Luxurious Museums Without Walls

Fifteen volumes offer a world of worship, nature and art

Leonardo da Vinci's Landscapes, Plants and Water Studies (Johnson Reprint Corp.; $4,600; after Dec. 31, $5,500) reproduces 70 sheets of drawings, unbound and printed recto and verso, from the hand and mind of genius. Whether he drew acorns, flowers, an oncoming thunderstorm or doodles, Leonardo worked magic. This project is every bit as magnificent as its price. The drawings come in a large portfolio box, accompanied by a 250-page volume of text and notes; the whole production is partly bound in royal blue Nigerian goatskin. It would be less expensive to jet to Britain and wangle an invitation from Queen Elizabeth II to browse in her private collection. But even then, the fortunate traveler would return emptyhanded. Thanks to Johnson Reprint, the closest things to Leonardo's originals are to be had and held.

To the user pottery is a craft; to the collector it is an art. How high an art can be seen in Song Ceramics (Rizzoli; 262 pages; $100) by Mary Tregear. During China's felicitously named Song Dynasty (A.D. 960-1278), expanding trade provided the artists of the Middle Kingdom with new sources of income and fresh creative energies. As Oxford Curator Tregear notes, "Every class in society [could be] regarded as a patron, inspiring or encouraging either the growth or selection of a particular style of pottery." The pieces showed continuing variety: white glazes, hard stoneware, porcelain, greenware; dishes of great poise and deceptive simplicity. Even humble spittoons were elegantly designed with a finely crackled finish. Tregear includes hundreds of pictures, plus a wealth of details--the design of the kilns and the chemistry of the clays. The missing ingredient is the Song spark of genius, which disappeared with the coming of the Mongols and has never been reignited.

Sex! Horror! Humor! Fairground Art (Abbeville; 312 pages; $85) offers 1,100 illustrations (700 in glorious color) of European and American carnival equipment and advertising, many of which deserve an exclamation mark. Authors Geoff Weedon and Richard Ward provide a pictorial history of their eye-catching subject, from the primitive wedding-cake carousels of the last century to the heavy-metal speed rides of today. The history of the merry-go-round discloses an intriguing variety of national tastes. Americans preferred animals in armor; the French were fond of cats and bunnies; and the Germans liked galloping pigs. As fascinating as banners portraying the Jolly Fat Lady, the Cardiff Giant and the proverbial Two-Headed Calf were the artists who created these icons of the bizarre. The exemplary Snap Wyatt, a cigar-smoking sign painter, became one of America's midway masters in his Florida studio. He once built a 9-ft.-tall animated elephant stepping on a convicted Hindu for a traveling "torture show." Behind these neon-bright screams for attention, one can almost hear the barker . and smell the caramel corn.

"Walt Disney never thought of the work of his studio as the creation of art," reports Publisher Robert E. Abrams in the preface to Treasures of Disney Animation Art (Abbeville; 319 pages; $85). "His sole aim was to create entertainment." But the two goals are not mutually exclusive, as demonstrated by this vast selection gleaned from millions of sketches, paintings and layouts. Abrams' book continues the elevation of Disney from the Barnum of the barnyard to an aesthetician with uncanny instincts. This is no Mickey Mouse collection; it includes paintings by, of all people, Thomas Hart Benton and Salvador Dali, which were commissioned by Walt as "inspirational sketches" for his animators. At the studio, "fine art" was stressed. As one executive had it, "If it works in a Rubens it must work in Donald Duck." Proof is offered in the book's juxtaposition of Renaissance sketches with drawings from the early Snow White and Pinocchio, to the still unfinished feature The Black Cauldron. The comparison holds; these oversize pages contain small masterpieces of illustration that deserve a place on museum walls. Onscreen, the cartoons went by at the speed of 24 frames per sec. In this greatest of all Disney festivals, the work appears timeless.

If clothes make the man, interior decoration can sometimes be a vivid expression of the soul of a society. American Decorative Arts by Robert Bishop and Patricia Coblentz (Abrams; 405 pages; $65) forages through the American experience as expressed in its furniture and furnishings. The volume begins with a 1629 hooded wicker cradle, medieval in its lines, then follows the American progress from straight-backed Puritan spareness through the clotting commercial optimism and extravagance of the 19th century, and on into the 20th with its Saarinen plastic pedestal chairs and the eerie metaphysical fatuousness of Andy Warhol's wallpaper decorated with large portraits of cows' heads. Generously illustrated, with a minutely expert and civilized text.

Are photographers artists or technicians? They can be both, although logically not all technicians are necessarily artists. Still, the question is guaranteed to start an argument, with opinions usually separating along the dotted line of self-interest. Painters, with their pigments and brushes, generally would like to keep the house of art exclusive. Photographers, with their palettes of light and shadow, would like to get in. Hence, "History of an Art," the slightly aggressive subtitle of Photography (Rizzoli; 269 pages; $60), an elegant survey of the men and women behind the camera. Unquestionably all those in the book are artists. It is impossible to flip through these pages and not feel delight, wonder, surprise and that baser response to creative expression, the acquisitive itch. The examples range from the early photo realism of Eugene Durieu that imitates portrait painting to contemporary collage by Carel Balth that explores puzzling questions of perception. The text by Jean-Luc Daval, lecturer in art history at the University of Geneva, brings both the technique and the aesthetic of this dominant 20th century medium into sharp, tingling focus.

Where can one find the Hope dia mond, Sitting Bull's rifle, an assemblage of Cuban tree snails, a slice of a one-ton meteorite that fell on Kansas, and the skull of a fearsome, fortunately extinct creature with the deceptive name of Smilodon? All these things, and a good deal more, can be found in two places. One is the National Museum of Natural History, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution, which serves as the country's attic. The other is the book The National Museum of Natural History by Philip Kopper (Abrams; 496 pages; $60). Heavy enough to test the structural integrity of coffee tables and augmented with photographs by Kjell Sandved and Chip Clark, the book does not purport to be a complete catalogue of the museum's enormous collection. But whether it displays a 160 million-year-old fossil or a reconstruction completed only months ago, this museum without walls is second only to the actual galleries.

Camouflaged in Anna Pavlova by Keith Money (Knopf; 425 pages; $55) is an important piece of cultural research. Author-Photographer Money spent six years documenting the career of the legendary Pavlova, especially her early years in St. Petersburg, a study that somehow had never been undertaken before. Pavlova (1881-1931) symbolized dance and the mystique of the ballerina as no one else has, and her obsessive touring (20,000 railroad miles in one typical month) brought to millions their first indelible impression of ballet. Pavlova was virtually the creation of Russian Choreographer Marius Petipa, who saw beyond her early technical insecurities to her ethereal lightness and laser-like theatrical instinct. Pavlova recognized early what a powerful ally the camera could be. More than the stiffish text, the hundreds of pictures disclose her allure, the poetry of her body and even the evangelical frenzy that sent her forth to conquer the world's stages.

The work of nearly 50 photographers is on display in Washington, D.C. (Abrams; 223 pages; $50). The results, 136 full-color plates, with text by Bill Harris, range from the familiar to the obscure. The major monuments are here, of course, caught at various seasons and times of day. There is even a shot of the periodic housekeeping at the Lincoln Memorial, with a workman hosing down the Great Emancipator's marble brow. Other pictures venture beyond tourists' beaten paths: the 16-acre garden at Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown; the interior of the Old Pension Building, which features the tallest (80 ft.) Corinthian columns ever built. Such information is not always easy to find in this package; captions huddle together to make room for series of full-page photographs. Persistence, though, rewards both the eye and the curiosity. The nation's capital has never looked so colorful.

Browsing in tall grass, or showering his parched hide in a cool river, the elephant moves with unhurried majesty. But for how long? In Elephants (Abrams; 255 pages; $50) Photographer Reinhard Kuenkel notes that during the 1970s a tenfold increase in the price of ivory, from $6 to $60 a kilogram, meant the death sentence for thousands of Africa's pachyderms. Hunters steal into national parks at night and, using automatic weapons, snares and poisoned arrows, kill dozens of animals at a time. The elephants' tusks are cut off and the huge corpses left to rot. During 1976 alone, writes Kuenkel, the ivory from 23,360 Kenyan elephants was sold to dealers in Hong Kong. The photographer, however, is as relentless as the poachers, discovering the beasts in surprisingly graceful and poignant stances. Kuenkel's work also manages to reveal why elephants have such a hold on our imaginations. It is not only their size but the strange feeling that one is seeing two creatures in one: the great body and head, and the serpentine trunk that seems to have a life of its own.

From the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the authors of An Illustrated Life of Jesus, Richard I. Abrams and Warner A. Hutchinson (Abingdon; 159 pages; $35), have selected 94 works to fashion an elaborate and appropriately timed birthday card. From the Annunciation to the Ascension, works by Botticelli, Duerer, El Greco, Rembrandt and dozens of lesser-known artists and craftsmen re-create the greatest story ever told and seen. Piety, passion and drama are conveyed in traditional mediums and styles. Jan van Eyck's Gabriel is a resplendent messenger in jeweled robe and peacock-colored wings. Salvador Dali's Sacrament of the Last Supper is dominated by a clean-shaven, translucent Jesus addressing his bowed Apostles under what appears to be a geodesic dome. Each illustration is accompanied by a descriptive text block. The Gospel narratives are condensed in clear, simple, documentary prose.

For a number of years after World War II, Photographer David Douglas Duncan explored the Middle East. He lived in Cairo and Istanbul, Jerusalem and Tehran. He took his cameras among the Berbers of the High Atlas Mountains of northern Morocco. He joined the tribal migration of the Qashqai nomads across southern Iran. He wandered through the world of Islam as far as Malaya and Indonesia. His fascination with that realm enlivens The World of Allah (Houghton Mifflin; 280 pages; $35). From the film shot in his travels, Duncan has assembled a Pavlova of the highly photogenic landscapes and people of Islam. It is a warm and sympathetic vision of the family of man, Muslim branch. In the past, Duncan's versatile lens has memorably captured war, American presidential politics and Pablo Picasso. The gaze he directs at Islam is, as always, lucid and superbly dramatic.

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