The most ambitious and beautiful art books this holiday season all have to do with the long ago and far away–or, at least, older aesthetic values. There’s no better reason for why that should be than that it’s fitting for a lavish book to contain something worth preserving.
In the go-go ’80s, when money and art were equally disposable, any list of art books featured something nice and expensive and “of the moment.” Not anymore. The images and ideas in the following books are for more times than ours. Indulge yourself.
Italian Frescoes: The Early Renaissance 1400-1470, by Steffi Roettgen (Abbeville, 464 pages, $135).
In recent years both Abbeville and Braziller have produced ravishing books on particular fresco cycles, but this is the first modern survey to cover such general aspects of 15th Century fresco painting as patronage and technical methods in addition to documenting 20 complete cycles.
Russell Stockman’s English translation of Roettgen’s German text is not without dry patches; these, however, will be borne without complaint thanks to the beauty of Antonio Quattrone’s color photographs. Detailed plans and descriptions set the projects before us as never before, bringing home masterpieces that in some cases can only be seen with difficulty in out-of-the-way places. The second volume, devoted to frescoes of the High Renaissance, is eagerly awaited.
An Introduction to Italian Sculpture, by John Pope-Hennessy (Phaidon, three volumes, 1,292 pages total, $345; also available separately).
Just before he died in 1994, Pope-Hennessy, one of the foremost authorities on the Renaissance, revised and updated his classic texts from the ’50s and ’60s that were instrumental in convincing other scholars to regard Italian sculpture as highly as Italian painting. Phaidon redesigned this fourth edition of the set, providing excellent duotone illustrations that run conveniently throughout the narrative. Pope-Hennessy’s notes and bibliographies also were updated. The result is a survey of the Gothic, Renaissance, High Renaissance and Baroque periods unmatched in its breadth and depth.
French Art: The Ancien Regime 1620-1775, by Andre Chastel (Flammarion, 400 pages, $75).
Few projects in art scholarship achieved the easy grace of the late Andre Chastel’s unfinished history of French art, the third volume of which now appears in English translation. The period it treats showed the emergence of a uniquely French style of classicism typified by the building and decoration of Versailles. Here Chastel is in his element, bringing together artistic, political and cultural history with surpassing skill and an incomparably deft touch.
The Early Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, by Graham Reynolds (Yale University Press, two volumes, $175).
Catalogs of the complete works of artists are obviously not for everyone; they contain more information than a general reader will have occasion to use. But Reynolds’ catalogue raisonne of the works of one of the greatest English landscape painters of the 19th Century is the result of more than 50 years of study, and the two-volume set already issued–“The Later Paintings and Drawings” appeared in 1984–has proved indispensable.
Here we receive chronological annotated listings and reproductions for nearly 1,400 works, ranging from juvenalia to the first major paintings that established Constable’s reputation. The introduction elegantly compresses much biographical information into just five pages. A detailed appendix presents more than 100 late pieces discovered since 1984. It adds up to impeccable scholarship on an artist whose appeal goes far beyond scholars.
Lucian Freud, by Bruce Bernard & Derek Birdsall (Random House, 360 pages, $175).
Most books on the unflinching British realist have been catalogs for exhibitions. The present volume is the first independent monograph since Lawrence Gowing’s 1982 study, and where that was notable for its text, this is distinguished by the number, layout and reproduction quality of its pictures.
The book presents more than 280 works–paintings and drawings, as well as prints–in large format. Many pieces are childhood drawings or recent paintings reproduced for the first time. Freud supervised Bernard and Birdsall’s selection, also approving the color plates. Bernard’s succinct, 17-page essay is the result of a half-century friendship with the artist, whose output here looks more unsettling than ever. No one paints human flesh with as much grit and relish.
The Language of the Body: Drawings by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, by John Elderfield and Robert Gordon (Abrams, 224 pages, $75).
Prud’hon died in Paris more than 170 years ago, and this is the first book on his work in English, yet it is devoted to an area of his oeuvre even less well-known today than his once-popular mythological and allegorical paintings, a series of chalk studies of nudes drawn from live models. Prud’hon’s artistic sensibility lay between neoclassicism and romanticism, giving his drawings a unique sensual appeal that Elderfield explores through his text and Gordon presents through the selection and arrangement of 57 color images. Might they lead to a Prud’hon revival? It’s doubtful. But cold is any viewer who cannot be seduced by the evident power of hand and eye in these exquisite rediscoveries.
Balthus, by Claude Roy (Little, Brown, 269 pages, $65).
The elusive figure painter who once said, “I would like to stay a child forever,” is now 88 and apparently intent on creating a self-portrait for the ages through recollections and observations that have never appeared in print before. Roy is the friend entrusted to humanize the myth of the inaccessible artist, drawing aside a curtain long enough to add biographical details but not so long as to dissipate the mystery and reserve of Balthus’ epicurean art. The most engrossing of all the books on this last surviving heir of the School of Paris.
William Morris, edited by Linda Parry (Abrams, 384 pages, $49.50).
This richly illustrated catalog for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s centenary exhibition marking Morris’ death includes 17 essays examining all aspects of his hyperactive career, from poetry and politics to painting, typography and interior decoration. An exhaustive tribute to the 19th Century British dynamo whose strongest influence was on the Modern Movement in design. America produced no artist as diverse and prolific.
Georges de la Tour and His World, by Philip Conisbee (Yale University Press, 320 pages, $50).
The first American exhibition for the 17th Century French master is at the National Gallery in Washington through Jan. 1, and here is its catalog, offering a life-and-times portrait through essays by 10 specialists. It includes several paintings unknown at the time of the Paris retrospective in 1972 and, among much else, freshly illuminates his most moving canvases, the great series of religious nocturnes.
Art of the Postmodern Era: From the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, by Irving Sandler (Harper-Collins, 635 pages, $65).
Sandler completes his four-volume history of art since 1945 with a brisk tour of recent American and European art that is admirable in its overview and detail. He treats not only the art but also the peculiarities of the art market and postmodern theory, at times being clearer than his sources and fairer than some of his subjects deserve.
