Readings of the Season

A celebration of society, nature and the imagination

$70 AND OVER

There were two James McNeill Whistlers. One was the artist of the putdown. Oscar Wilde: "I wish I'd said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." The other was the artist of subtle landscapes and unprecedented arrangements of color and light. The wit was amply recorded in his autobiography The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

The innovator is revealed in The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler (Yale; two volumes; $150). In a way, these volumes, edited by four art historians, represent the truest kind of biography, for the decades have worn away old enmities, and what remains is the record of a genius who grew from American prodigy to European master. The attractive work should win the painter a new audience, and therefore deserves an alternative title: The Gentler Art of Making Friends.

Just to mention Japanese woodcuts is to evoke the name of Hokusai (1760-1849), who produced some of the finest examples of the genre. In The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (Sotheby Parke Bernet/ University of California; 288 pages; $110), Scholar Jack Hillier explores seven decades of artistry. Hokusai, who began by illustrating cheap 18th century novelettes known as kibyoshi ("yellow-backs"), was prolific; he once illustrated 61 volumes of a Chinese classic. As Hillier observes, the man was an "encyclopedist of Japanese life and custom." That life and custom included portraiture, nature studies and some explicit erotic drawings that earn this book an X rating.

If one were to apply the Big Bang theory to art, the explosion could be said to have occurred during World Wars I and II. Avant-gardism--aggressive, impish, savage and wildly varied--still resounds throughout European and American culture. Jean-Luc Daval's Avant-Garde Art 1914-1939, (Skira-Rizzoli; 223 pages; $85) is a sequel to the author's Modern Art 1884-1914: The Decisive Years. The new work's 75 color reproductions and 270 black-and-white pictures have been chosen to illustrate Daval's brisk chronological text. By dividing his subject into 89 bite-size chapters, he is able to draw fine distinctions among the numerous unruly schools that flourished during those fertile 25 years when such men as Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Mird, Dali, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright changed the look and perception of the modern world.

Likenesses of Abraham Lincoln stare down from monuments and up from pennies and $5 bills; his mythic face is surely one of the most familiar in history. Yet no two of the 120 known surviving photographs of him look exactly alike, a fact surprisingly documented in The Face of Lincoln (Viking; 201 pages; $75). Editor James Mellon spent years combing the country for Lincoln pictures; when original plates or negatives were available, they were meticulously developed to bring out all retrievable detail. This work has brought forth images of astonishing clarity; it sometimes seems possible to number the hairs in the President's beard. Another byproduct is mystery: Lincoln's craggy features and soft eyes still contain as many secrets as they reveal.

The great Indian empires of Mexico and South America were toppled not solely by invading Spaniards, but by the horses they brought with them. The Aztecs and Incas had never seen such marvelous creatures, and they fled from the men who rode them, assuming that they must be demigods. The terror may have been exaggerated, but it is understandable: mankind has always been in awe of that dumb but somehow articulate animal. John Baskett's The Horse in Art (New York Graphic Society; 160 pages; $70) is a chronicle of that remarkable relationship, with magnificent examples of equine art, from the cave paintings of Lascaux, circa 10,000 B.C., to Picasso. The dog may be man's best friend, but as these examples prove, the horse has been a far more inspiring subject for painters.

$39.95-$55

Everyone who has stood on its rim has wondered what titanic forces formed the Grand Canyon, a mile-deep chasm of water-carved cliffs and wind-sculptured buttes. Readers of Ron Redfern's Corridors of Time (Times Books; 198 pages; $55) will wonder no longer. Filled with panoramic vistas and illuminated by a crisp text that entertains as well as it explains, Corridors reveals how the combined power of the Colorado River, the wind and the movements of the earth carved the fantastic stone formations and, in the process, exposed the geologic strata. They can now be read as if they were pages from the earth's autobiography.

The Treasury of the U.S. stands at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue. At the other end--on Capitol Hill--looms the Library of Congress. There, says Historian, Social Critic and Librarian of Congress Daniel J. Boorstin, one "can discover the spiritual, traditional wealth of our nation, the wealth we inherit from all the world." Treasures of the Library of Congress by Charles A. Goodrum (Abrams; 318 pages; $50) mounts a rare sampling of books and artifacts from the institution's shelves and vaults: one of the three perfect vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible, luminously decorated Books of Hours, Orientalia including the oldest known printed artifact (A.D. 770 Japanese prayer panels), and the graceful calligraphy of ancient copies of the Koran. The Library's collection of American memorabilia is represented by old photographs, prints, posters, early motion pictures and the contents of Abraham Lincoln's pockets on the evening of his assassination: two pairs of spectacles (one mended with string), a button inscribed with the letter L, a gold watch fob, a handkerchief, a pocketknife and a billfold that contained old newspaper clippings and, for some mystifying reason, a Confederate $5 note.

In the museums of Europe, East and West, they glow from the wall with an unmistakable vividness: altarpieces, portraits of princes and burghers and ethereal nudes. They are the works of the Cranach family, principally Lucas the Elder and Lucas the Younger, whose genius reflects the richness and turbulence of the 16th century. In Cranach: A Family of Master Painters (Putnam; 476 pages; $50), Art Historian Werner Schade shows how and why their likenesses of Luther and other leading reformers remain the prevailing images today. Much of their work was designed to glorify the new money as well as the new faith. So, without ideological prejudice, did the East German printers of this sumptuous book, who were surely mindful that many of the finest Cranachs still hang in their country.

The fierce, splendid land between Iran and India has always tempted conquerors: Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and scores of others preceded last year's Soviet invaders into Afghanistan. But the tribesmen there have proved to be as resistant as their terrain--from the desert of Nimruz, where men were once condemned to death for stealing water, to the formidable barrier of the Hindu Kush, which forms the dividing line between Southern and Central Asia. Roland Michaud, a French photographer, and his wife Sabrina spent 14 years in Afghanistan (through 1979). In Afghanistan (Vendome; unpaginated; $45), they have memorably recorded the country's ancient life: the dervishes, the bazaars, the teahouses, the huge rolling dunes, the nomads' black leather tents like bats against the dun-colored hills. It is a dreamscape that, once seen, cannot be forgotten.

Edward Lear, who died in 1888, is best known to modern readers for his limericks and nonsense verse. But contemporaries knew another side of the man. Lear devoted his early career to producing detailed paintings of birds, and his pictures, collected by Susan Hyman in Edward Lear's Birds (Morrow; 96 pages; $37.95), belong on the same shelf with Audubon's. The line drawings and sketches that accompany them shed new light on the man himself. Many artists have used birds to lampoon their fellow men. The owlish Lear used them to caricature himself.

During all the years of his exile after the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Nabokov obsessively sought to recapture "a Russian something that I could inhale/ but could not see." There are glimpses of that Russian something in Photographs for the Tsar (Dial; 214 pages; $35), the best of the color shots that the chemist and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii began taking in 1909 at the behest of Tsar Nicholas II. Having fascinated the Romanovs with a color slide show at the court at Tsarskoe Selo, Prokudin-Gorskii gained an imperial commission to record the art and people of the Russian Empire. He traveled widely in a private railroad car outfitted with a darkroom. His pictures are no Walker Evans tour of Russia's huge brute poverty. In the warmly glowing but primitive colors of his still rudimentary art form, Prokudin-Gorskii celebrated the village life and gilded ecclesiastical magnificence of a Mother Russia that Tsar Nicholas imagined would remain unchanged forever.

In 1924 a new business calling itself the Electro-Motive Company put a six-cylinder gasoline engine into a trolley carlike body. The engine ran an electric generator that in turn powered traction motors. Thus was born a new generation of railroads: self-propelled rail passenger cars. The first generation, of course, belonged to the steam-driven locomotive, which was to be eclipsed by diesels in the 1940s and '50s. America's Railroads: The Second Generation (Norton; 216 pages; $34.95) by Don Ball Jr., with Jim Boyd and T.J. Donahue, nostalgically traces the development of the gas-electric and diesel age. The success and durability of these workhorses is evident in the fact that engines built in the 1920s were still operating in the '60s. Ball, an authority on U.S. railroading, augments his highly personal history with technical details, route maps and 285 color photographs of his justifiably beloved iron brutes.

$25 AND UNDER

Books on wine tend to be encyclopedic or quixotic. One manages to be both. Michael Broadbent's The Great Vintage Wine Book (Knopf; 432 pages; $25) is a collection of tasting notes by a determined oenophile who modestly claims: "I have been exposed to the widest range of wines and vintages that it is possible to imagine." Broadbent, who heads the wine department at the London-based auction firm of Christie's, tends to treat his favorite beverage as if he were a schoolmaster dealing with errant third-formers. "The most important duty of wine," he writes sternly, "is to be pleasant." If nothing else, Broadbent's precise descriptions of oenological rarities will provide wine snobs with endless ammunition for oneupmanship. Chateau Lafite 1799 (yes, 1799), the author assures us, is "a meaty little wine, faded but fascinating," while a 1653 Rudesheimer is "deep, rich . . . star bright."

Burton Anderson, an American who lives in Tuscany, can handle the ritualized vocabulary of wine experts with the best of them. His goal in Vino (Atlantic-Little, Brown; 568 pages; $19.95) is not to categorize Italy's bewildering variety of nearly 5,000 wines but to personalize them. A relaxed and idiosyncratic tour of the country's winegrowing areas, Vino provides capsule portraits of vintners and mouth-watering memories of unforgettable meals, as well as the requisite details of bouquet, color and taste. Anderson has a nice eye for oddities. Who would have guessed that the Veneto region produces an obscure little wine called Clinton, made from an American grape that somehow was transplanted from New York State to Italy in the early 19th century?

On a plain in the south of England a heap of huge slabs forms both a circle and an eternal puzzle. In The Enigma of Stonehenge (Summit; 128 pages; $19.95), Novelist John Fowles examines this massive neolithic relic and the wonder it has inspired in centuries of observers. Archaeologists have excavated, probed, measured and described Stonehenge to a fare-thee-well, but past this empirical surface lurk controversies, some of them hundreds of years old. What manner of people put Stonehenge up, and why? Fowles presents the important arguments and misconceptions, but the monument's chief attraction for him is its intractability: "It is like some very ancient and corrupt text, of which one can decipher just enough to be sure it is very important but never enough to establish exactly what it is saying." Barry Brukoff's color and black-and-white photographs crisply capture this paradox: an enormous presence that is, somehow, not entirely there.

They are the least hospitable places on earth, some searingly hot by day, some bitter cold at night, some bone dry whatever the hour. Despite these conditions, deserts house a variety of living matter from snakes to flowers. These flora and fauna are not merely described but celebrated in Frederic H. Wagner's Wildlife of the Deserts (Abrams; 231 pages; $18.95). Examining terrain from Central Asia's Kyzyl Kum to the great deserts of the American Southwest, Wagner traces the origin of such wastelands and watches the life that inhabits them. Written with dramatic--and sometimes melodramatic--awareness, Wagner's book will not make many readers want to live in the sandscapes of the world. But it should make them appreciate, and admire, the creatures that do.

"We located the hissing noise," announces the mechanic. "Your wife's mother is in the back seat." This kind of report is standard in Pussycats Need Love, Too (Dodd, Mead; unpaginated; $8.95). In the cockeyed world of Cartoonist George Booth, men philosophize to an audience of cats, new bank depositors who hope for the gift of a Cuisinart are only eligible for the Patty Cake stuffed monkey, and breeders believe that what every living room needs is a small horse. What every living room really needs is a copy of this bright lunatic fringework. Edward Koren has also earned his mirthright with his new collection of cartoons, Well, There's Your Problem (Pantheon; unpaginated; $8.95). The title comes from the mouth of yet another automobile mechanic who has found a grinning monster under the hood. Keren's entire output is one long shaggy-dog story, with featured roles by people, reptiles and molecules ("I'd like you to meet our friend the protein"). In a typical drawing, one dinosaur species tells another, "The reason you all are becoming extinct is that you can't take a joke." Happily, readers can, and Koren has a vast and hilarious supply.

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