BURNE-JONES
By Christopher Wood
Stewart, Tabori and Chang, $35
This year’s centenary of the death of Victorian painter Edward Burne-Jones has brought the first comprehensive exhibition of his work in the United States (through Sept. 6 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) and a trickle of books on his supremely literary art. Christopher Wood has carried a standard for the artist almost longer than some of the other authors have been alive and now has produced a successor to his volume on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to which Burne-Jones belonged. Especially valuable is the first publication in a popular text of five complete series of tapestries and paintings. All the works here prompt a reassessment of Burne-Jones’ dreamy neo-medievalism, not least because it influenced moderns, including the hard-headed Marcel Duchamp.
BONNARD
By Sarah Whittfield and John Elderfield
Abrams, $60
As sometimes happens with exhibitions shared by museums across the Atlantic, the show for the brilliant French colorist Pierre Bonnard that is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through Sept. 29 includes fewer paintings than when it appeared at the Tate Gallery in London earlier this year. The catalog, however, reproduces and annotates all the works, pairs each of them with little-known photographs and drawings, and provides two splendid essays that build on research done since the last major Bonnard retrospective in 1983. A treat for the mind and eye achieved partly through 112 first-rate color reproductions.
THE ART OF BALLETS RUSSES
By Alexander Schouvaloff
Wadsworth Atheneum/Yale University Press, $65
The century’s greatest confluence of artists, composers, choreographers, dancers and designers was Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, which created 37 productions from 1909 to 1929. The impresario’s last protege, Serge Lifar, collected paintings, set and costume designs from each of the productions, eventually selling them to the Wadsworth Atheneum, the oldest art museum in the United States, which much later acquired a number of original Ballets Russes costumes. This, the catalog of the collection, provides synopses of every ballet, substantial entries on each object, excellent reproductions and a solid re-evaluation of the company’s achievements.
AUBREY BEARDSLEY
By Stephen Calloway
Abrams, $39.95
Thirty years ago the perverse illustrations of this 19th Century British aesthete had a decisive impact on graphic design and led to the rediscovery of the sinuous decorative style known as Art Nouveau. Now his work reclaims attention on the centenary of his death, testifying to the singularity of an output created by an artist in his early 20s during a period of just five years. The author of the handsomely designed monograph is curator of this year’s memorial exhibition in England, and he has provided the first detailed analysis of Beardsley’s influences in a text that nicely complements pioneering efforts in the ’60s by Brian Reade.
CELEBRITY CARICATURE IN AMERICA
By Wendy Wick Reaves
Yale Universoty Press, $45
A branch of portraiture that has received little scholarly attention is the art of caricature, which flourished in the American popular press for the first 30 years of our century. Wendy Wick Reaves sensibly narrows the field to caricatures of celebrities, examining European roots before devoting separate chapters to such masters in the United States as Carlo de Fornaro, Marius de Zayas, Miguel Covarrubias and others. Many of the examples reproduced-including a fantastic dress picturing film notables who dined at Hollywood’s Cocoanut Grove-are masterpieces of the genre as well as being lots of fun.
SOCIALIST REALIST PAINTING
By Matthew Cullerne Bown
Yale University Press, $75
Who would have thought that the most ridiculed art of the century would one day receive as serious a study as any of the modern movements that opposed it? Yet Matthew Cullerne Bown has produced the first comprehensive history of the pro-pagandistic art that was enforced throughout the Soviet Union, and he has done a remarkable job tracing its formal and stylistic development not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg but also in the republics outside of Russia. Even the masters of socialist realism-Aleksandr Deineka, Arkadi Plastov, Geli Korshev-will be unfamiliar to most Western readers, who perhaps will find much to admire in the paintings apart from their ideology.
JOHN SINGER SARGENT: The Early Portraits
By Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray
Yale Univeersity Press, $60
This is the first volume in a complete-works catalog that will include oil paintings, watercolors and pastels by the 19th Century American expatriate. Although it chronicles John Singer Sargent only to 1889, five years after he settled in England, it encompasses a number of his most famous paint-ings, reproducing them beautifully in color and providing a number of luscious closeups of his virtuoso brushwork. The superb introductory essay sets his work against artistic theo-ries of the period, and detailed entries on the paintings provide even biographical accounts of the sitters. A book that amply justifies its 16 years of labor-and not only to specialists.
DE CHIRICO-The Metaphysical Period
By Parolo Balddacci
Bulfinch, $95
Giorgio de Chirico’s habit of inventing biographical details and redating works has made an analysis of his most important paintings far from easy, but Paolo Baldacci, a former professor of ancient history, has acquitted himself nobly, producing the first monograph on the artist’s early works in more than 40 years. If the writing occasionally becomes too airy, Baldacci’s insights into the artist’s study of philosophy and literature are nonetheless remarkable, and his effort to construct a reliable chronology proves heroic. The text is so densely packed with new findings that all future research on this enigmatic figure will have to begin here.
THE COMPLETE WORKS OF MARCEL DUCHAMP
By Arturo Schwarz
Delano Greenidge Editions, 2 volumes, $225
Twenty years ago in a newspaper poll, French museum officials decided that Marcel Duchamp was the most influential and radical artist of the century. Arturo Schwarz, however, had decided it earlier, and now, nearly 30 years after the first edition of these extraordinary books, his conviction has not weakened. Everything that informs the beautifully produced third edition is testimony to that conviction, for this is one of those rare sets that defines the lifework of both subject and author. Many of Schwarz’s interpretations were controversial long ago, yet the reappearance of them, along with substantial new material, has made for a study that, despite blind spots and omissions, a younger generation of Duchamp scholars and enthusiasts can scarcely ignore.
ANSELM KIEFER
By Massimo Cacciari and Germano Celant
Edizioni Charta, $55
The essays take up fewer than 10 pages in this massive volume, which is acceptable because the rest have reproductions devoted to the full range of the German artist’s work, from paintings and collages to photographs and pieces in the form of books. The catalog for Kiefer’s first museum exhibition in the United States, at the Art Institute of Chicago, perhaps gave a clearer introduction, though it’s now 11 years old and the artist is prolific. So this is the book to bring viewers up to date. The color reproductions give as good an indication of the work as any photographs can, and the layout helps viewers determine his persistent approaches and themes.
