Stuart Davis: A Catalogue Raisonne
Edited by Ani Boyajian and Mark Rutkowski
Yale University Press, three volumes, 1,784 pages, $300
Not long ago a complete-works catalog for a major figure would include essays of interest only to specialists and reproductions that gave just the barest idea of the paintings, in black and white. Not anymore. Without affecting the high level of scholarship, catalogues raisonnes produced in recent years have been marked by numerous visual and textual gratifications that also make them appeal to more-interested general readers who seek to explore in depth the careers of significant creators.
One of the more exciting of these efforts is on behalf of Stuart Davis (1892-1964), a European-influenced painter who developed some of the last century’s most influential American work based on, among other things, hip jargon, vaudeville, advertising and jazz. A full volume of essays by William C. Agee and Karen Wilkin treat his development in detail, followed by two volumes of color reproductions and annotations. In all, 1,749 works are treated, with nearly a third receiving their first publication. Anyone who traces this course will be exhilarated. With utmost quality, it allows for an immersion that cannot be achieved in even today’s largest and finest exhibitions.
The History of Venice in Painting
Edited by Georges Duby and Guy Lobrichon
Abbeville, 496 pages, $235
To multivolume artistic explorations of Florence and Paris, Abbeville Press adds a single oversize tome that presents Venice as the inspirer of seven centuries of images, from illuminated manuscripts to the canvases of Oskar Kokoschka. Masterpieces by Titian, Giovanni Bellini, Antonio Canaletto and many, many others either were created in the city or depict aspects of it as the subject. So along with early religious themes are depictions of Venetian buildings, events and customs, showing the city in almost every significant style from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. The result shows the highest production values, featuring even several spectacular four-page foldouts.
Klimt
Edited by Alfred Weidinger
Prestel, 320 pages, $165
Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections
Edited by Renee Price
Prestel, 504 pages, $65
Here are two superlative additions to the groaning library shelf on sumptuous, exotic Viennese master Gustav Klimt. Alfred Weidinger’s effort, which provides a complete catalog of Klimt’s paintings, is the most lavish book since the great Fritz Novotny-Johannes Dobai volume of 1968, offering nearly everything in color and much in telling, full-page (oversize) details. Renee Price’s survey of the finest Klimt holdings in the U.S. (at the Neue Galerie in New York, on view through June 30) presents the highest level of scholarship in its dozen specialized essays, offers the first publication of Klimt’s final notebook and includes an extensive section on the artist’s continuing influence on popular culture. Klimt bibliophiles cannot do better.
Koloman Moser: 1868-1918
Edited by Rudolf Leopold and Gerd Pichler
Prestel, 320 pages, $75
Turn-of-the century Viennese art and design has gained so many adherents in the last three decades that it’s hard to believe one of its key figures — the equal of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka — had not had a comprehensive survey even in Vienna since 1979. A 2007 exhibition finally remedied that, and this is its catalog, including much unfamiliar material by the artist who in his lifetime justly was known as a jack of all trades. As Rudolf Leopold’s landmark book on Schiele widened the circle of admirers 35 years ago, so will this volume bring new adherents to the output of the dazzling Koloman Moser.
Euan Uglow: The Complete Paintings
By Catherine Lampert, essay by Richard Kendall
Yale University Press, 352 pages, $125
One of the least-well-known masters of the late 20th Century was Euan Uglow, a fiercely obsessive British painter who died at 68 in 2000. His landscapes, still lifes and portraits excite in their rage for order. But the graphlike rigor of his female nudes really was inimitable; they are the highlights of the nearly 450 works reproduced here, many for the first time. It was not uncommon for Uglow to spend years on a canvas, and the intensity of his deliberation shows. Such work at last has the benefit of the best guides who have assembled a volume daunting and inexhaustible.
Lucian Freud
By William Feaver
Rizzoli, 488 pages, $135
Followers of the exhibitions of this greatest of all living realists will have collected many of the reproductions included here but not all and certainly not the three stimulating conversations with the author. William Feaver’s introduction results from years of familiarity with the work, so it gets to the heart of the matter without noticeably striving to set itself apart from the texts of other commentators. The full range of the art, from the naivete of 1939 to the mastery of 2007, also is set out plainly, chronologically in beautiful color plates, usually one to a page. All this makes for the best single source on the artist, who soon will be 85.
Martin Puryear
Text by John Elderfield, Elizabeth Reede, Richard Powell, Michael Auping
Museum of Modern Art/Distributed Art Publishers, 192 pages, $60
This catalog for the exhibition (through Jan. 14) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers the most complete treatment of Martin Puryear’s abstract sculpture since the catalog for his first retrospective, in 1991 at the Art Institute of Chicago. The essays are as insightful as any that have been written about him, and the conversation with him is indispensable. Especially good is the tracing of some of his inspirations plus the chronology assembled by Jennifer Field. The reproductions also do justice to the incomparable poetry of the work.
Jasper Johns: Gray
By James Rondeau and Douglas Druick, with Mark Pascale and Richard Shiff
Yale University Press, 320 pages, $65
One of the richest exhibitions of the year (at the Art Institute of Chicago through Jan. 8) is complemented by a catalog luxurious in reproduction — all of the works were freshly shot by photographers Jamie Stukenberg and Taku Saiki — and sound in evaluation. Jasper Johns’ 50-year career is surveyed from the unusual standpoint of the color he once said was his favorite. His media and motifs are treated in essays by the principals, with added contributions from four other writers, including a rare short interview with the ever-elusive artist.
Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist
Edited by Susan Earle
Yale University Press, 272 pages, $60
This is the first significant monograph on a major artist of the Harlem Renaissance, whose paintings, murals and illustrations often transcend racial politics to find a larger place in American art of the 1920s and 1930s. Seven essays, by various authors, set Aaron Douglas’ modernism in the context of works by his contemporaries — more unfamiliar than not — that also are reproduced. His strongest pieces, including a destroyed mural for the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, are built from silhouettes whose influence also is surprisingly shown to be with us today in the provocative art of Kara Walker.
London Art Deco
By Arnold Schwartzman
Hudson Hills, 160 pages, $45
The author of this compact volume was born in London in the mid-1930s, when many of the buildings he pictures were new. Forty years later he settled in the U.S. just as the Art Deco revival was taking hold. His color photographs show him revisiting places beloved from youth. His text and captions also show the feeling for just the right detail that characterizes the true amateur. British Deco is less lavish than the French, often closer in spirit to the streamlined American version known as Art Moderne. Here are many of its masterpieces, including important sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill.
The Last Photographic Heroes: American Photographers of the Sixties and Seventies
By Gilles Mora
Abrams, 200 pages, $50
The author of this persuasive personal survey defines a hero as anyone “who has devoted body and soul to his cause.” The 48 heroes he has chosen all did some of their best work between the 1958 publication of Robert Frank’s “The Americans” and the 1983 coronation of the princess of Postmodernism, Cindy Sherman. Several — Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Larry Clark, Robert Adams, William Eggleston — are the equal of the finest painters and sculptors of the period. It’s time to discover — or rediscover — them.
Magnum Magnum
Edited by Brigitte Lardinois, introduction by Geoff Dyer
Thames & Hudson, 564 pages, $225
Here is a great idea, beautifully realized. To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Magnum, the legendary photo collective, 69 members have selected images by as many of their colleagues and provided two-page texts that introduce the photographers as well as explain what it is they admire in their work. All of the greats, from Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa to W. Eugene Smith and Bruce Davidson are represented and viewed freshly, through photographs that often are unfamiliar. Many lesser-known photographers who, like Antoine D’Agata, would not seem to have fit into the collective, also are treated on the same level. The insight of the texts varies; the large-format reproductions are superb.
Edward Weston’s Book of Nudes
Edited by Brett Abbott
Getty, 96 pages, $39.95
It is not every day that a book fulfills the vision of a giant long dead, yet that’s what happens in this volume planned 54 years ago by Edward Weston and historian Nancy Newhall but shied away from by publishers of the time. Working from the original mock-up (which is reproduced in smaller size), the volume juxtaposes 32 of Weston’s nonpareil nudes with still lifes and landscapes. The nudes represent the summit of his art, though few had been included in earlier books and Weston sought to have the present volume redress the balance. Now, for the first time, we can see the work as he intended.
Harry Callahan: Eleanor
Introduction by Emmet Gowin
High Museum of Art/Steidl, 160 pages, $65
The greatest artist in any medium who came to aesthetic maturity in Chicago was photographer Harry Callahan (1912-1999), and many of his finest pictures were of his wife, Eleanor. This monograph, accompanying an exhibition through Dec. 9 at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, reproduces full-page more than 90 of them (in black and white, and color), adding a poetic introduction by one of Callhan’s most gifted students, curator Julian Cox’s scholarly analysis and a 2006 interview with the subject. Callahan came closer to perfection than any other lens man after World War II, and the present volume is a sterling tribute.
Ansel Adams: 400 Photographs
Introduction by Andrea Stillman
Little, Brown, 440 pages, $40
Before Ansel Adams died in 1984, the best books devoted to his work were large-format monographs that forcefully conveyed the outsize quality of his nature worship. Now comes the largest number of his pieces in a single volume, and the size of the images is only a small fraction of the earlier ones. But Andrea Stillman edited seven of Adams’ books and knows how to get the most out of reproductions, which here convey Adams’ remarkable tonal range while having the benefit of a format that fits comfortably in the hands. The craftsman in Adams is well served.
The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family
Photos by Richard Avedon, text by Shannon Thomas Perich
Smithsonian/Collins Design, 128 pages, $29.95
Just before the inauguration of President John Kennedy, Richard Avedon photographed the family for a photo essay in Harper’s Bazaar, creating more than 200 portraits, few of which have ever been seen. Avedon donated them to the Smithsonian Institution, and a selection of nearly 80 now appears in groupings of father and daughter, brother and sister, mother and son, Jackie alone, and wife and husband. The warmth, even tenderness, missing from many Avedon portraits is present here, making the collection much more than nostalgia.
Polaroids: Mapplethorpe
By Sylvia Wolf
Prestel, 254 pages, $60
Four years ago the publication of a collection of Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits made available some of his Polaroid pictures for the first time since the 1970s. Now comes a much wider selection, including portraits, self-portraits and still lifes plus the sadomasochistic images and homosexual erotica for which he became (in)famous. Lacking the lavish print quality of his major works, these pieces are closer to their underground sources and where it matters have a sharper edge without the later affectation of elegance. Here, in germ, is the sensibility that caused the biggest artistic scandal in contemporary America.
Finding Grace: The Face of America’s Homeless
By Lynn Blodgett
Earth Aware, 136 pages, $55
The subjects of this volume are almost never seen in photographs apart from the landscapes they inhabit. Here they have been removed from that environment, set against a white backdrop and generally shot head-on in hard light. The tonal quality of the images recalls some of Richard Avedon’s unsparing portraits, though unlike them, the results are not always grim even if we’re always aware of the sitters’ straitened condition. Occasionally the photographer supplies a short descriptive text, which can be telling but usually proves superfluous in relation to the communicativeness of his pictures.
North Korea
Photos by Philippe Chancel, texts by Michel Poivert and Jonathan Fenby
Thames & Hudson, 208 pages, $50
The land of autocrats Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il seems positively made for color, thanks to Philippe Chancel’s photographs that document, among much else, kitsch architecture and extravagant political rituals. Theatrical excesses in the former Soviet Union seem modest by comparison with what these images have preserved from the public and private spheres. Partly because of the highly saturated colors, we seem to catch glimpses of a wonderland, strange and unreal even in recognizable operations. That plus omnipresent political portraits often give a sense of candy-coated terror.
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aartner@tribune.com
