Great Altarpieces: Gothic and Renaissance
By Caterina Limentani Virdis and Mari Pietrogiovanna
Vendome Press, 421 pages, $150
This survey is so beautiful it’s a wonder no one attempted it before last year’s Italian-language edition. Thirty multipanel devotional paintings–by such artists as Albrecht Durer, Piero della Francesca, Matthias Grunewald, Andrea Mantegna and Hieronymus Bosch–are introduced, reproduced complete and explored through full-page details. Eight altarpieces also receive gatefolds that open and close like the originals. The paintings are preceded by an extended essay (like everything else, translated from Italian by Daniel Wheeler) on the history of altarpieces and followed by a bibliography with more than 300 years of sources. Lavish production values are always at the service of the subject.
Matisse
By Pierre Schneider
Rizzoli, 752 pages, $100
Pierre Schneider, an American art historian living in Paris, organized the Henri Matisse centennial exhibition at the Grand Palais in 1970 and almost 15 years later published the finest single volume on the artist. That massive, much-acclaimed book has been out of print for a decade, and examples in excellent condition have sold for more than twice the price at publication. This reprint has added material (mostly prefatory and bibliographical) but is otherwise identical to the first edition and is offered for only $5 more than the original price. No other Matisse monograph comes close to Schneider’s; its scholarship and unaffected prose remain a joy. Welcome back to one of the great art books of the 20th Century.
Richter 858
Edited by David Breskin
Distributed Art Publishers, 120 pages, $125
Communists have made some of the most extravagant capitalists, so there’s little surprise in Gerhard Richter, the former East German who has become the world’s most overrated living painter, now being treated to a production that typifies the excesses of the Western art world. Whatever you call it–designer art history, connoiseurship aspiring to the condition of Prada–this collection of color reproductions, essays, poems and a CD of music inspired by Richter’s abstract paintings is to our new century what Julian Schnabel’s autobiography was to the old: a venture at once fascinating and appalling that also is an instant collectible. As slick as can be, right from the aluminum slipcase.
Audible Silence: Cy Twombly at Daros
Edited by Eva Keller and Regula Malin
Scalo, 162 pages, $34.95
About 20 years ago, a Swiss art collector began acquiring late 20th Century works by primarily North American artists. The collection now is part of Daros Services, which last May opened an exhibition space that mounted its first monographic show, of paintings, sculptures and drawings by Cy Twombly. For the catalog, Daros engaged 11 essayists long familiar with the artist to address widely varying aspects of his work. The essays–by Robert Pincus-Witten, Harald Szeemann, John Berger, Yve-Alain Bois and others–are published here with excellent color reproductions in a coolly designed volume that is, by turns, informative and merely curious.
Degas and the Dance
By Jill DeVonyer and Richard Kendall
Abrams, 304 pages, $49.95
Given that more than half of Edgar Degas’ work is devoted to activities of dancers and the artist died 85 years ago, it might be assumed that the last word on the subject was written well before now. This catalog for the exhibition (through Jan. 12) at the Detroit Institute of Arts proves any such assumption false; in fact, it’s the first in-depth study of Degas’ relationship to the Paris Opera, which housed the French national ballet company. The exploration of context is now very much the focus of young art historians, but they can scarcely be more clear-sighted than veteran Richard Kendall and former dancer Jill DeVonyer, who continually cast light into corners never before illuminated.
Mondrian, 1892-1914: The Path to Abstraction
By Hans Janssen and Joop M. Joosten
Waanders , 224 pages, $65
Piet Mondrian painted for nearly 30 years before he came to his famous grid paintings, and few of his representational pictures are widely known. The big Mondrian retrospective in the ’90s was organized in such a way as to direct attention to his abstract work, so only this year brought the first exhibition that gave the early paintings something like their due. This catalog for the show traces his development step by step, and it is one of the greatest developments of the modern period, teeming with ideas that will reverberate throughout the rest of the 20th Century. Here is an indispensable book that brings discovery on every page. It belongs in every serious art library.
Koloman Moser: Master of Viennese Modernism
By Maria Rennhofer
Thames & Hudson, 248 pages, $60
Koloman Moser was one of those extraordinary 19th Century artists who did everything. When he designed a dining room for his exclusive clientele, it might include not only furniture and decorative objects but also a mold for dinner rolls and gown for the lady of the house. In addition, he was a master draftsman and budding Symbolist painter who was one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession, the association that was to free young artists from the academic Establishment. This is the first book to treat his work comprehensively, and it reproduces many period photographs along with color plates devoted to his varied output. It’s a volume at once handsome and overdue.
Modigliani and the Artists of Montparnasse
By Kenneth Wayne
Abrams, 223 pages, $60
The first significant Amedeo Modigliani exhibition in the U.S. in more than 40 years recently began a three-city tour at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (through Jan. 12). Here is its catalog, which departs from the romantic myths surrounding the artist to establish him as a sophisticated painter and sculptor who gained a wider reputation during his lifetime than was previously acknowledged. Curator Kenneth Wayne presents much new material, including the first publication of excerpts from a Surrealist novella by one of Modigliani’s lovers and fascinating documentary photographs. A section of beautifully reproduced works by contemporaries also amplifies his artistic context.
Theodore Chasseriau, 1819-1856: The Unknown Romantic
By Stephane Guegan, Vincent Pomarede and Louis-Antoine Prat
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 432 pages, $65
Theodore Chasseriau is not well known even in France, where his works are found in most significant number, so his first retrospective exhibition in more than 70 years–through Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York–is essential viewing for anyone interested in 19th Century French Romantic painting. Chasseriau was a pupil of Ingres’ and an admirer of Delacroix’s who reconciled the line of the former with the color of the latter. His historical, religious and Orientalist subjects were more influential on later generations than his portraits, though all are treated in exemplary fashion by the seven scholars who contribute to this monograph that serves as the exhibition catalog.
Peerless Images: Persian Painting and Its Sources
By Eleanor Sims, with Boris Marshak and Ernst Grube
Yale University Press, 350 pages, $95
This first broad survey of Persian figural painting extends from prehistoric times to the early 20th Century and bypasses questions of style or history in favor of the themes displayed in the pictures. Nevertheless, the new approach has produced a work of high research and connoiseurship, not just for painting but also Persian sculpture, ceramics and metalwork. The format could not be simpler: a fairly brief historical overview followed by the primary themes of Iranian imagery and many examples annotated and reproduced in each category. This gives the volume the look of an exhibition catalog, but predictability in design is a small price to pay for an increase in clarity. Warmly recommended.
