Does anybody read art books in the summer?
You hardly ever see people carrying them, though many of the best art books are catalogs for exhibitions, which people often use part of their summers to see.
It can be done, however, the other way around: Read books in advance, as preparation for visits to exhibitions during the summer. With such books available from many stores–not just shops in museums–access is more convenient than in years past, and every show will mean more when approached this way.
Some of the following entries are exhibition catalogs. Others are independent monographs.
Bon voyage to the armchair travelers!
El Greco: The Burial of Count Orgaz, by Francisco Calvo Serraller (Thames and Hudson, $45).
All the various approaches to art will never replace the irreducible process of one viewer articulately dealing with what he or she sees in a single work. Books are ideal carriers for results of that process, especially when, as here, they include enough reproductions of details so a reader may conveniently follow each turn of the writer’s thought.
This 143-page volume indicates just how persuasive the act of seeing can be under the guidance of an intelligence that serves the work of art rather than any cause more questionable. A reader comes away from the study of El Greco’s great Mannerist painting having learned not only about the piece and the artist but also about the age that shaped both of them. Here is a breadth of scholarship that reveals so much being practiced today as the rankest careerism and the sheerest fantasy.
James McNeill Whistler, by Richard Dorment (Abrams, $75).
Whistler was an artist who typified what used to be said about Irish novelists: He talked away so much of his thought that it came down to us more clearly through the works of others. In fact, the aesthetics he imparted to Oscar Wilde had tremendous influence on the art and literature of the modern period, though Whistler’s own paintings, prints, interior decorations and drawings, even at their most adventuresome, rarely went as far as his ideas.
After his death in 1903, he received a memorial exhibition that has never been matched in number of objects and only now is being approached in depth of analysis. Here is the catalog for the show opening Sunday at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which perhaps will cause a re-evaluation of one of the 19th Century’s most fascinating, colorful and forward-looking artists, a late-Victorian dandy who lived as wittily as if he wanted George Sanders to play him in the movies. His relationship to a famous counterpart in France is also the subject of an excellent new study, “Whistler and Montesquiou: The Butterfly and the Bat,” by Edgar Munhall (Flammarion, $45).
Piet Mondrian: 1872-1944, edited by Angelica Zander Rudenstine (Bullfinch, $75).
The Dutch pioneer of non-objective painting died in New York City a half century ago last year. This is the catalog for the commemorative exhibition that will open next month at the National Gallery of Art. It’s the largest show ever mounted on the artist’s behalf, and the book has comparable expansiveness, beginning with a highly detailed chronology that reproduces many rare documentary photographs.
The essays by Mondrian specialists Yve-Alain Bois and Hans Janssen are not long but nonetheless flesh out beautifully the annotations of drawings and paintings by Joop Joosten and Rudenstine. However, the emphasis overall is on Mondrian the modernist, which gives short shrift to those works–more than half of the artist’s output–formed by 19th Century aesthetics. Caveat emptor to readers who seek a balanced view of Mondrian’s naturalism and abstraction; the paperback reissue of John Milner’s 1992 study (Phaidon, $29.95) may better serve their need.
Nicolas Poussin, by Richard Verdi (Zwemmer, $70).
Last fall the Grand Palais in Paris staged an exhibition to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the birth of Poussin, and this is its catalog, translated into English for the only other stop on the tour, the Royal Academy in London. The claim made by Pierre Rosenberg, director of the Louvre, that Poussin was “France’s greatest painter” is perhaps easily accepted when a traveler is in France, surrounded not only by Poussin’s works but also the paintings and drawings of three centuries of artists who admired him. Yet despite masterpieces owned by 11 museums in the United States, Americans would not be likely to rank the artist so highly, which means there’s much to learn from the essays and annotations collected here and supported by more than 90 accurate color reproductions.
The Cubist Epoch, by Douglas Cooper (Phaidon, $22.95).
No art movement in the modern period has proven as eternally fresh as Cubism, the movement begun by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the first decade of the 20th Century. Where the art of every subsequent avant-garde movement has been inverted or parodied, Cubism has repelled all such attempts by demanding as much of viewers today as on the day almost 90 years ago when it was created. There’s no shortage of texts that tell the story, though this one has achieved classic status during the last quarter century, and a new, moderately priced paperback edition will enable it to reach the hands of another generation yet to make the exciting discovery.
Hidden Treasures Revealed, by Albert Kostenevich (Abrams, $49.50).
The ancient Greeks knew that the greatest art collectors often were the greatest thieves, so it was not exactly a surprise that more than 70 Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings thought destroyed in Germany during World War II should have turned up in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, where they are all currently on exhibit for the first time. Whatever the courts will say about their eventual disposition, some of the works are both famous and beautiful, and it’s good to have them documented so well in a volume that, considering the number of pages (272) and color plates (about 100), is a steal.
Walker Evans: A Biography, by Belinda Rathbone (Houghton Mifflin, $27.50).
Evans’ Farm Security Administration photographs from the 1930s long have been favorites of people who approach them with bleeding hearts, attributing a “concern” for humanity that strongly goes against their aristocratic aloofness. The author of this first Evans biography does not make the same error. She sees he was every inch an aesthete who cared little for his subjects and, at times, even less for those figures supposedly close to him. Like all such books, it does not offer nearly enough on the art, though it treats the life directly while sparing us the full ugliness of the predators who, in the end, descended upon the ruin of this American giant. A clearheaded complement to the many available books of his pictures.
Andres Serrano: Body and Soul, edited by Brian Wallis (Takarajima, $50).
Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine has become one of the most infamous artworks of the last decade, but how many people who have seen it in reproduction know anything else he has done? This first monograph on Serrano’s work puts the picture back into the context of a series on body fluids that is the very opposite of blasphemous and traces the artist’s subsequent development. He emerges as a humane photographer concerned with themes of life and death that are seldom found in contemporary art. His vision is direct, uncluttered and, at times, surprisingly sentimental. The essays here make too much of relatively modest achievements, though some of the color reproductions are strikingly vivid.
Shark Infested Waters: The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the ’90s, by Sarah Kent (Zwemmer, $35).
For the last decade or so, Charles Saatchi not only has bought art on a princely scale but also has shown it in his semi-private museum outside London and provided catalogs on the collection. The first set, covering his international holdings, ran to four volumes written by many contributors. This recent addition gathers work of 36 young artists in a single book by a single author. As before, the collector is indiscriminate in his tastes but powerful in making reputations: Several of the artists–Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Abigail Lane, Jane Simpson, Rachel Whiteread–already have shown in Chicago. One of Saatchi’s former scribes used to credit him with “inventing the ’80s.” Here’s the book to indicate we are not yet free of his influence.
David Salle 1979-1994, by David Whitney and Lisa Liebmann (Rizzoli, $75).
An overdesigned, overwritten bit of advertising for an overweening artist whose paintings have the same underwhelming effect in reproduction as in direct encounter. This first monograph on Salle is to the ’90s what artist Julian Schnabel’s autobiography was to the ’80s: a reminder of some of the shallower aspects of the contemporary art world that send collectors to hog heaven until the market allows them to double or triple their investment. The book should be shot into space as provocation for higher forms of life to come destroy us.
