism and vitality are well represented in this handsome album with witty paintings like Washington Crossing the Delaware, as well as the studies for some of his best-known works, Dutch Masters, French Money and Rainbow Rembrandt.
'Tis not the season to be jolly for baseball addicts; the World Series is long since over and spring training seems a wintry way off. Yet some holiday cheer is at hand in The Ultimate Baseball Book, edited by Daniel Okrent and Harris Lewine (Houghton Mifflin; 352 pages; $35), as generous a gift to the hot-stove league as any fan could wish. The editors offer a decade-by-decade history of the national pastime interspersed with nine essays on individual topics. Best of all are the hundreds of photographs, many dating back to the game's earliest seasons, and the reproductions of old baseball cards, programs and other assorted memorabilia.
UNDER $30
Royal connections aside, Lord Snowdon has an eclat of his own: he is a smashingly good photographer. In this wittily written, visually provocative Snowdon: A Photographic Autobiography (Times Books; 239 pages; $29.95), Princess Margaret's ex offers a collection dazzling in its sweep and range. Fleet Street's Lord Beaverbrook, looking like a longshoreman, peers out of one page, scruffy Liverpool slum children out of another. The familiar becomes uncommon: a demoniacal Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer, a pop-eyed Alec Guinness in Hotel Paradiso. There is some royal family fun --Princess Alice, 95, looking every inch a queen, next to a shot of Queen Elizabeth II looking every inch a grandmother. And just when the reader thinks "Where is she?" a stunning portrait of Princess Margaret, taken a dozen long years ago.
Vendors of sake, pickled vegetables and straw baskets mingle with kago (chair) bearers, itinerant priests and the more familiar samurai, geisha, and sumo wrestlers in Japan: Photographs 1854 1905, edited by Clark Worswick (Knopf; 151 pages; $25). Drawn from hundreds of European and Japanese prints, these 120 photos recall the flavor and ethos of feudal Japan as it was rapidly disappearing. Included is a generous sampling of hand-tinted photos, colored by the countless numbers of wood-block artists displaced by the new medium that, ironically, often echoed its predecessor in subject and pose.
British Photographer Eric Hosking has spent the past 50 years and lost the use of an eye trying to photograph birds in their natural habitats. He freely acknowledges his monomania in A Passion for Birds (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; 224 pages; $25), a brilliant collection of pictures of everything from sparrows to the owl that attacked him. Charles Tunnicliffe is similarly passionate, and differs from Hosking only in his preferring pencil and paintbrush to the camera. His Sketchbook of Birds (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 123 drawings; $19.95) shows him to be a man with a naturalist's eye and an artist's soul.
One of the best known of 20th century American artists, Edward Hopper, who died in 1967, is familiar to generations of gallerygoers for his pictures of stark New England scenery and lonely city streets. But even before he achieved fame, Hopper was known to thousands of magazine readers as an illustrator and printmaker.
Two new books show why Gail Levin's Edward Hopper as Illustrator (Norton/ The Whitney Museum of American Art; 288 pages; $24.95) brings together the dramatic paintings and drawings Hopper executed for the covers of such publications as Tavern Topics and Hotel Management, as well as the illustrations he did for books and catalogues. Levin's companion volume, Edward Hopper: The Complete Prints (Norton/The Whitney Museum; unpaginated; $15.95), reproduces more than 100 of the artist's etchings and dry points.
"The real war will never get in the books," wrote Walt Whitman. In Famous
Land Battles: From Agincourt to the Six Day
War (Little, Brown; 184 pages; $17.50), Richard Humble, an English military historian, goes further than most of his fraternity to get it all in. Some of his vignettes of battle scenes--half-crazed English soldiers fighting naked at Agincourt, defeated German troops stumbling drunkenly from the First Marne--are as telling as his descriptions of the pettifoggery, vanity and incompetence of commanders and politicians. Together with an introductory section recapitulating ancient wars and a final chapter previewing the next (and last), Humble incisively analyzes 18 great victories from the day of the longbow to the era of the missile. The book is superbly illustrated, with excellent battlefield maps.
Will Barnet has been making prints for nearly 50 years; his reputation as a formal virtuoso and innovator is now secure.
Will Barnet: 27 Master Prints (Abrams; 63 pages; $12.50) offers a sampling of work done over the past decade and provides fresh evidence of the artist's versatility. His lithographs employ a broad palette of muted, pastel colors, while the serigraphs are built up from large blocks of flat, brilliant hues. For subjects, Barnet favors women and cats in stylized arrangements leaning toward abstraction. Woman Reading, perhaps his best-known work, achieves an almost hieroglyphic serenity.
The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species not only changed the way Victorians thought, it altered the way they saw. Animals became part of the great chain of being and illustrators freshened their efforts to give birds and mammals moral characteristics. Perhaps the best and, ironically, the most obscure was Ernest Griset, whose influence can be seen in the works of such disparate artists as Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, and the whole phalanx of present-day New Yorker cartoonists. In Ernest Griset by Lionel Lambourne (Thames & Hudson; 88 pages; $8.95), even hints of Miss Piggy can be seen in the antic portraits of hogs and frogs and owls. The result is a rare pictorial biograph that shuttles between serious analysis and pure nonsense.
Humor, James Thurber observed, "is emotional chaos remembered in tranquillity." That at least seems to be the governing philosophy behind many of the cartoons in this year's collections. The best in this vein is Gahan Wilson's gently crafted Nuts (Marek; unpaginated; $4.95), chronicles of growing up. "You who remember how great it was to be a little kid, gang, don't remember how it was to be a little kid," warns Wilson, whose intrepid, chunky comic -strip hero survives a series of boyhood crises. Pilgrim's Regress, edited by Joel Wells (Thomas More Press; 127 pages; $8.95), is a collection of cartoons both secular and otherwordly, selected from the pages of the liberal Catholic journal The Critic. Here a prim stewardess warns a passenger, "You can't read erotic books while we're in Irish air space," and two dour leprechauns, spotting a leprechaun bishop under a toadstool, observe. "So much for our carefree, puckish way of life." Funny fauna inhabit Animals, Animals, Animals, edited by George Booth, Gahan Wilson and Ron Wolin (Harper & Row; 241 pages; $12.50), an old-fashioned chortler of a book. Next to a sign reading DO NOT FEED THE BEARS a smirking moose wears his own sign: I AM NOT A BEAR. Elephants stand around remembering "the Alamo," "the Maine," "Pearl Harbor" and a toga-clad pig solemnly inscribes a scroll under a sign that says:
"TSKTHAY"
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