MICHELANGELO: The Complete Sculpture, Painting, Architecture
By William E. Wallace
Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, 267 pages, $95
There certainly is no shortage of books on the giant of the Italian Renaissance, but this one exerts a special claim on our attention for production values that appear higher than its price. Nai Chang’s elegant design sets off the brilliance of the color photographs, which often had already benefitted from restorations of the original pieces. But the chief delight comes by way of books produced during the 1980s in Paris by Jacqueline and Maurice Guillaud. The onionskin they used to give luminosity to reproductions of frescoes has been replaced here by rice paper that captures much the same delicate effects, rare in a trade edition. A justifiable extravagance.
DELACROIX
By Barthelemy Jobert
Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $65
The 200th anniversary of the birth of Eugene Delacroix has brought a dazzling exhibition of his late work (through Jan. 3 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and this long-awaited study by the curator of the bicentennial show of Delacroix prints and drawings in Paris. Strangely enough, it is the first book in English to treat the artist’s full output plus its influence after his death. Barthelemy Jobert’s prose, in a translation by Terry Grabar and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren, is free of airiness and crystalline in expression, presenting Delacroix’s Romantic genius in terms even the newcomer to his work will understand.
HARLEQUIN ON THE MOON: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts
By Lynne Lawner
Abrams, 208 pages, $60
One of the most poignant images in all of painting is that of Gilles in the eponymous 1719 canvas by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Gilles is another name for Pierrot, the melancholy man in white who was central to a form of theater that arose in Italy at the end of the Renaissance. He and his confreres recur in visual art from the works of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to Robert Longo. This is the first popular study to examine how painters (and stage designers) have used the images again and again, revealing for each new age their mythic possibilities.
THE UNKNOWN MATISSE: A Life of Henri Matisse:
The Early Years, 1869-1908
By Hilary Spurling
Knopf, 480 pages, $40
Pierre Schneider’s magisterial study of Henri Matisse (from 1984) seemed to have everything we needed to fully comprehend the artist and his work, but no. Hilary Spurling, a British theater critic and literary editor, has turned up information about Matisse’s indirect involvement in a 1902 political scandal that had a directand regressive-impact on his painting. This is the book’s most significant new contribution, but as a whole the text treats the artist’s early difficulties so persuasively that readers are likely to think twice about the joy in his mature work, realizing it was anything but easily won.
PICASSO AND THE WAR YEARS: 1937-1945
Edited by Steven A. Nash
Thames and Hudson, 255 pages, $50
Recent years brought an exhibition and book on the “weeping woman” theme in Pablo Picasso’s work, but not until the current show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco was there a study of the artist’s entire wartime output. This catalog for the exhibition presents seven essays that explore how Picasso responded to war in paintings, prints, drawings and photographs. A detailed chronology also establishes his activities between the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and the end of the Nazi occupation of France. The result is invaluable new insight where one might have least expected.
JOSEPH CORNELL/MARCEL DUCHAMP . . . IN RESONANCE
Introduction by Anne d’Harnoncourt
Cantz, 343 pages, $70
Joseph Cornell kept an elaborate file called the “Duchamp Dossier” that chronicled his friendship with the brilliant French artist and art strategist. After Cornell’s death in 1972, Walter Hopps, adviser to the Cornell Foundation, planned an exhibition exploring the artists’ affinities, but it came to fruition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art only now, nine years after the dossier entered its permanent collection. This is the first publication of the materials Cornell collected; essays by six prominent scholars (including Hopps) illuminate them, making for a book as strange as it is touching and special.
MODERN ART IN EASTERN EUROPE:
From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890-1939
By S.A. Mansbach
Cambridge University Press, 384 pages, $65
Here’s a kind of book that comes along only a few times in a century. Nearly everything in it is unfamiliar to Western readers. Many of the illustrations are receiving their first publication. The author’s command of the material is both brilliant and comprehensive. The text supersedes that of earlier, more specialized English-language publications. And, if taken seriously, the achievements outlined should lead to changes in how we view the origins and development of the modern movement. A whole new world awaits the reader’s discovery.
JIM DINE: The Alchemy of Images
By Marco Livingstone, with commentary by Jim Dine
Monacelli Press, 352 pages, $85
Jim Dine’s stature as an artist has not been adequately reflected in either the number or quality of books about him. Here, at last, is a volume that treats all areas of his achievement-performance, painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, book design-with complete authority in the words of Marco Livingstone, the curator of his most important exhibitions. Dine’s fresh comments are characteristically brief and to the point; Livingstone supplements them with extensive earlier quotations that, taken together, are as apposite and revealing as a first-rate oral biography.
MARK ROTHKO: The Works on Canvas
By David Anfam
Yale University Press, 708 pages, $125
This is not the catalog for the traveling exhibition that soon (Jan. 8 to April 18) will end its tour at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris but the first volume of a catalogue raisonne that has been a decade in the making. It presents all of Mark Rothko’s paintings on canvas and wood panel, from figure studies in the 1920s to the great abstractions ending in 1970. David Anfam is a splendid guide to the artist’s sources and themes, and the color reproductions that are essential to a major Rothko study are the truest of any published. A landmark in scholarship for one of North America’s most sublime painters.
PERFORMANCE: Live Art Since 1960
By RoseLee Goldberg
Abrams, 240 pages, $60
Nearly 20 years ago, Abrams published the first history of an art form that lies somewhere between religious ritual and stand-up comedy. The author now complements her earlier study with a book documenting key artists and their creations. No other writer has quite RoseLee Goldberg’s range, as she takes in video, opera and dance along with pop music and avant-garde theater. Her introductions and extended captions put to shame most “critics” of performance art who, instead of explaining its various metamorphoses, have proclaimed, against all evidence, its disappearance. Indispensable.
