A Library to Celebrate the Holidays
Two dozen volumes provide fresh glimpses of nature, art and faith
The work of Matisse is a carnival: of light, of warmth, of eros and of art itself. Matisse (Rizzoli; $95) is a celebration of the celebrator: a formidable, 752-page volume with 930 illustrations that took 14 years to prepare. Not a minute was wasted. The French master's parabola is traced from early still lifes of glowing Oriental rooms and odalisques to the shimmering, heated imagery of dancers, to the paper cutouts and stained-glass windows executed when he was in his 80s. Pierre Schneider's text echoes Matisse's advice to his students: "Retain only what cannot be seen." What was invisible to the audience, the artist represented. What was unknown, his biographer-scholar has revealed.
Carpet knotting was introduced to India in the 15th century. The weaver's art took root and quickly spread through the subcontinent. Masterpieces from Indian looms decorated the palaces of Mughal emperors but remained obscure to the West until the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. The result: a profitable European market was opened, production increased to meet demand, and, inevitably, standards and quality declined. Erwin Gans-Ruedin's Indian Carpets (Rizzoli; 318 pages; $85) is a particolored object lesson in how art is overtaken by commerce. Carpets and rugs from the 16th and 17th centuries demonstrate an imagination all but forgotten in modern examples. An antique Agra is alive with a profusion of delicate figuring; a new Agra is static and merely crowded. Inadvertently or not, Gans-Ruedin's selections give the reader a chance to compare the finest rugs with the run of the mill. It is one's best defense against a dealer's trumped-up superlatives.
It is hard to read Renoir: His Life, Art and
Letters (Abrams; 311 pages; $67.50). That is not the fault of Barbara Ehrlich White, a Renoir expert who has written a thorough and commendably lucid biography of the great French painter. The problem stems from the size of this magnificent book, which is every bit as big and heavy as it has to be to accommodate hundreds of sumptuous reproductions. They too, of course, distract attention from the text: voluptuous nudes, enchanted gardens, glittering portraits and skies filled to the brim with sunlight. Dedicated readers will learn that Renoir's long life was not as serene and untroubled as the joy that shines from his canvases might suggest. That information is worth knowing, but examining these pictures is a greater reward.
"What interests me is a series of shocks and encounters a person can have," confesses Sculptor George Segal. For nearly three decades, the master of plaster has recorded those seismic occasions, and in George Segal (Rizzoli; 379 pages; $65), Art Historians Sam Hunter and Don Hawthorne have gathered the best of them, from '50s paintings like Dead Chicken to his life-size casts of individuals trapped in time. Throughout his long career, the artist has trumpeted his message of alienation.
But seen in this gallery without walls, the most effective pieces are political--those commemorating the Kent State shooting and the Holocaust, for example. They display one attribute Segal has usually shown more obliquely: emotion.
The Declaration of Independence is there, and the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation. But they are just the summit of a mountain of American treasures that are preserved in a vast building on Constitution Avenue in Washington. This historical storehouse, 50 years old this year, is celebrated in The National Archives of the United States (Abrams; 289 pages; $49.50), with a knowledgeable text by Herman J. Viola, director of the National Anthropological Archives and photographs by Jonathan Wallen. Presidential papers go back to George Washington; State Department records to Revolutionary War naval prize cases; census records to the first one, in 1790. There are Mathew Brady's photographs, and Walker Evans' too, and confiscated photo albums once kept by Eva Braun. Patents go back further than Eli Whitney's cotton gin (1794), which was so simple to copy that Whitney made no money from it. Abraham Lincoln got a patent for a device to float boats over shoals (never used), and Samuel Clemens, who wrote real books as Mark Twain, got a patent for a stickum-coated scrapbook that sold thousands. A grand and intelligent book.
In Eye on America (New York Graphic Society; $50) German Photographer Michael Ruetz sets out to "try to show what can and must be appreciated in America"--and succeeds to stunning effect.
Working with standard Leicas and a new wide-angle camera called the Technorama, Ruetz records the country from his fresh, often idiosyncratic viewpoint. An aerial shot, intentionally, shows as much of the helicopter he is in as the Grand Canyon below. He gives a slightly mordant dimension to the panorama of St. Louis and its Gateway Arch by shooting from East St. Louis with the littered river shore in the foreground. Throughout, Ruetz exploits the interplay of light and landscape at dawn and sunset: in a pair of striking pictures of Monument Valley, for example, and in a dramatic gatefold of Bryce Canyon, where the sunrise just burnishes the tops of the canyon's pinnacles. Dark skies and heavy clouds brood over the land in many of his photos; one, looking across California's fog-shrouded Central Valley from a mountainside above it, is a play of brightness and shadow that seems more a Japanese silk-screen print than a photograph.
Will Barnet is best known for his prints; his bold use of primary colors and flattened perspective, along with the enigmatic presence of women and cats, has become a trademark. The public knows far less about Barnet's painting, and with good reason; a substantial number of his works over the past 50 years reside in private collections. Luckily, some of these patrons have agreed to share their wealth. Will Barnet by Robert Doty (Abrams; 168 pages; $45) reproduces 91 oils and sketches (48 in color), many for the first time. The result, arranged chronologically, is a fascinating portrait of an artist's development. Barnet has never taken up with the fashionable or trendy. His adherence to representational forms kept him out of several mainstreams earlier this century; characteristically, he experimented with abstractions at a time when many other U.S. artists had given them up. His best work on canvas combines subtle coloring, exquisite composition and severe economy of line. There is no contemporary remotely like him; this book displays the finished products of a school of one.
The history of illustration is at least as ancient as the clay pictographs of Sumer (3000 B.C.) and as new as the freshest video graphics. To trace the highlights of that epic would take unflagging research and a tireless, discerning eye. These are, happily, the attributes of Michel Melot, a Paris-based librarian who seems to have studied every scroll, page and poster since the origin of writing and painting.
The result, The Art of Illustration (Rizzoli; 269 pages; $60), is more than a compendium; it is an oversize, colorful detective story amplified with wit and illuminated with art that flows in a wandering, but reassuringly unbroken line from prehistory to tomorrow morning.
In 1885 Czar Alexander III asked a St. Petersburg jeweler, Carl Faberge, to make an Easter present for his Empress. The gold and enamel egg so pleased the monarch that he commissioned at least one every Easter. His successor, Nicholas II, continued the tradition, and for the next 31 years, until the Bolsheviks put an end to such inspired extravagance, there was always a Faberge egg in the imperial Easter basket. A gorgeous rooster pops out of the Chanticleer egg to announce every hour; the Peacock egg hides an enameled gold bird that struts on cue and fans its multihued tail; inside the Trans-Siberian Railway egg is a golden Trans-Siberian Railway train. Everyone should have one. But for those who cannot, this lavishly illustrated, well-documented history, Masterpieces from the House of Faberge (Abrams; 192 pages; $35), is a handsome substitute.
Fifty is the operative number here:
Hawaii is the 50th state, and 50 of the world's leading photojournalists went there to illustrate A Day in the Life of Hawaii (Workman; 221 pages; $40). Fanning out through the islands on Friday, Dec. 2, 1983, the cameramen, including Eddie Adams, Gordon Parks and Douglas Kirkland, visited such disparate sites as a de livery room of a hospital on Oahu, the ranch country of the Big Island, a Japanese cemetery near Honolulu and the crest of dormant Haleakala volcano on Maui. The resulting kaleidoscope of scenery and characters, natives and haoles, shows an undiscovered country that, paradoxically, seems to grow more appealing as it becomes more familiar.
Other professional sports may spread throughout the calendar, but to baseball there is still a season. While waiting, bereft, for it to begin again, the true fan will find no brighter winter solace than Base ball (Abrams; 160 pages; $35). The 133 color shots by former SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Photographer Walter looss Jr. catch all the right action, from Maury Wills airborne on the way to second to Nolan Ryan throwing smoke. But in many ways the photographs are more striking when they turn aside to the game's quieter images:
the loneliness of a largely unoccupied dug out; the careworn faces of the managers; the vast summer skies that arch over the diamond, shading imperceptibly to dusk behind the light towers. Baseball, as The New Yorker's Roger Angell notes in his graceful text, is not as fast a game as television coverage makes it seem. With its qualities of silence and waiting, it "invites us really to go slow, for a change, almost to stop, in order to reflect on what is before us and what is to come." So does this clothbound hall of fame.
Toward the end of the 19th century, Emile Galle melded science and art to create an oeuvre of glass masterpieces.
The luminous art nouveau bowls and vases and the early lamps chronicled by Alastair Duncan and Georges de Bartha in Glass by Galle (Abrams; 223 pages; $40) were often adorned with images of flowers, insects, birds, drawn from Galle's extensive nature studies, or abstractly patterned by pieces of colored glass. Jade, amber, even emeralds and sapphires were reproduced by adding metallic oxides and salts to molten glass. The designer went on to produce other decorative objects, including inlaid furniture, but Galle's reputation rests on glass works that were revolutionary in his time and still retain their ability to astonish and delight.
Every move Mikhail Baryshnikov makes, onstage and off, seems to have been recorded and analyzed. In fact, more than half his professional life was lived in a shadow--the years before 1974, when he came to the U.S. Now, thanks to Theater Critic and Photographer Nina Alovert, who left the Soviet Union three years later, the dancer's Soviet career has been recaptured in Baryshnikov in Russia (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; 212 pages; $30).
Here is the 23-year-old star as Adam, alternately impudent and bored in The Creation of the World; here is the sinuous Pedro Romero, the bullfighter of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises; here is the classic, vaulting Pan, making the kind of leaps that remain incredible, even when they are frozen on the page and documented by the author. Alovert's text is eloquent, but nothing can match her photographic chronicle; this is the kind of history that is, in the best sense, revealing.
About time: a warm, funny and fairly comprehensive visual history of rock, told almost entirely in reproductions of those glossy 8-by-10 studio portraits musicians would drop on fans or sign and leave behind after a gig or a square meal ("To the boys down at the Chicken Shack . .."). The portraiture in Rock Archives by Michael Ochs (Doubleday; 402 pages; $35) is guileless even when it is most imposingly posed. There are plenty of candid shots to go along with the p.r. material, including a beauty of Smokey Robinson, backstage with the Temptations, teaching the group a new tune of his called My Girl. The book's most valuable contribution is a granting of full weight to the seminal black artists who worked at the tap source of rock and whose pictures sometimes did not show up even on record sleeves. If every picture tells a story, every song ought to be worth at least a single snap, and Ochs has corralled lots of the best of both.
Photographs of animals in the wild can capture invaluable details about creatures rarely seen, but in making static what is by nature elusive, they diminish some of the excitement of the hunt. That may be the chief reason why the field of wildlife illustration continues to thrive. In competent hands, a pencil or brush can register both what is visible and what is not: excitement, discovery, surprise. Glen Loates: A Brush with Life (Abrams; $40) displays such intangibles in abundance. Loates, a Canadian artist whose magazine work and two earlier books won wide acclaim, manages to combine meticulous craftsmanship with a sense of wonder. When he renders a pair of timber wolves, it appears possible to count every tuft in their fur; his birds, finely detailed, still seem glimpsed as if they are about to fly away. Among the 157 illustrations, including 86 color plates, are a number of Loates' sketches that led up to finished paintings, a documentary record of how a craftsman brings them back alive.
For New Yorkers and those now visiting the city, the "angel tree" has become an enduring symbol of the season. Dominating the Medieval Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bedecked with 18th century Neapolitan angels and cherubs, the work seems to crystallize its message. Photographer Elliott Erwitt captures that radiance in The Angel Tree (Knopf; 79 pages; $20). Examining the figures individually and in groups, he reproduces the sights that have delighted millions, and conveys tidings of comfort and joy.
This is the heyday of bird painting, and most practitioners are still engaged in heroic portraiture. British Illustrator Michael Warren is a striking exception. In his first collection, Shorelines: Birds at the Water's Edge (Times Books; 128 pages; $25), his avian heroes are often tucked away in a corner of a busy canvas, painted head-on or tail-on and overwhelmed by water, sun, rocks and plant life. Working in acrylics, Warren manages to express himself in highly theatrical styles. Longtailed ducks with early cubist heads bob in expressionist waters. A heron skulks awkwardly through Gauguin greenery. In all, Warren covers some 200 American and European species in 70 finely detailed paintings and 40 casual sketches, one of them a four-part panel of a green sandpiper being pursued by a stoat. The sandpiper gets away.
Hearts are trump in Folk Hearts
(Knopf; 107 pages; $25). They embellish quilts and samplers, weather vanes and water jars, chests, chairs, tavern signs and tombstones. Authors Cynthia V.A. Schaffner and Susan Klein, both of New York City's Museum of American Folk Art, celebrate the heart's presence in American folk decoration. The image pervaded the culture of the young country and on the evidence of this book reached its zenith among the Pennsylvania Germans. The new immigrants painted their bright, elaborate designs on pottery and furniture, inked them on love letters, and even incorporated them into birth certificates. Amid these ebullient displays, the text is just a touch too scholarly, but throughout, the authors' hearts are in all the right places.
The art of European civilization simply makes no sense without its spiritual spine, the Bible. So say British Critic Bruce Bernard and Art Historian Sir Lawrence Gowing in The Bible and Its Painters (Macmillan; 300 pages; $24.95), an opinionated and amply illustrated survey of biblical themes in more than 200 paintings produced over six centuries. Rembrandt is, in Gowing's words, "the hero of this book" because he surpassed all artists in getting to the heart of the biblical vision: his works in this volume reach from the famous portrayal of Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac to a shadowy ascension of Jesus into heaven. But Bernard's eclectic and refreshing selection presents many other visions, some quite surprising. The 19th century American Thomas Cole grandly evokes the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden; old sobersides Albrecht Duerer brings a light-hearted touch to, of all things, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; and John Martin, a 19th century Englishman with a 20th Century-Fox mind, offers a Cinemascopic Belshazzar's Feast that obviously showed Hollywood the epic handwriting on the wall.
"His name is Sinatra, and he considers himself the greatest vocalist in the business," remarked the bandleader Harry James, alternately amused and astonished by the young singer he hired in 1939. The crooner turned out to be a shrewd self-appraiser, and what he said about himself 45 years ago still stands. In Sinatra: An American Classic (Random House; 251 pages; $29.95), Music Critic John Rockwell deftly analyzes the Chairman of the Board's technical proficiencies, and his examination of Sinatra recordings of One for My Baby is a nice combination of a scholar's observations and a fan's notes. The deluxe photo essay includes family snaps, publicity shots from early movies and candids from heavy romances and long nights out, along with occasional salty observations ("The audience is like a broad--if you're indifferent, endsville"). Rockwell's book will do very nicely until the gentleman in question sits down to talk, not sing, into a mike--or, as he might put it, until the real thing comes along.
America had emerged from the long tunnels of the Depression and World War II, and LIFE was there to record the nation as it began its spurt of unparalleled growth. LIFE: The Second Decade 1946-1955 (New York Graphic Society; 200 pages; $29.95) follows LIFE'S earlier photo-journal of the previous ten years.
Editor Doris C. O'Neil has selected 200 evocative photographs by such camera virtuosos as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, David Douglas Duncan, W. Eugene Smith and Philippe Halsman. Many of their images have become part of America's visual memory: the thousand-yard stare of an exhausted Marine retreating from the Changjin Reservoir in North Korea; the infinite gaze of Albert Einstein; a triumphant Harry Truman displaying a copy of the Chicago Daily Tribune with the headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. The lens surprises U.S. citizens moving unsteadily into the middle class, Europeans and Asians suffering the scourge of new tyrants, and young stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote priming for incandescence.
He was a neurasthenic, an asthmatic, a snob. He was cosseted by his mother and indulged by the salon world of La Belle Epoque. The pallid, delicate Marcel Proust (1871-1922) should have been a Parisian lap dog; instead he became one of the most industrious and insightful authors France has ever produced. His massive Remembrance of Things Past was a triumph of imagination based on a series of fabulous originals: aristocrats, performers like Sarah Bernhardt and Louisa de Mornand, professionals, wastrels, all of whom decorate the pages of A Proust Souvenir (Vendome; 128 pages; $17.95). Their shadowy photographs by Paul Nadar and sparkling cameo biographies cannot explain the author's genius, but they show the roots of his inspiration and give his novel a poignant reality.
A word of Japanese: gorin-pisu. Those who delve into All-Japan: The Catalogue of Everything Japanese (Morrow; 224 pages; $29.95) will learn that this is one of many English loan words in Japanese and means just what it says, with a Japanese accent: green peas. In this compendium of essays on things Japanese, eight authors of talent and good humor, including Stephen Longstreet and Liza Dalby, explain much of what many people want to know about Japan, although not "everything," as the title so boldly claims. There is almost nothing in this brisk and elegantly illustrated volume, for example, about doing business in Japan, but very much about the experience of living there: about pleasant practices like the art of wrapping packages or the proper way to take a bath, serious matters like the tea ceremony and the bewildering varieties of martial arts, and confounding matters like the social complexities of the Japanese language.
George Plimpton is no paper pyrotechnician, as guests at his annual Fourth of July fireworks displays can testify. Now, in Fireworks: A History and Celebration (Doubleday; 286 pages; $25), the literary celebrity deepens his infatuation with things that go boom in the night. Roman candles, pinwheels, whistling aerial bombs and whirlybirds are tracked to their origins and explained. The great patrons of sparkle (Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Charles V) are given their due, as are the contemporary families, like the Gruccis of New York and the Ogatsus of Japan, whose offerings have lighted up the skies around the world. Written with wit and packed with anecdotes, the book covers everything you ever wanted to know about fireworks, except what to do for a stiff neck. -