GIFT BOOKS

$45 AND UP

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE by Georgia O'Keeffe. Unpaged. Viking. $75. There are 108 exacting color plates in this spare, handsome book. The paintings were chosen by the artist, now in her 90th year; many have not been reproduced before. The wonder is that despite their stark eloquence, they are almost upstaged by the text--also by O'Keeffe. She describes her surroundings in Abiquiu, N. Mex., recalls the '20s when D.H. Lawrence was underfoot. Her voice is laconic, styleless, arrow straight to the point. About one of her pictures of bleached pelvic bones, she notes: "I was the sort of child that ate around the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut. So probably--not having changed much --when I started painting pelvic bones I was most interested in the hole in the bone."

PRE-COLUMBIAN ART OF SOUTH AMERICA by Alan Lapiner. 460 pages. Abrams. $50. The pottery, statuary, textiles and metalwork of the ancient Americas are no longer considered mere artifacts of forgotten peoples but art forms that reflect the sophistication of complex civilization. The late Alan Lapiner chose to illustrate his book with outstanding examples of ritual tomb furnishings and gold and silver mummy ornaments from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil. The result is a trove for collectors and browsers alike.

THE UNICORN TAPESTRIES by Margaret B. Freeman. 244 pages. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Dutton. $45. The seven magnificent tapestries depicting the hunt of the unicorn (on permanent display at the Cloisters in Manhattan) dazzle the eye. Woven into the tapestries' more than 1,000 sq. ft. is a graphic portrait of the medieval mind, frozen at a time (circa 1500) when thought was beginning to shift from heaven to earth. Thus while the tapestries tell the story of a bridegroom brought to the altar and of the death and resurrection of Christ, they also show the realistic hunt of a wholly believable unicorn. Margaret B. Freeman, a former curator of the Cloisters, has written a scholarly and enthralling analysis of the tapestries, including an explanation of the weaving techniques that were used to produce one of the glories of Western art.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART by John Walker. 696 pages. Abrams. $45. For those unable to visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this collection offers a distant second-best tour. Although the 1,028 color plates illustrate the gallery's estimable holdings, many are reproduced in a size somewhat smaller than that of a self-respecting post card. The saving bonus is the lucid running commentary of John Walker, who has been with the museum since its birth in 1939.

ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA by G.E. Kidder Smith. 832 pages. American Heritage/Norton. $45. The author motored 130,000 miles to see and photograph the structures that might best represent America's architecture. The trip was worth the effort. In this two-volume pictorial history readers will find old favorites (New England's shingled houses, the South's Greek Revival manors, the Southwest's adobe churches) as well as such modern masterpieces as Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, Eero Saarinen's Dulles Airport and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute.

SWISS PAINTING by Florens Deuchler, Marcel Roethlisberger and Hans Luethy. 198 pages. Skira/Rizzoli. $45. One calumny on Switzerland runs that 500 years of democracy produced the cuckoo clock. Naturally, the three Swiss academicians who produced this book dispute the insult. They also show some indecision about whether there is such a thing as Swiss art, as opposed to art that happened to be created in Switzerland. The country never fostered the influential art centers that flourished in Italy and France. It did give birth to at least two masters--Holbein and Fuseli. This volume includes them but concentrates on a host of lesser-knowns who moved uneasily--and not always satisfactorily--between wider European and narrower native traditions.

$29.95 TO $40.00

BIRDS OF THE WEST COAST. VOLUME I. Paintings and Drawings by J.F. Lansdowne. 175 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $40. Lansdowne is one of today's leading bird painters. In this, his latest work, he turns to the bird life of his native Canadian West. Of his childhood on Vancouver Island Lansdowne writes, "I vividly recall the plummeting, erratic nighthawks of summer evenings, the flocks of plaintive waxwings and the great, flame-crested pileated woodpeckers that hammered at the roadside stumps." For Volume I the artist has selected 53 species to illustrate, including numerous sea birds and the bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), the endangered national emblem of the U.S., which thrives in western Canada.

PEOPLE OF THE FIRST MAN. Edited by Davis Thomas and Karin Ronnefeldt. 256 pages. Dutton. $29.95. The Plains Indian warrior was not only proud but prosperous as well. Sioux, Minnetaree. Assiniboin, Cree and Mandan were among the tribes who lived in high style before the European invaders manifested their destiny. The Indians' chief sources of wealth were the bison and the horse. In 1883 the German explorer and naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied and his Swiss-born companion, Artist Karl Bodmer, traveled among the tribes. The result was Maximilian's diaries, packed with details of Indian life and Bodmer's stunning watercolors. It was a happy marriage of ethnology and art, as the reader is now able to see in this finely produced book.

STAINED GLASS. Photographs by Sonia Halliday and Laura Lushington. 207 pages. Crown. $39.95. The authors traveled throughout Europe selecting and photographing the world's finest examples of sacred and profane stained glass. The result is a comprehensive guide, from the llth century Old Testament windows in Augsburg Cathedral to the 20th century revival of the craft as seen in modern churches as well as the temples of commerce and art. The text and layout by Lawrence Lee, George Seddon and Francis Stephens provide a rich historical context; a final illustrated chapter explains the methods of stained-glass artisans.

MYTHS by Alexander Eliot. 320 pages. McGraw-Hill. $39.95. This dizzying book hurls the reader around the world and across the centuries in pursuit of the common roots of mankind's myths. Here is Himbui the Hummingbird, the fire bringer of Peru's Jivaro Indians, cheek by jowl with Prometheus. Here is Polynesian Forest God Tanemahuta forcibly separating Father Sky from Mother Earth. Visions of heavens and hells are shared by Aztec and Hindu, Algonquin and Buddhist. This sweeping survey of human imagination is buttressed by 1,300 illustrations, excellent maps, and essays by Scholars Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade.

HERALDRY by Ottfried Neubecker. 288pages. McGraw-Hill. $39.95. The author confirms a suspicion probably held by most people: to understand even a tiny blot on the elaborate escutcheon of heraldry, one must be a herald. The author, director of the German General Roll of Arms, explains the code of identification that was already fiendishly complex in the 12th century. It is no use. Even introductory definitions flutter toward mystification ("Fountain. A roundel barry wavy argent and azure"). Fortunately, the book's 1,700 illustrations fill this simple information gap with a tournament of griffins rampant and bends sinister. They may be best perused couchant (lying down but with head erect).

TREASURY OF STAMPS by David Lidman. 303 pages. Abrams. $37.50. The current state of the U.S. mails is nothing to write home about. But if electronics or private services ever totally take over the business of correspondence, something will have been lost. Stamps, as this volume demonstrates, have often achieved a rare combination of function and beauty. David Lidman, a former stamps editor for the New York Times, offers a crisp history of franking, from ancient stone tablets to contemporary air mail. The 1,200 color illustrations convey a representative sampling of the good, the odd and the exceptional. Committed collectors may find nothing new here, but the book is ready-made for the Johnny-come-philately.

$17.95 TO $25.00

PEOPLE OF KAU by Leni Riefenstahl. 224 pages. Harper & Row. $25. "It was a time of almost intolerable hardship and exertion ... But for my deep-seated urge to pursue the strange and the beautiful, heedless of time, danger and discomfort, these pictures would never have been taken." So trumpets Leni Riefenstahl, whose previous pursuits of the strange included making effective propaganda films for Hitler's Third Reich (Triumph of the Will). Now 74 and a photographer of the black African people of the Sudan, Riefenstahl still prefers to surround herself and her subjects with clouds of Sturm und Drang. Last year's volume, The Last of the Nuba, photographically displayed Mesakin tribesmen as statuary reminiscent of the heroic Mussolini-modern style of the 1930s. People of Kau is as technically dazzling as the Nuba book, though once again Riefenstahl succumbs to the bizarre and the theatrical.

THE WORLDS OF ERNEST THOMPSON SETON. Edited by John G. Samson. 204 pages. Knopf. $25. Ernest Thompson Seton knew the true meaning of animal magnetism. For most of his 86 years, the writer-artist was uncontrollably attracted to creatures great and small. His best work, reconsidered 30 years after his death, is a reconciliation of opposites. The scientific Seton could count the feathers on a grackle (4,915); the romantic Seton attributed human characteristics to crows, wolves and rabbits. Both attitudes are fused in this scrapbook of nature notes, lush oil paintings and meticulous life studies. The volume is plainly meant as a celebration, but its illustrations carry an aura of valediction --a sense of the approaching world of endangered species.

THE LAST EMPIRE: PHOTOGRAPHY IN BRITISH INDIA, 1855-1911. Texts by Clark Worswick and Ainslie Embree. Unpaged. Aperture. $19.95. Clark Worswick, a photographer and film maker, has assembled a pictorial gallery of extraordinary technical excellence. More important, it is a voyage back to British India, and not entirely to the India of its rulers' vision. There are, to be sure, the colonial set pieces: viceregal functions, regimental assemblies, Lancers posed as if for a sixth-form Eton portrait. But dauntless British photographers penetrated the far reaches of Queen Victoria's mightiest possession to capture magnificent scenic panoramas, demented rajahs, beguiling fakirs and guileful snake charmers, palaces, pleasure domes and poverty, all with the objective innocence of a Victorian traveler sketching Venice.

THE SECRET PARIS OF THE '30s by Brassai. Unpaged. Pantheon. $17.95. Seeking the seedy side of Paris, Brassai photographed prostitutes, clochards, crooks, transvestites and drug addicts. If the resulting images seemed shocking in the 1930s, they retain little journalistic voltage now, in an age accustomed to grittier images of such subjects. Yet the famous Hungarian-born photographer's pictures must be valued for their composition, insight and their evocation of the romance of sin.

$12.95 AND UNDER

THE GOLDEN AGE OF STYLE by Julian Robinson. 128 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $12.95. This is a languorous history of haute couture from 1911 to 1932, when Bakst, Poiret, Vionnet, Chanel and other fashion designers found inspiration in the restless lines and superb craftsmanship of art deco. Though the text is thin and rhapsodic, the book's emphasis falls properly on the sumptuous dresses of the day as rendered by a band of Parisian illustrators. They were an expert lot--so deft, witty and evocative that today's fashions look shabby by comparison.

LADY OTTOLINE'S ALBUM. Edited by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. 117 pages. Knopf. $12.50. Party snapshots are usually of interest only to the guests--unless the guests are of interest to uninvited outsiders. Lady Ottoline Morrell's visitors were and still are. A bohemian daughter of the British aristocracy, she and her husband Philip began collecting literary lions during the first decade of this century. Before her death in 1938, she had entertained and photographed everyone from Henry James to Ian Fleming. As a photographer, Lady Ottoline made an excellent hostess. Yet, as collected here, her labors produced a faded, fascinating record of the flowers of Bloomsbury and environs.

THE ILLUSTRATED CAT by Jean-Claude Suares and Seymour Chwast. 72 pages. Harmony Books/Crown. $10.95, hardcover; $5.95, paperback. A fetching concatenation of feline portraits done by celebrated painters, illustrators and cartoonists from Watteau, Manet, Renoir and Picasso to Andrew Wyeth, from Tenniel to Thurber, from Chessie in the C & O berth to Krazy Kat beset by Ignatz Mouse. The text is too kittenish, even for ailurophiles, but the pictures are, well, magnificat.

ALLIGATORS AND MUSIC by Donald Elliott. Illustrated by Clinton Arrowood. 67 pages. Gambit. $8.95. Anyone who thinks of alligators as truculent beasts can thank Clinton Arrowood for revealing their spiritual side: they are dedicated musicians. There is no indication of this in Donald Elliott's didactic text, a series of short essays in which the instruments of the orchestra archly explain their characteristics. Thus the bassoon: "I am something of a deep thinker." Somehow, this unpromising libretto inspired Arrowood to portray each instrument being performed by one of his bewigged and frock-coated reptiles. The results are as absurd--and as charming--as Babar the elephant enjoying the Comedie Franc,hise.

THE HIGHER ANIMALS: A MARK TWAIN BESTIARY. Edited by Maxwell Geismar. Drawings by Jean-Claude Suares. 160 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell. $8.95. Fully half a century ago, Robert Benchley protested against the practice of concocting an annual anthology of Mark Twain relics. That season's offering happened to be Moments with Mark Twain, so Benchley wondered whether "we may look for further books in this series in 1923, 1924, 1925, etc., to be entitled Half-Hours with Mark Twain ... Pleasant Week-Ends with Mark Twain, Indian Summer with Mark Twain. " Mutatis mutandis, this year's Twain anthology is a collection of his tales and observations about animals, ranging from the familiar Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County to such oddities as a polemic against the inefficiency of ants. Twain is a master always worth rereading, and perhaps the chief justification for new anthologies is to remind us of lines like "A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman."

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