A Shelf of Holiday Treats and Treasures

MORE THAN $75

Intense, erotic, opulently colorful, the flower paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe provide a heady mixture of sheer sensory shock and austere formalism, of extreme close-up scale and bold monumentality. In this 100th anniversary year of the artist's birth, a selection has been beautifully reproduced in Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers (Knopf; $100). Their richness and vibrancy seem to leave nothing to say, and Editor Nicholas Callaway, except in a brief afterword, presents the plates without comment. The effect is magnificently simple, and simply magnificent.

The Old Testament injunction against graven images did not apply to the work of Jewish artisans of the Middle Ages. Fortunately so, as illustrated in The Hebrew Bible in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts, by Gabrielle Sed-Rajna (Rizzoli; 173 pages; $85). Sed-Rajna, director of the Hebraic department of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes in Paris, has included , painted manuscripts from the 13th through the 15th centuries. Biblical characters depicted in medieval dress recall the stories of Genesis, Abraham and Jacob, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lions' den and The Song of Solomon. The undeniable vigor of the art leads Sed-Rajna to conclude that these little-known iconographers influenced later illustrators more than has generally been believed.

Artists are known for what they push away as well as for what they embrace. So it was with Paul Gauguin, who for a century has fired the escapist imagination with his rejection of conventional life and academic painting for la vie Tahitienne and a bold new art. Paul Gauguin: Life and Work, by Michel Hoog (Rizzoli; 332 pages; $85), presents the Gauguin legend on a grand scale, from the artist's exotic Peruvian boyhood to his South Seas idyll. Hoog, chief curator at Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris, integrates the painter's biography with a broad representation of his work. The result forcefully demonstrates how a large and restless talent broke the bonds of Europe and found room to flourish halfway around the world.

From Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of revolutionary maxims to Later Chinese Painting and Calligraphy: 1800-1950, by Robert H. Ellsworth (Random House; 1,049 pages; $850), is a great leap forward in our perception of this surprisingly complex and adaptable culture. Twelve years in preparation, the three-volume set contains illustrations of more than 800 pieces of art, 369 pages of color reproductions of paintings, scrolls, fans and album leaves, and hundreds of pages of calligraphy, an art form in itself. This is the largest compilation of 19th and 20th century Chinese art in the West, and the perfect gift for the mandarin who has everything.

$50-$75

He designed his first dress when he was a little old man of five, and his mother wore it to a St. Petersburg ball. Mata Hari was a client, as were the Ziegfeld Follies, MGM, various opera companies and magazines as disparate as Harper's Bazaar and Playboy. Now a little old man of 95, Erte still astonishes, as is vividly demonstrated by the delicious retrospective Erte at Ninety-Five: The Complete New Graphics (Dutton; 192 pages; $75). His work is generally labeled art deco, but his wit, imagination and irrepressible flamboyance suggest a more fitting appellation: art Erte.

The folks in the Kentucky hollers, the Midwestern river valleys and Amish Pennsylvania probably did not think of quilting as an art but rather as a skill and source of pride. They certainly did not think dealers and collectors would someday gather at auction to pay tens of thousands of dollars for Grandma's handiwork. America's Glorious Quilts, edited by Dennis Duke and Deborah Harding (Macmillan; 320 pages; $75), assembles photographs of some of the finest examples of this varied craft. Country and patriotic themes dominate the 19th century pieces, although their combinations of colors and designs are hardly naive. The surprises in the book are the contemporary works -- vibrant abstractions such as Yvonne Porcella's Ginza (1984) and Michael James' Rhythm Color: Bacchanale (1986) -- that indicate the evolution of this intensely communal craft into a personal art form.

In the late 15th century, the Russian state coalesced between the lands of the Tartars and the Lithuanians. Under Ivan III, its seat was Moscow and its heart the onion-domed fortress known as the Kremlin. Within this medieval city rose cathedrals and palaces teeming with frescos of Christian martyrs and luxuriant icons, such as that of the Archangel Michael, fiery with gold and transcendent with righteousness. The store of imperial riches has only increased with time. The Kremlin and Its Treasures (Rizzoli; 356 pages; $75) is a gilded album of Russian history recalled through the voluptuous chambers of the czars, the rococo throne of Catherine I and the spare, careful quarters of the Lenin family.

"In America," Stage Designer Boris Aronson once said, "you are a genius at 18 and finished at 30." Aronson seemed almost finished at 60, yet when he died at 80, in 1980, he was widely recognized as a genius. The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, by Frank Rich with Lisa Aronson (Knopf; 323 pages; $75), shows why. The authors (respectively, the drama critic of the New York Times and the artist's widow) use photos and Aronson's vivid sketches and paintings to document the bulk of his more than 100 designs, including Broadway's The Crucible, The Diary of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret, Company, Follies and Pacific Overtures. The authoritative text evokes the artist's crusty personality and analyzes his ability to make each project new and distinctive -- in his word, a personal "rejuvenation." Quite a few of them also rejuvenated the American theater.

Two perfect slices of abalone, counterpointed with green and yellow radish, lie in the curve of an earthen bowl shaped like an open shell. This is the serene, luminous geometry of Japan: The Beauty of Food (Rizzoli; 175 pages; $50). Photographer Reinhart Wolf was not satisfied with recording only the creations of eminent chefs. He foraged in food shops to assemble sake glasses made of dried octopus, a squad of chocolate sumo wrestlers, a bouquet of lollipops, kaleidoscopic cookies. Angela Terzani's text provides morsels of its own. Sushi lovers may be abashed to learn that they have not exactly touched the ancient soul of Japan: sushi was not a hit there until the 19th century.

Dance is the most mutable and ephemeral of the arts; photography records frozen moments of time. Paradoxically, many practitioners of the one have been fascinated by the other. Dance and Photography, by William A. Ewing (Henry Holt; 240 pages; $50), is a collection of black-and-white photos tracing the history of that partnership, from rare daguerreotypes down to today's 35-mm snapshots. The focus of the collection is not on vanity icons of swan-necked ballerinas posing daintily in profile but on visions of grace and power. Two highlights: Max Waldman's grainy, lyrical image of Mikhail Baryshnikov rehearsing an impossibly bravura jete and an anonymous, easy-does-it portrait of Fred Astaire hoofing his way through Three Little Words.

LESS THAN $50

For baseball fans seeking spiritual sustenance to carry them through to spring training, the off-season's brightest offering is Diamonds Are Forever (Chronicle; 166 pages; $35, $18.95 paper), a beguiling sampler of photos, artworks and writings about the game. The prose excerpts are literary as well as journalistic (Roger Angell, Wilfrid Sheed, John Updike). The illustrations are less familiar: a haunting photo of a sandlot game by Joel Meyerowitz; the charming primitive canvases of Ralph Fasanella; more sophisticated images by such artists as Robert Gwathmey and Claes Oldenburg. At the heart of them all is that enduring diamond, evoked by Crime Novelist Robert Parker in a "bright green park, bathed in light, changeless and symmetrical, contained, exact, and endlessly different."

The Audubon Society Book of Water Birds (Abrams; 256 pages; $35) presents enthralling photographs of creatures that seem made for metaphor. They are clouds hovering pink and white across the surface of a lake, dive bombers plummeting to strike seaborne prey, bankers in tuxedoes posing in comic solemnity at a social event on an ice floe. But the easy, intelligent prose of Authors Les Line, Kimball L. Garrett and Kenn Kaufman allows the real creatures -- from the lava heron of the Galapagos to the bald eagle -- to emerge from the metaphors in full dimension. Not all the faces are pretty. The fierce marabou stork of Africa needs 2 lbs. of meat a day, and often finds it in the carrion left by lions.

Tchaikovsky conducted there, 16-year-old Jascha Heifetz astonished its audiences, Arthur Rubinstein made his U.S. debut upon its stage. Yet classical concerts are only a part of Carnegie Hall's history. Audiences have been harangued by Winston Churchill, diverted by Lenny Bruce and serenaded by Frank Sinatra, who observed that "performing in Carnegie Hall is like playing in the Super Bowl." These and many more celebrities make dazzling reappearances in Richard Schickel and Michael Walsh's Carnegie Hall: The First 100 Years (Abrams; 263 pages; $49.50), a valentine by two TIME critics who are manifestly in love with the place that is synonymous with cultural life in America.

American blacks fled to Northern cities at the beginning of the 20th century fired with new dignity, purpose and activism. Black artists in particular took on the role of interpreters of their culture and made northern Manhattan a Paris for the "New Negro." Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Abrams; 200 pages; $35) documents this flowering, from the Paris-trained sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who built her studio with her own hands, through Painter William H. Johnson, who renounced his academic style for a self-enforced primitivism, to James Van Der Zee, whose camera was witness to Harlem weddings, funerals and roaring good times.

If you are old enough to be amused by the notion of antique plastic, you are old enough for Radios: The Golden Age, by Philip Collins (Chronicle; 119 pages; $25, $14.95 paper), an exaltation of those portable Emersons, Motorolas and Sonoras that fulfilled the American dream of bringing news and entertainment to every room of the house. Collins, an executive with Columbia Pictures and collector of highly stylized receivers of the '30s, '40s and '50s, has produced the nostalgic sleeper of the season. The photographs glow with a warmth and color that make one forget how often these little bijoux of popular culture were on the fritz during the heyday of amplitude modulation.