THREE THOUSAND YEARS OF CHINESE PAINTING
By Richard M. Barnhart, James Cahill, Wu Hung, Yang Xin, Nie Chongzheng and Lang Shaojun
Yale University Press, 402 pages, $75
As the first in a proposed series of more than 75 volumes on Chinese culture and civilization, this 402-page study is an astonishing feat with much new to say to novice and specialist alike. The color photo-graphs occasionally leave some-thing to be desired, though they are more than made up for by the clarity of the essays, not only on specific historical periods but also on such fundamental issues as how to look at Chinese painting. Broad surveys in the area have, of course, appeared many times before, but this one outclasses them on virtually every count.
MICHELANGELO: The Last Judgment, A Glorious Restoration
By Loren Partridge, Fabrizio Mancinelli and Gianluigi Colalucci Abrams, 207 pages, $65
This first one-volume study of Michelangelo’s masterpiece is a spectacular production. Takashi Okamura’s color photographs present the fresco whole and in more than 130 details. Loren Partridge interprets the work in the light of earlier painted and sculpted treatments. Fabrizio Mancinelli outlines the painting’s history, technique and restoration. Gianluigi Colalucci reflects on heading a restoration project that lasted 14 years. It all comes together in a handsomely designed book that complements a 1994 monograph on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. For what you get, the price is also moderate.
HANS HOLBEIN
By Oskar Baetschmann and Pascal Greiner
Princeton University Press, 255 pages, $55
The quincentenary of the birth of one of the most prominent painters of the Northern Renaissance has brought the first complete study of his works in 40 years. Altarpieces, portraits, jewelry and stained-glass-window designs, woodcuts, decorative schemes-the volume treats them all, in addition to reexamining the positive appraisals that appeared for centuries after Holbein’s death. A surprise is in store for those who perceive him only as the court painter to Britain’s King Henry VIII. Holbein ranks among the most ambitious and diverse artists not only of his own time but also from what we know of antiquity.
INTIMATE ENCOUNTERS: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France
Essays by Richard Rand, Sarah Maza, Mark Ledbury, Virginia Swain and Anne L. Schroder Princeton University Press, 220 pages, $65
French paintings of people engaged in romantic or family situations have at last been rescued from viewers who see in them only entertaining subjects or winning technique. The essayists assembled examine for the first time how genre painting functioned in the cultural context of the Enlightenment. This book de-emphasizes aesthetic qualities in the interest of ideas that had currency during the period, but the writers stay within reasonable bounds, enriching rather than puffing up (or unconsciously diminishing) the art.
SEURAT AND THE AVANT-GARDE
By Paul Smith
Yale University Press, 211 pages, $60
Most scholarship on Georges Seurat has accepted his art as a kind of realism informed by scientific theory and influenced by leftist politics. Not here. Paul Smith questions more than a century of Seurat interpretation and reassembles incontrovertible data to form a different view of the painter, one that finds him without anarchist sympathies or a scientific theory of color and, instead, in the process of developing a visionary theory of aesthetics that borrowed from German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and composer Richard Wagner. A book with implications for future research that probably will not be clear for a generation.
MAX BEERBOHM CARICATURES
By N. John Hall
Yale University Press, 240 pages, $45
Long before David Levine began to flay prominent figures with his pen, there was caricaturist and essayist Max Beerbohm, who remains more than 40 years after his death just as he was supposed to have been in life: incomparable. His pointed drawings of writers, actors, artists, politicians and royals are as witty today as when he started producing them a century ago, though most readers will be grateful for N. John Hall’s help in identifying the figures and placing them in their proper pre-World War I contexts. More than 200 caricatures are reproduced, conveying Beerbohm’s elegance of line and subtle use of color. Both pleasure-giving and fun.
THE INNOCENT EYE: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist
By Jonathan Fineberg
Princeton University Press, 249 pages, $60
Tribal art has long been known to have influenced the painting and sculpture of pioneering modernists, but another source for such primitivism was the art of children, which only now receives significant analysis. Jonathan Fineberg devotes chapters to artists Mikhail Larionov, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and several others whom he shows to have admired and even owned collections of children’s art that profoundly affected their outputs. These findings first appeared in a 1995 exhibition in Germany and Switzerland; while not strictly a substitute, this book was, nonetheless, worth the wait.
EGON SCHIELE: The Leopold Collection, Vienna
By Magdalena Dabrowski, Rudolf Leopold and Romana Schuler
Yale University Press/Dumont, 363 pages, $60
The last 30 years have brought many books on the great turn-of-the-century Viennese painter and draftsman, but few have substantially increased our knowledge. One volume that did was the superb 1972 “Egon Schiele: Paintings, Watercolors, Drawings,” which never received an English translation from the original German. Its author, Rudolf Leopold, was the collector of Austrian art who now annotates 152 selections from his extraordinary holdings for an exhibition (through Jan. 4) at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Only Jane Kallir’s 1990 complete-works catalog presents more of Schiele’s genius.
STANLEY SPENCER: An English Vision
By Fiona MacCarthy
Yale University Press, 195 pages, $45
This is the catalog for the exhibition of 64 paintings that was scheduled to appear at the Museum of Contemporary Art before Chicago dropped out of the tour (the show is at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., through Jan. 11). Fiona MacCarthy’s excellent text, which emphasizes biographical links with the art, supplements the 1992 complete-paintings catalog by Keith Bell, providing a humane introduction to the disordered life of a bizarrely original artist who recast history and religion in the terms of his quaint little village and at the same time created some of the most frankly sexual portraits of the 20th Century.
THE PAINTINGS OF PAUL CEZANNE: A Catalogue Raisonne
By John Rewald
Abrams, 592 pages (Vol. 1) and 335 pages (Vol. 2), $400
Here’s an exceptional venture that literally contains the scholarship of a lifetime. Sixty years ago, John Rewald wrote a review of the first Cezanne catalogue raisonne, having little idea that he would one day build on the achievement of its author, Lionello Venturi, to produce his own. In fact, Rewald died before all 954 entries were complete, leaving Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman to work from his notes and in many cases provide only identifications with bibliographies, exhibition histories and provenance. Nonetheless, all future studies of Cezanne will begin here, not least for Rewald’s telling juxtapositions of the black-and-white photographs that fill the second volume. Expensive but indispensable.
