Christmas art books
David Ekserdjian
In the year of the Macmillan Dictionary of Art (£5,700 come the New Year), it might seem hard to get excited about anything else, but actually there is a bumper crop of outstanding art books to recommend to despairing present-hunters.
Taschen deserve some sort of special award for enterprise, since they appear to have managed to create the book equiva- lent of budget-priced compact discs. Both their multi-authored History of Sculpture and their Monet, which is Daniel Wilden- stein's monograph and catalogue raisonne reborn, come in four lavishly illustrated volumes, but retail at a comparatively mod- est £99.95 each.
The latter is the most complete study of its subject that exists, and brings a classic within the reach even of students with gen- erous uncles and aunts, while the former is an all-encompassing anthology that breaks new ground. It covers everything from Ancient Egypt to Jeff Koons — perhaps happily represented by a bunny rabbit rather than La Cieciolina — and includes colour reproductions of countless really fascinating productions from off the beaten track. Even the fact that England is slightly hard done by is scarcely a defect, since there are perfectly accessible books on the subject in English already.
My list only contains one other sculpture book: The Colour of Sculpture, 1840-1910 (Waanders, £45). Like all too many exhibi- tion catalogues these days, it is a book on the subject masquerading as a guide to a particular show, but the material is never dull (I was going to say colourless). Not all the contents are to my taste, but then it is hard to overcome our modern predilection for monochrome sculpture.
Conversely, manuscript illumination is an area where colour — unfaded by the ravages of time — tends to run riot, and seldom more so than in Mireille Mente's spectacular Illuminated Manuscripts of Mediaeval Spain (Thames & Hudson, £48). These fabulous pages, mostly illustrating Beatus manuscripts, are a perfect exemplifi- cation of what was lost when the vigour and fantasy of the Middle Ages were but- toned into the straitjacket of linear per- spective. Hugues Demeude's The Animated Alphabet (Thames & Hudson, £14.95) car- ries its story forward from the mediaeval period right up to the 19th century, but it is tempting to say that nothing more recent can compete with Giovannino de' Grassis' Bergamo Alphabet of around 1400.
The so-called decorative arts are still the poor relations when compared to paintings, even in the year when an outstanding piece of silver sold for over $10 million. Western Furniture, 1350 to the Present Day (Philip Wilson/ V & A, £39.95), edited by Christo- pher Wilk, is a beautifully illustrated histo- ry told through the resources of a single collection. It is a model of the heavyweight scholarship to which furniture is now rou- tinely subjected, and combines learning with readability. That such an approach pays dividends — albeit sometimes of an unexpected variety — is demonstrated by the discovery that one of the V & A's stars, the Marie de Medici cabinet from Ment- more, is actually mostly 19th century. Another collection catalogue full of good- ies is Maria Antonia Pinto de Matos' Chinese Export Porcelain from the Museum of Anastacio Goncalves, Lisbon (Philip Wilson, £45), where almost everything is covetable and looks as if it could fit into a real home. Blue and white predominates, but that is all to the good as far as this reader is concerned.
This year, as always, books on paintings abound, and for some reason the ones I have chosen are all monographs. Two are devoted to two of the more Christmascardy of the Quattrocento Florentines. Paolo Morachiello's lavish Fra Angelico — The San Marco Frescoes (Thames & Hudson, £65) is part of a whole series published by Thames & Hudson devoted to individual decorative schemes. In each case the text is brief but informative, and it is the illustra- tions that count. The best of the details are stupendous, and the overall quality of reproduction is extremely impressive, but it has to be admitted that the blank black pages every so often are a ghastly mistake. Diane Cole Adil's Benozzo Gozzoli (Yale, £45) is the first comprehensive study of Angelico's only illustrious pupil to be written in English in this century, and makes sure that we come away well aware of the fact that he had a life beyond those irresistible Medici Chapel frescoes. In fact, the frescoes at Montefalco are arguably even more enchanting, but it does seem fair to say that he never attained the same heady heights as a panel painter.
Georges de La Tour and his World (Yale, £30) edited by Philip Conisbee contains some outstandingly illuminating essays on the greatest of all the candlelight masters. Having suffered centuries of neglect, La Tour is one of those rare artists whose works still occasionally pop up out of nowhere, with the result that there are nov- elties in spite of the fact that the last book on him came out comparatively recently.
If you have never heard of William John Leech, An Irish Painter Abroad (Merrel Holberton, £29.95), then there is no need to hang your head in shame because nobody else has either. Dublin has already Lucas Kilian 's Newes ABC Buechlein, 1627, Augsburg (from Hugues Demeude's The Animated Alphabet) hosted the exhibition for which Denise Ferran's book is — surprise, surprise — a catalogue, but it is going on to Quimper and Belfast in 1997. Leech will remain a minor master even after all this attention, but that is not to say that he does not deserve it, because the best of his paintings overflow with warmth and joie-de-vivre.
Stanislas Klossowski de Rola is well qualified to write about Balthus (Thames & Hudson, £24.95) because he is his son, but what he provides is an opaque little intro- duction designed to tease rather than enlighten. I suspect Balthus is much more uneven than his generally uniform proces- sion of pubescent girls would lead one to suppose. There is some fine rhetoric about the distinction between eroticism and pornography here, but it seems absurd to express astonishment if people are shocked by his generally one-track and deliberately provocative subject-matter. At his best, however, he is a painter of real distinction, and one can forgive him a lot for having filched the cat in his 'Le Chat au Miroir I' from Hogarth's 'Graham Children' of all places. Vive l'Angleterre et Joyeux Noel!
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