ROGIER VAN DER WEYDEN: The Complete Works
By Dirk De Vos
Abrams, 445 pages, $145
Rogier van der Weyden was the most influential Flemish painter of the 15th Century. His religious works are austere masterpieces that convey a strong, simple emotional power with utmost clarity; his portraits have masterly psychological penetration. All his known paintings and drawings (including problematic attributions and lost works) are ravishingly reproduced and authoritatively discussed in this first comprehensive study in 25 years. Specialists will, of course, get the most from it, but so overwhelming is the strength of the enterprise that it also can be recommended to more serious general readers.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: Catalogue Raisonne
By Barbara Buhler Lynes
Yale University Press, two volumes, 1,198 pages, $195
The forces that made Georgia O’Keeffe a living legend and the best-known painter from North America are still at work 13 years after her death. More than 2,000 paintings, drawings and watercolors are here gorgeously reproduced and tellingly annotated in the only complete-works catalog I know that matches the highest scholarship to the most beautiful design. In every sense the effort achieves the tyrannically high standards the artist set for books during her life. If the annotations are for scholars, the art is at once personal and accessible to everyone. That it is also limited and highly repetitive is, given a production like this, almost beside the point.
BALTHUS: Catalogue Raisonne of the Complete Works
By Virginie Monnier
Abrams, 569 pages, $225
For most of his 91 years, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola has been “a painter about whom nothing is known.” James Lord violated the silence, preparing the way for Nicholas Fox Weber’s new biography (Knopf, $40), which has turned out to be a mixture of revelation and continued concealment. Here, however, is what ultimately counts: 2,100 paintings, drawings and sketchbooks, nearly half receiving their first publication. From portions of the text (plates were unavailable at this writer’s deadline), the case is restated for a figure painter whose gifts and obsessions went against the grainand still triumphed-in an era of abstraction.
LATE ANTIQUITY: A Guide to the Postclassical World
Edited by G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar
Harvard University Press, 780 pages, $49.95
A number of exhibitions in recent years have demonstrated that the late classical period –from the middle of the 3rd Century to the end of the 8th Century — was hardly the period of decline it once was thought to be. Here is the book to end all doubt. A combination of essays and encyclopedic entries, the volume brings together work by more than 200 scholars that treats significant aspects of history, art, religion and architecture in a format prompting sustained reading and serendipitous sampling. It is the only study of its kind, setting side by side the achievements of Rome, Persia, Byzantium and early Islam.
VENETIAN COLOUR: Marble, Mosaic, Painting and Glass, 1250-1550
By Paul Hills
Yale University Press, 247 pages, $55
Venetian light and color often have been discussed in terms of paintings created in (or inspired by) the city. Here a watercolorist and scholar of Italian art goes deeper, exploring what might be called the social, cultural and environmental history of color as it is manifest in buildings, clothing and glass in addition to painting. The text is clear but weighty, and many juxtapositions of photographic details in color underline the author’s premises more persuasively than in any other book on Venetian art I’ve seen. A first-rate production that is literally marvelous.
VICTORIAN PAINTING
By Lionel Lambourne
Phaidon, 512 pages, $59.95
Queen Victoria occupied the British throne for 64 years, during which time a staggering number of English painters plied their trade. Lionel Lambourne, the former head of paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum, takes on even more by treating artists not only from England but also British colonies and the U.S. As late as 30 years ago the majority of their works were thought sentimental and banished to museum storerooms. Now that they have re-emerged, viewers have a superb, authoritative guide to their industry, variety and — truth be told — often extraordinary pictorial invention.
DEPEROFUTURISTA
Curated by Gabriella Belli
Skira, 194 pages, $50
Skira, the Italian art and architecture press, long has been a great name in publishing, but only recently has it again begun to receive wide distribution. A book that in its own way is as refined and daring as earlier Skira titles, this one is devoted to the long career of Fortunato Depero, a Futurist pioneer who excelled in painting, graphics, stage design and the applied arts. This is the gorgeous catalog for an exhibition that took place this year in Florida, and much of the work reproduced in color — drawings to clothing to toys, including a legion of reconstructed marionettes — will knock your eyes out.
EDWARD HOPPER: The Watercolors
By Virginia M. Mecklenburg
National Museum of American Art/Norton, 181 pages, $39.95
From 1923 to 1940, Edward Hopper painted watercolors outdoors in bright summer light. He began in New England but eventually worked in the South, Southwest, Far West and even Mexico. These pieces were significantly different from his studio paintings in oil and, in more than one sense, changed the course of his career. The book that complements an exhibition of Hopper watercolors — at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, through Jan. 3 — is a substantial addition to the literature on a much-celebrated artist whose reputation, in the 31 years since his death, only grows.
ILLUSTRATED LETTERS: Artists and Writers Correspond
Edited by Roselyne de Ayala and Jean-Pierre Gueno
Abrams, 239 pages, $60
Children of e-mail and the cell phone need to be reminded that not so long ago correspondence still could achieve the verbal and visual distinction of fine art. Here we have 83 letters — 35 published for the first time — in which the stuff of everyday life finds expression only through a conjunction of word and image that stretches conventional bounds. There also are elegant examples of visual wit that our sharper contemporary efforts can scarcely approach let alone surpass.
THE TILE CLUB AND THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT IN AMERICA
By Ronald G. Pisano
Abrams, 112 pages, $29.95
For a decade beginning in 1877, a group that included artists as different as Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Elihu Vedder met regularly in Manhattan to discuss aesthetics of the day, paint ceramic tiles and organize sketching trips. Because several of its members were famous, the club received a lot of attention and had great influence, which makes it all the more surprising that this should be the first book on the subject, accompanying the first exhibition — at the Museums at Stonybrook, N.Y., through Jan. 23 — in more than half a century. A happy rediscovery.
