Museums Between Covers

In Andre Malraux's "imaginary museum" of art reproductions, many walls are still blank. But last week U.S. publishers were doing their best to fill in the empty spaces and, incidentally, investing more dollars than ever before in the U.S.'s growing interest in art of all nations and ages. Result: the biggest crop of art books ever. In anticipation of the Christmas season, more than 100 titles have been published in the fall season alone at prices ranging from 50-c- to $50.

Among the best:

THE BELLES HEURES OF JEAN, DUKE OF BERRY PRINCE OF FRANCE (Metropolitan Museum; $4.75) is a bargain and, except for its macaronic title, a model of simplicity. In the years before his death in 1416, the old duke commissioned a number of books that were luxurious masterpieces of medieval illumination. The Metropolitan owns one of them, reproduces 33 pages in facsimile. Text: brief but helpful. Reproductions: wondrously exact.

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE SCULPTURE, by John Pope-Hennessy (Phaidon; $20), surveys in 309 photographs and a scholarly text the full range of 15th century Italian sculpture from Brunelleschi and Donatello onward. A sober book, it fairly bursts with sculptured passion, giving new romance to that old term, the Renaissance.

ART NEWS ANNUAL (Art News; $4.95) is a Christmas punch of old and new art, powerfully spiked with a provocative and thoughtful study by Alfred Frankfurter of the year's hottest art news--the runaway prices of pictures--and a fond salute to Manhattan's abstract-expressionist center: Tenth Street.

THE HOKUSAI SKETCHBOOK, by James A. Michener (Tuttle; $10), has hundreds of excellent reproductions from the mountains of popular drawings and prints that Hokusai gave to the world between 1814 and 1878, plus a warm, perceptive introduction to the zestful Japanese master by Novelist Michener. Publisher Tuttle prints in Tokyo, distributes from Rutland, Vt., offers no less than a dozen other new books on Japanese art this year.

MASTERPIECES OF THE JAPANESE COLOR WOODCUT, by Willy Boiler (Crown; $25), is a reissue of a German classic, one of the loveliest art books ever produced on one of the loveliest of popular art forms; with large, superbly executed plates in color and black and white.

THE PICTURE HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY, by Peter Pollack (Abrams; $17.50), is by far the strongest argument yet made in book form for considering photography an art. The clear solid text and 600-odd plates offer amateur photographers a tradition to measure themselves against and an impressive reminder that there is more to photography than is dreamt of by some modern gadgeteers.

THE SCULPTURE OF AFRICA, by Eliot Elisofon (Praeger; $15), contains 405 examples, so brilliantly displayed that the photographs (mostly done on assignment for LIFE) convey a good deal of the subjects' three-dimensional excitement and lasting strangeness. By its influence on Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi and others, African sculpture changed the course of modern art; yet it is hard to imagine that people will ever get used to it.

MOSAICS OF ST. MARK'S (New York Graphic; $22.50) also suffers from a certain stuffiness of text, but its 44 big color plates are little short of perfection, do much to bring the Byzantine marvels of St. Mark's Cathedral down from the shadowy vaulted ceilings into the reader's lap. Many a tourist has stopped in Venice and visited its cathedral without ever dreaming that he stood at the heart of one of Byzantium's finest offshoots. This book should send him back once more.

FLEMISH PAINTING FROM BOSCH TO RUBENS (Skira; $25) has 112 eye-filling color reproductions, mostly good. Text contains a maximum of mere information and a minimum of thought, as is all too common with art books. The gigantic hero, overshadowing both Bosch and Rubens should of course be Bruegel, but he occupies only 22 pages out of 202, and his essential mysticism is barely hinted. But the pictures show the Bruegel, as Pliny said of Apelles, "painted many things that are really unpaintable."

THE LAST WORKS OF MATISSE (Harcourt, Brace; $32.50) is more of an event than a book, splendidly reproduces the entire output of Matisse's last five years, and proves that the "collages" of scissored and pasted colored paper he made in sickbed were a breakthrough to a new, intensely personal art form.

Other standouts range from ARP (Museum of Modern Art; $4.50) to VERMEER (Phaidon; $10). Oriental art gets a lion's share of publishers' attention, with 2000 YEARS OF JAPANESE ART (Abrams; $25) and CHINESE PAINTING (Universe; $10) among the handsomest efforts. Pelican Books offers a monumental study, ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN ITALY: 1600-1750, for $12.50. Collins has a NEW TESTAMENT (de luxe, $50) exquisitely illustrated with tipped-in reproductions from medieval manuscripts, and Praeger a compendium of ARTISTS' TECHNIQUES ($12.50). New York Graphic provides a large Henry Moore sketchbook of HEADS, FIGURES AND IDEAS at $30, and a handsome color survey of Pre-Hispanic Mexican painting at $18. Altogether, they are almost enough to make the armchair viewer feel pleasantly footsore.

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