Vuillard: The Inexhaustible Glance, Critical Catalogue of Paintings and Pastels
By Antoine Salomon and Guy Cogeval
Skira/Wildenstein Institute, three volumes, 1,742 pages, $550
Shortly after the death of Edouard Vuillard, nephew Jacques Salomon, himself a painter, began preparing a comprehensive Vuillard catalog. The “work of piety,” as Salomon called it, proceeded slowly and came under the direction of his son Antoine, who continued engaging scholars including, ultimately, Guy Cogeval, chief curator of the Vuillard retrospective now in Paris. In 1993 the project was said to be near-complete, but only now has it appeared, 61 years after inception. The result is one of the most commanding efforts on behalf of any modern artist, presenting invaluable commentary and a wealth of material new to even specialists. A sublime artist, much of whose 60-year output still is unknown, at last receives his due, supported by the highest production values.
The Art and Spirit of Paris
General editor Michel Laclotte
Abbeville, two volumes, 1,654 pages, $385
Fourteen years after Abbeville’s massive “The Art of Florence” comes another paean to an artistic city, this time traversing two millenniums and celebrating everything–architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, theater, film–from the earliest Gallo-Roman settlement to Francois Mitterrand’s grand building projects. Under a former director of the Louvre Museum, 10 specialists provide essays of dizzying ambition, complemented by nearly 1,500 illustrations of artworks both familiar and little known. The texts are weighty for a project so covered in glitter, and that’s all to the good. For the same price as “Florence,” there also are 342 more pages, and that’s good value too.
Byzantium Rediscovered
By J.B. Bullen
Phaidon, 240 pages, $75
Any number of texts outline the Classical and Gothic influences in 19th Century art, but this is the first in-depth survey of the impact of Byzantium, the Greek city on the Bosphorus that Constantine the Great made the capital of the Roman Empire and that for more than 1,000 years was the embodiment of human imagination to the rest of the world. In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Germany, Austria, France, Britain and America all looked to the East for inspiration that turned up in architecture, painting and decorative arts. For artists, think Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt and Louis Comfort Tiffany to start. There are many
More, persuasively explicated and beautifully illustrated, in this pioneering volume.
El Greco
Edited by David Davies
Yale University Press, 320 pages, $65
The first North American El Greco exhibition in decades is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Jan. 11. Here is its catalog, which also is one of the first in a long time to address the full range of the artist’s work–sculpture as well as paintings–in English. A chronology and three essays are interwoven with fully annotated reproductions of more than 80 pieces, many supplemented by full-page color enlargements of details. The writing of the seven contributors is of a uniformly high level, making the volume essential reading for anyone interested in the life and times of this ever-modern-looking 16th Century ecstatic.
Gustav Stickley
By David Cathers
Phaidon, 240 pages, $69.95
The furniture of Gustav Stickley long has been recognized as occupying a high place in the American Arts & Crafts movement and has been collected for decades. Still, only now, more than 60 years after his death, is there a text that comprehensively treats his achievements. It brings together images from The Craftsman, the seminal magazine Stickley founded, with contemporary color photographs of individual pieces of furniture to complement the first detailed account of his life and art. The period photographs are indispensable, and readers who are strangers to Stickley’s world will find especially helpful the appendix that provides brief biographies of his creative collaborators.
Dieter Roth: Unique Pieces
Curated by Dirk Dobke
Edition Hansjoerg Mayer, 320 pages, $55
This is the first volume in a complete-works catalog for one of the protean artists of the late 20th Century. Another, devoted to graphics, is also available, with a third to come in January, prior to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Here, however, is the place to begin, as the book offers not only essential texts and pictures but a CD-ROM that gives a virtual tour of a magical adjunct to the Dieter Roth Museum and Foundation in Hamburg, Germany, the so-called Mold Museum, a “gigantic installation dedicated to evanescence.” The range and variety of works shown is staggering. The artist, who died at 68 five years ago, was clearly one we have yet to come to terms with.
Picasso and the Invention of Cubism
By Pepe Karmel
Yale University Press, 233 pages, $60
Cubism was the one great artistic style of the 20th Century that lost nothing with time and today proves as demanding as when new. Every history of modern art has dealt with it, but even few specialist studies have presented its genesis and evolution as freshly as does this volume, which has taken advantage of material that became known only in the last two decades. The author presents Cubism taking shape drawing by drawing and painting by painting. And this has led to the abandonment of familiar categories–analytical and synthetic Cubism–in the interest of a new, stimulating approach that involves complex analyses of intellectual history as well as close readings of the pictures.
Nature, Form & Spirit: The Life and Legacy of George Nakashima
By Mira Nakashima
Abrams, 276 pages, $75
George Nakashima, one of the great furniture designers of the 20th Century, believed in Japanese Buddhism and Shintoism, Hinduism and–least expected–Roman Catholicism. These beliefs, integrated from different cultures, were not peripheral to his work but central, leading him to design pieces that sought to restore a part of the natural order that people had become detached from in the pursuit of earning a living. Here his daughter, a colleague and designer in his workshop, examines his long career, taking into account its spiritual and modernist dimensions. The study benefits from the first publication of much material from studio archives as well as evocative new color photographs.
Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective
Essays by Elizabeth Smith, Robert Storr, Donna De Salvo and Mona Hadler
Abrams, 240 pages, $40
In 1972 Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art organized the first museum exhibition for sculptor Lee Bontecou. Now the MCA has collaborated with the UCLA Hammer Museum on a 50-year Bontecou retrospective, which comes to Chicago in February. This is its catalog and, remarkably, the first extended monograph on the artist. Her early sculpture, from the 1950s and the 1960s, was admired by artists as different as Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, Charles Ray and Kiki Smith. It’s all the more surprising, then, that her work of the last 30 years is almost completely unknown. Become acquainted here with one of the most distinctive artists working in North America.
Video Art
By Michael Rush
Thames & Hudson, 224 pages, $45
Little more than 25 years ago, work created by artists on videotape was in its infancy and seldom seen, apart from a few outposts and particularly adventurous museum collections. Now it has pushed painting and sculpture to the sidelines, becoming the medium that for many offers the sharpest edge in contemporary art. One day, perhaps, a history of video art will come with a DVD to offer buyers a look at excerpts from “classics.” Until then, the present volume will do, despite clunky design and a far-from-perfect suggestion of works through sometimes only a single still photograph. The text is, however, up to date, surveying all categories of work from pioneers to post-moderns.
