Manet/Velazquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting
By Gary Tinterow and Genevieve Lacambre
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 592 pages, $75
It long has been known that French composers of the early 20th Century were held in thrall by Spain, but here is the first in-depth exploration of how 19th Century French artists, writers and collectors developed a taste for Spanish painting that brought about a triumph of realism in French painting and, in turn, laid the foundation for modern art. The attraction to Spanish art was felt in the U.S. as well, and several American painters are examined in a group of essays that also traces the intertwined histories of the Louvre Museum in Paris and the Prado Museum in Madrid.
Edouard Vuillard
By Guy Cogeval, with Kimberly Jones, Laurence des Cars and MaryAnne Stevens
Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/National Gallery of Art/Yale University Press, 501 pages, $65
This is the catalog for the most comprehensive exhibition ever devoted to the paintings, drawings, photographs and prints of the great French artist Edouard Vuillard, which is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through Aug. 24. It is not, however, the complete-works catalog by Guy Cogeval and Vuillard heir Antoine Salomon; that is scheduled for publication later this year. Nevertheless, it’s a beautiful publication that surveys the artist’s career through entries on 334 works–many unfamiliar to all but specialists–then adds persuasive essays on such topics as his photographs and summer vacations.
Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University
By Albert E. Elsen, with Rosalyn Frankel Jamison
Oxford University Press, 662 pages, $75, $55 paper
There are three exceptional collections of the sculpture of Auguste Rodin in the world. Here is the catalog for one of them, begun by the pioneering American scholar who helped form the collection and brought to completion by an independent art historian after his death. It represents a lifetime of connoiseurship by the man who first caused others to see Rodin as a giant in the modern movement. More than 200 works–bronzes, ceramics, drawings–receive detailed entries supplemented by essays on the formation of the collection and the casting of Rodin bronzes.
Egon Schiele: Drawings and Watercolors
By Jane Kallir
Thames & Hudson, 493 pages, $29.95
In a career that lasted only 12 years, Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele created several hundred paintings and almost 3,000 drawings and watercolors. Here Jane Kallir, co-director of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City and the author of Schiele’s paintings catalog, introduces large groups of his works on paper year by year, reproducing many unfamiliar examples, often for the first time in color. As Schiele was among the most powerful draftsmen of the 20th Century, the more than 300 excellent reproductions are worth the price of purchase, and combined with Kallir’s sensitive analyses they make the production irresistible.
Philip Guston: Retrospective
By Michael Auping
Thames & Hudson, 271 pages, $50
Philip Guston began as a representational artist, developed into one of the most delicate of the Abstract Expressionists and ultimately returned to a quirky kind of representation. These shifts were controversial even to close friends, and now, more than 20 years after Guston’s death, they still can look more like breaks than an evolution. The exhibition that unites all phases of his career most persuasively is scheduled to be at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 27. This is its catalog, now the single best introduction to a tremendous force in American painting.
Christopher Wilmarth: Drawing Into Sculpture
By Edward Saywell
Yale University Press, 92 pages, $18.95 paper
The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University recently had an exhibition devoted to sketchbooks, maquettes and drawings by American sculptor of glass and steel Christopher Wilmarth. His widow gave the archive to the university two years ago, and the exhibition plus this catalog are the first fruits of the gift. Drawings were particularly important to the artist, and Edward Saywell, a curatorial associate at the Fogg museum, has assembled a generous selection of all types. The text gives special insight into Wilmarth’s nonpareil art.
Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs
By Julian Cox and Colin Ford
Getty Publications, 560 pages, $150
Here is the volume that rescues 19th Century British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron from the sociological realm of women’s studies to reclaim her as an artist. All of Cameron’s known photographs are chronologically reproduced and annotated; many also receive full-page toned reproductions that complement essays treating everything from Cameron’s life and times to her commercial strategies. Further research into Cameron’s photographs, whether they be portraits, literary illustrations, allegories or studies of the people of Ceylon, now will begin here. An exemplary effort.
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective
By Philippe Arbaizar, Jean Clair, Claude Cookman, Robert Delpire, Peter Galassi, Jean-Noel Jeanneney, Jean Leymarie and Serge Toubiana
Thames & Hudson, 431 pages, $75
Henri Cartier-Bresson will be 95 this August, and he’s still the world’s greatest living photographer even though he gave up the camera more than 20 years ago for drawing and painting. This commemorative volume, based on a retrospective (through July 27) at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, brings together examples of all his creations, along with documentary images, reproductions of memorabilia and essays by several of the people who have known his work best. Much of the material is unfamiliar, contributing to a gratifying–always life-enhancing–tribute.
Margaret Bourke-White: The Photography of Design 1927-1936
By Stephen Bennett Phillips
The Phillips Collection/Rizzoli, 207 pages, $45
Margaret Bourke-White got the jobs that made her famous–at Fortune and Life magazines–by showing abstract photographs of architecture and industry. Comparable to celebrated images by Charles Sheeler, Bourke-White’s studies are nonetheless little known. The images were created in the period of high modernism in America under the impress of design principles of artist-theorist Arthur Wesley Dow–which influenced many, including Georgia O’Keeffe–but the photographs receive their due only now in this first study, which complements an exhibition currently on the way to Sarasota, Fla. (opening Oct. 24).
The History of Japanese Photography
By Anne Wilkes Tucker, Dana Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryuichi and Takeba Joe
Yale University Press, 405 pages, $65
Almost 30 years ago a Chicago dealer in photography introduced to the U.S. the work of Nojima Yasuzo, a Japanese modern who excelled at portraits and nude studies. His remarkable oeuvre led one to wonder how long it would take before an English-language history would set the panoply of Japanese photography before us. It has taken until now. This is the first major attempt and, as such, proves beyond criticism. Art-world attitudes regarding multiculturalism seldom get beyond cant. Here they guide us through a new world.
Archaeology of Elegance: 20 Years of Fashion Photography
Edited by Marion de Beaupre, Stephane Baumet and Ulf Poschardt
Rizzoli, 363 pages, $85
By now most museumgoers will be familiar with classic fashion photography, from Baron de Meyer to Richard Avedon. Many also will know the kinky chroniclers of fashion in the 1970s: Helmut Newton through Guy Bourdin. For everyone interested in what has happened since, there is this imposing survey of more than 200 images by 62 photographers, stretching from the punk to digital periods. Some will find the provocation of these pictures visionary. Others will as easily feel a need to shower after viewing.
Daughter of Art History: Photographs by Yasumasa Morimura
Introduction by Donald Kuspit
Aperture, 128 pages, $40
One of the best things about this 18-year survey–better even than the vivid color reproductions of Yasumasa Morimura’s seriocomic restagings that put him at the center of artworks such as a Rembrandt self-portrait–is the way the artist’s down-to-earth afterword undercuts the high-flown introduction. Still, despite the pleasure of essential information clearly given, the massing of Morimura images–here are more than 70–dulls their primary conceit and the obsessions behind it, refocusing attention on mainly the camp extravagance that has resulted from his bringing together photography, painting and digital manipulation.
