It would be nice to say that art books are a good read during summer travel, if only because it’s that time of year and we should favor any beneficial pursuit that shows signs of disappearing.
But really, who lugs 20-pound books to the beach or country? Outside, nobody has need of them.
This season’s recommendations are strictly for home consumption. Darken the room, turn up the air conditioner, and remember how great works of art inevitably put nature to shame.
The works contained herein should occupy you at least through Labor Day:
Paolo Uccello, by Franco and Stefano Borsi (Abrams, $95). The Florentine painter, craftsman and mosaicist whose proper name was Paolo di Dono entered art history as an eccentric obsessed with geometry and perspective, a judgment that in more than 500 years he still has not completely shaken off. The Borsis, father-and-son specialists in the Renaissance, examine the artist more closely in relation to the ideas of his day, finding in him an “alternate humanism” that somewhat normalizes his vision without detracting from its progressiveness and dazzling beauty.
Production values on the book are superb, presenting Uccello’s marvelously abstract “Battle of San Romano” panels on color foldouts and supplying a complete-works catalog that reproduces in black and white all his surviving pieces accompanied by lengthy analytical texts. It’s a splendid in-depth study of an artist who all too frequently has seemed decorative and peculiar.
Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730-1930, by Jean-Michel Humbert, Michael Pantazzi, Christiane Ziegler (National Gallery of Canada/University of Chicago, $49.95 paper). Just when it looks as if every major exhibition that could be done has been done, along will come a team of curators to support fresh ideas with the kind of sound, necessary scholarship shown in this exploration of the ways both the real and fantastic Egypt impressed itself on art and design in the West.
The exhibition, which includes nearly 400 diverse objects, already has appeared at the Louvre and is now at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, through Sept. 18. However, as inevitably happens, the (600-page) catalog includes reproductions of many more objects than are in the show, and the excellent texts weave them together more tightly than can be managed by labels and panels in an exhibition. While certainly not a substitute for seeing the objects, it’s hard to imagine any tour conducted better than this.
The Actor’s Image: Print Makers of the Katsukawa School, by Timothy T. Clark and Osamu Ueda (Art Institute/Princeton, $125). With this handsomely designed 504-page book, the Art Institute of Chicago comes a little closer to completing the catalog of all the Japanese prints in its famous Clarence E. Buckingham collection, nearly 40 years after the appearance of the first volume and about 20 since research began on the present (third) installment.
The 18th and 19th Century school of artists named for Katsukawa Shunsho designed an enormous number of woodblock prints devoted to the Kabuki theater. Working from playbills, programs and diaries, Ueda identified individual actors, their roles and, in many cases, the specific scenes depicted. Clark reconstructed a 1784 production and discussed in detail more than 130 prints. Donald Jenkins also surveyed the lives and works of artists in the school to conclude the most thorough study on the subject in English and establish an exceedingly high standard for future volumes.
Bonnard, by Nicholas Watkins (Phaidon, $49.99). Ten years have elapsed since the great Pierre Bonnard retrospective organized by the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris swept away the final vestiges of the idea that the artist was a sentimental Impressionist who outlived his time. But always there is a gap before the effects of a scholarly exhibition turns up in work for a more general readership, and here, finally, is a book that shows them.
Watkins, who himself organized a Bonnard retrospective for Japan in 1991, surveys the artist’s entire career, from early posters to late paintings, and rightly acknowledges the questing spirit and high self-demand that gave the output of his final 30 years (1917-1947) a special chromatic brilliance, challenging and in some ways surpassing better-known achievements from the 1890s. The text and excellent reproductions should win for this genius the admiration of an even larger audience.
Flying Out of This World, by Peter Greenaway (University of Chicago, $75 cloth, $39.95 paper). One of the most commanding pieces in last year’s Venice Biennale was an environment created by Greenaway, the British painter-turned-filmmaker, in the palazzo of the late 19th Century painter, inventor and clothing designer Mariano Fortuny.
Here Greenaway raids the drawing cabinets of the Louvre to string together images pertaining to actual or spiritual flight as if they were individual frames in a short film. On the “soundtrack” are his own brief comments about the drawings and the issues they raise. Together, images and words create a fantasia on the theme of flight that follows the simple trajectory of a thrown ball but reveals a lot of complexity along the way.
Pontormo Paintings and Frescoes, by Salvatore S. Nigro (Abrams, $75). This year marks the 500th anniversary of the birth of Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo, the father of Florentine Mannerism, whose exaggerated forms and unusual colors gave new expression to the art of his day. Nigro, who already has produced a fine book on Pontormo’s drawings, here treats 75 paintings and frescoes with the same sane scholarship that strives toward, and achieves, solidity rather than dazzle.
Arikha, by Duncan Thomson (Phaidon, $49.99). The remarkable Avigdor Arikha has received monographic treatment only once before, almost a decade ago, so this new in-depth study is more than welcome, especially as it has been based on conversations with the artist. It includes reproductions of many portraits, still lifes and interiors completed since 1985 as well as several of the abstract paintings with which he built a career prior to the experience of a Caravaggio exhibition that (happily) turned him toward representation. A self-recommending volume.
Christian Boltanski, by Lynn Gumpert (Flammarion, $24.95). When the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago gave this French creator of death-haunted objects and installations his first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Gumpert contributed to the catalog. Now she has produced the first comprehensive monograph on him in English, covering everything superlatively well right down to the impact of Robert Mitchum in Boltanski’s favorite film, “The Night of the Hunter.”
Richard Serra: Writings, Interviews (University of Chicago, $40 cloth, $17.95 paper). Henri Matisse said artists should have their tongues cut out, presumably to protect them from causing worse damage to their reputations. Serra slashes himself only in his accounts of the infamous removal of one of his sculptures from a New York federal building plaza. Otherwise, he is an admirable guide to 25 years of his work.
Installation Art, by Nicolas de Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry (Smithsonian, $49.95). Other books have appeared on the kind of temporary arrangement of objects that became prominent in the mid-1980s but none has been as clear, wide-ranging or well illustrated as this.
