The Best Art, Architecture and Design Books By HOLLAND COTTER, ROBERTA SMITH, KEN JOHNSON, KAREN ROSENBERG and NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

The New York Times
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November 25, 2008
The Best Art, Architecture and Design Books By HOLLAND COTTER, ROBERTA SMITH, KEN JOHNSON, KAREN ROSENBERG and NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

There is nothing like art itself when it comes to appreciating art, but books are good too. They convey all kinds of information regarding the making, showing, meaning and experience of art. With that in mind, The Times’s art and architecture critics have chosen these as the most notable volumes published this year.
HOLLAND COTTER
Alexander Calder: The Paris Years 1926-1933
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(Yale University Press, $60). The most charming of fall exhibitions, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, comes with one of the year’s most appealing catalogs. Like the show, with its pull-toys, midair drawings and balancing-act sculptures, the book is adult entertainment that children will probably adore, as much for its strangeness as for its sweetness.
Joan Miró: Painting and Anti-Painting 1927-1937

(Museum of Modern Art, $50). I also recommend the catalog for this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, which traces another familiar artist’s walk on the wild side of modernism as he overturns monuments and makes art from the creepy-crawlies he finds underneath. The text by the curator Anne Umland is excellent, but the pictures really tell the tale. If you tend to think of Miró as an old darling, you won’t anymore.
Delight in Design: Indian Silver for the Raj

By Vidya Dehejia (Mapin Publishing, $65). Deeply researched, engagingly written, handsomely produced, this design book focuses on the amazing silverware produced by Indian craftsmen for a European cliental during the British Raj. On tea caddies, claret jugs and beer mugs, gardens bloom, Hindu gods walk and cultures gorgeously converge. The book accompanies a show at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University (through Dec. 16) but is a scholarly keeper on its own.
Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art

(Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, $44.62). Cultures and epochs also meet in , which, in a very contemporary way, explores the written word in African art from ancient Egypt to the present, including sculptures, Korans and tattoos from Zanzibar to New York. Eye-opener studies like this are among multiculturalism’s great gifts: art history for a globally tuned-in world.
Additional Recommendations

If you are an art lover for whom pictures and words have equal weight, you’ll want to consider three new text-intensive offerings. Part memoir, part theoretical tract, part queer manifesto, Disavowals: or Cancelled Confessions by the French photographer and performance artist Claude Cahun, born Lucie Schwob (1894-1964), is making a first-time appearance in English in a paperback edition peppered with photomontages. It’s an event. (The MIT Press, $29.95)

So are two reappearances. The words of a major poet-critic-curator are back, fresher than ever, in Frank O’Hara: Selected Poems, edited by Mark Ford. (Alfred A. Knopf, $30)

And the influential painter-critic, Fairfield Porter’s Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism 1935-1975, reissued by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the year’s outstanding book of art criticism, a rich read, a goal for some of us to shoot for. (MFA Publications, $22.50)
ROBERTA SMITH
Salon to Biennial — Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume I: 1863-1959
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(Phaidon, $90). There is nothing like art when it comes to teaching us about art, but books aren’t bad either. They convey all kinds of information regarding the making, showing, meaning and experience of works of art. One of the most interesting books of the season takes a nothing-but-the-facts bead on a subject of increasing art historical study: the exhibitions that have introduced most modern art to the public. Thick and very orange, “Salon to Biennial,” is a marvel of information, organization and design. Largely the work of Bruce Altshuler, an independent scholar, in collaboration with Phaidon’s editors, it combines engaging analysis with myriad details to create in-depth portraits of exhibitions that are known, but not well. These shows range from the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863 to “The New American Painting” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959; the data provided includes lists of participants, installation shots (when possible), color photographs of the individual works in the show (and often the exhibition brochures), and lengthy excerpts from reviews. “Salon to Biennial” is a shoe-in for any art-obsessive’s Christmas stocking; the main drawback is that it only covers 24 shows.
Solar System & Rest Rooms: Writings and Interviews, 1965-2007

By Mel Bochner (MIT Press, $39.95). Artist’s writings are another source of on-the-spot historical information, and the new collection of Mr. Bochner’s writings does not disappoint. This volume brings together reviews, lectures, catalog statements, essays (published and unpublished) and raw notes by this leading Conceptualist turned painter. The title is taken from a sign at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History and first appeared in “The Domain of the Great Bear,” a famous article written with the artist Robert Smithson in 1966. The book is part artifact, part self-portrait and part memoir. It includes an interview in which Mr. Bochner discusses his return to painting and his enduring interest in language as an artistic material.
Van Gogh and the Sunflowers

By Louis van Tilborgh (Van Gogh Museum, $19.32). As time, wallets and attention spans contract, more art books zero in on single works or on thin slices of a great artist’s career. This book is an excellent case in point: a rather lavishly illustrated 86-page volume by a research curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Its focus is van Gogh’s 1888 “Sunflowers,” a painting he liked so much that he copied it twice, with slight adjustments in color. The essay follows the course of his lifelong love of flowers and his gradual warming to flower still lifes and their role in the explosion of paint and color in his mature work. Mr. van Tilborgh also touches on the popularity of “Sunflowers,” ending with a large photograph of a studio in China where hand-painted copies are churned out. Dozens of them are hung up to dry, a field in itself.
KEN JOHNSON
Black: The History of a Color

By Michel Pastoureau (Princeton University Press, $35). Who would have thought the history of a single color could be so fascinating? “Black” proceeds chronologically from cave painting to modern fashion and focuses on mythology, heraldry, religion, science and painting along the way. The author, a historian at the Sorbonne, narrates developments in the material, aesthetic and sociological dimensions of the color black with infectious, wide-ranging curiosity and easy-going erudition. After this you’ll want to read his previous book, from the same publisher, Blue: The History of a Color ($39.95).
Lives of the Artists
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By Calvin Tomkins (Henry Holt & Company, $26). In this volume, Mr. Tomkins profiles 10 living artists. Veteran art followers will find much that is familiar in his portraits of Damien Hirst, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and others, and some may regret that only one of his subjects, Cindy Sherman, is a woman. But for newcomers this compendium of articles that first appeared in The New Yorker will serve as an entertaining and informative initiation into the mysteries of contemporary art.
Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties

By Alastair Gordon (Rizzoli, $65). In the 1960s psychedelic drugs altered the consciousness of a generation. This big, richly illustrated book vividly recalls a time when boundaries of art, architecture and life were dissolving in a trippy haze, and utopia seemed but a stone’s throw away. Geodesic domes, magic buses, hobbity houses in the woods, mind-bending sculptures and light shows: Mr. Gordon chronicles these and other manifestations of the Aquarian revolution in an engaging style and with a generous spirit.
KAREN ROSENBERG
Seven Days in the Art World

By Sarah Thornton (W. W. Norton & Company, $24.95). A field guide to the insular, nomadic tribes of the contemporary art world, this book was reported and written in a heated market, but it is poised to endure as a work of sociology. Ms. Thornton, the author of a previous book chronicling the rave subculture, shadows high-level artists, curators, critics and dealers from studio to fair to auction to biennale. The interviews, like the book’s title, collapse time — follow-up quotes are woven into on-site chitchat — but Ms. Thornton deftly navigates competing agendas. Where others would be content to gawk and gossip, she pushes her well-chosen subjects to explore the questions “What is an artist?” and “What makes a work of art great?”
Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’

By Eric Karpeles (Thames & Hudson, $45). To read Proust is to become ensnared in a web of images, unless you happen to be an art historian with a photographic memory. Performing a valuable service to the rest of us, the painter Eric Karpeles has thoughtfully tracked down every painting or artist mentioned by name in Proust’s masterpiece: the 206 illustrations in this volume are accompanied by the relevant passages of text, each with a brief, unobtrusive introduction. Even casual readers of the literature will appreciate the conspiratorial relationship between Proust’s words and his favorite artworks. It doesn’t hurt that Proust had excellent taste: Mantegna, Manet and Vermeer (then-obscure) are just a few of the artists in his virtual gallery.
A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World

By Marcia Tucker (University of California Press, $27.50). As museums prepare for the lean years ahead, this memoir by the founder and longtime director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art offers some much-needed inspiration. Edited by the artist Liza Lou after Tucker’s death in 2006, the book meanders in places but offers ample evidence of Tucker’s take-no-prisoners attitude and passion for “difficult” art (a show called “ ‘Bad’ Painting”; a notoriously ephemeral Richard Tuttle survey). Although the founding of the New Museum is technically the book’s climax, the most interesting section explores Tucker’s formative years as the first female curator at the Whitney. There, she confronted institutional politics, including gender discrimination, to become a powerful advocate for contemporary art.
NICOLAI OUROUSOFF
Le Corbusier: A Life
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Nicholas Fox Weber (Alfred A. Knopf, $45). Even among the giants of 20th-century Modernism, Le Corbusier stands apart for the breadth of his vision. The publication of the first full-scale biography of the architect allows us to place this work in a more personal context for the first time. Mr. Weber’s book is a bit weak on architectural insights, and he likes to dwell on salacious details (repeated references to masturbation and visits to brothels), but he helps round out our understanding of one of the greatest architectural minds of any era. By allowing us to see Le Corbusier’s work in a wider context, he also makes the man’s strengths and weaknesses seem more human.
On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change

By Ada Louise Huxtable (Walker & Company, $35). This release is cause for joy. As a crusading architecture critic for The New York Times in the 1960s and ’70s, and the first full-time architecture critic at any newspaper in the United States, Ms. Huxtable invented architecture criticism as we know it. In the process she brought architecture out into the public consciousness with articles that were invested with an unflappable moral authority. Read here, they seem as sharp and piercing today as ever.
Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000

By Peter Eisenman (Rizzoli, $60). This is the kind of brash, cheeky work we have come to expect from one of architecture’s most irascible contrarians. Its laserlike focus on architectural form, to the exclusion of any social or physical context, may irritate the politically correct. But Mr. Eisenman also has a nice way of upending received wisdom. His penetrating, sometimes brilliant analysis will prod you to see even the most celebrated of these buildings with fresh eyes. The power of his arguments will challenge some of your most dearly held architectural beliefs.