Books: Treasures of Art and Nature

Season’s readings honor the past and celebrate the present

OVER $60

Books on Pablo Picasso have the good sense to dwell on this century’s greatest artist and the misfortune of having to live up to him. Many do not. But Picasso: The Early Years (Rizzoli; 559 pages; $160) by Josep Palau i Fabre succeeds in conveying the explosive creativity of its subject. The volume’s 1,587 illustrations (361 in color) provide the fullest look anyone but a diligent art historian will ever have of Picasso’s formative period. He was never an apprentice. In his early teens he could do copies of Velásquez and large-scale compositions. The draftsmanship in such works was astonishing, but the sketchbooks reached out for bigger challenges. It is possible in these pages to watch him take each step of a discovery. The emaciated figures of the Blue period take shape slowly, as do the acrobats and harlequins of the Rose. The author’s survey ends with the creation of Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon (1907), the painting that revolutionized 20th century art. This book vividly portrays the young revolutionary as an old master.

Artistic rebellions usually end in new orthodoxies every bit as rigid and dogmatic as the old. Harry Jackson, 57, did not revise this pattern, he reversed it. In 1957, at the beginning of a promising career in abstract expressionism, Jack son dropped his dribble stick and picked up the brush and palette of a traditional realist. He left New York City for long visits to Wyoming, where he had once worked as a cowhand.

There he painted scenes of the Old West in a brawny and fluid style reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton. As a sculptor he produced bronzes of cowboys, Indians, bucking horses and stampeding cattle. The casual eye is reminded of the work of Frederic Remington; the more discerning see the energy and muscular humanism of the Renaissance statues. In Harry Jackson (Abrams; 308 pages; $125) Author-Editors Larry Pointer and Donald Goddard sample Jackson’s abstract work and offer a generous selection of his realism along with a biography of one of the mavericks of American art.

Painter Tom Wesselmann, like de Kooning before him, has refused to choose sides in the controversy between abstract expressionism and the new realism. Instead, his female nudes, often in monumental proportions, inhabit both schools. The results of his energetic production are collected in the 200 pictures—100 in high-intensity color—in Tom Wesselmann (Abbeville; 321 pages; $75). The artist’s huge women are usually blank idealizations adrift in mundane rooms, like the fantasies of adolescent boys. Others display explicit but deadpan eroticism among billboard-style oranges and ashtrays. Always provocative, usually amusing and sometimes shocking, Wesselmann’s work reflects America’s amorous obsessions. In his windy and erratic assessment, “Critic” Slim Stealingworth tends to overvalue the artist’s impact on his age. That is to be expected. Stealingworth, after all, is the pen name of none other than the prolific Wesselmann.

$30-$60

The images, says Author Walter A. Fairservis Jr., “are stereotypic: tong wars, Fu Manchu, Charlie Chan, the Dragon Lady, Bruce Lee . . .” His book, Asia: Traditions and Treasures (Abrams; 256 pages; $50), seeks to replace clichés with other traits: photographs of art and cities, peoples and temples in a part of the world that extends from Turkey and Iran eastward through Siberia and China and southeastward through India to Burma and Thailand. His volume is drawn from the trove of artifacts and insights compiled by the American Museum of Natural History for nearly a century. Ranging through the fallen dynasties of China and the British raj in India, the color plates and duotone illustrations show such glimpses as the dinosaur eggs discovered by Roy Chapman Andrews in Central Asia; a “parking lot” in Aden, where camels wait bumper to bumper; and throughout, an omnipresent religious sense, represented by portraits of worshipers and penitents, saints and witches, holy men and likenesses of sacred animals.

The National Museum of American History (Abrams; 495 pages; $50) is a handsome guide to the attic of the American family. Part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., the N.M.A.H. stores machines, tools, weapons, furnishings and memorabilia from the colonial period to the present. Many of the objects represented in nearly 400 color photographs embody a utilitarian elegance rarely seen in mass production. Nineteenth century contrivances seem almost formally attired in black cast iron and gleaming brass. There are hand-forged ax heads with richly mellowed wooden handles, old automobiles and locomotives that resemble the bright toys of young giants, and examples of early neon signs and first-generation computers.

As Walt Disney acknowledged early, his talent was not in his animation, but in his animators. As Old Disney Hands Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston demonstrate, from the opening credits the master showed an inspired staff how to set new standards, how to mix a unique amalgam of tenderness, terror and hilarity, how to add dimension to such classics as Bambi and Snow White, and most important, how to take comedy seriously. Disney Animation (Abbeville; 575 pages; $49.95), a bright, overstuffed history of cartooning, gives an example of one animator’s instructions about Goofy: ” . . . though his gestures are broad, they should still reflect the gentleman.” That precision shows in every frame and page (indeed, by riffling certain sections, readers can see mini-movies). Cinema students will sift through the anecdota and doodles, but essentially this merry compendium is meant for audiences who for three generations have thought of Disney—correctly—as synonymous with delight.

New York City’s slums, derelicts and neon denizens have become the sallow clichés of urban photography. Yet to most of the world, Baghdad on the Subway, as O. Henry called New York, N.Y., means power and chic. Manhattan (Abrams; 256 pages; $45) sells this view hard and visually loud. Editor J.C. Suares has selected from the work of some 60 photographers. Skyscrapers bounce gold and silver light off their expressionless facades; angled shots fill the page with abstractions of steel and glass; muscled workers appear to be engaged in heroic feats; wash on a tenement clothesline flutters like pennants from medieval battlements. This is an art director’s vision of the city. People and objects seem to emit star quality and a contemporary acrylic glamour.

It is ironic that a book so lovely to look at should also be so sad. But The Doomsday Book of Animals (Viking; 288 pages; $40) by David Day is a census of the creatures that have disappeared from the earth since 1680, made extinct, for the most part, by the hand of man. At one time, for instance, passenger pigeons accounted for nearly 40% of the bird population of North America; a century ago, a single flock could number more than 2 billion, and its passage could darken the sky for hours. Hunters, sun worshipers and statue lovers struck back, and suddenly there were no more targets: the last of the species died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. All we have of the passenger pigeon, the dodo, the ferocious Bali tiger, the Pyrenean ibex and many others is beautiful pictures, like those assembled here.

March 6,1981, was an epochal time in the history of photojournalism. On that day, 100 prominent photographers set out to record the actions and reflections of an entire nation during the course of a single day. The conception was grandiloquent the adventure risky, the result triumphant. Of 96,000 photographs, 367 wer chosen for A Day in the Life of Austral! (Ditla Ltd.; 286 pages; $39.95). As the sun arcs across the continent, instants become apertures into the country’s intense and varied life: a young tribesman from Bathurst Island exhibits a carpet snake coiled around an ebony arm; high court judges in Canberra seem to have stepped from the pages of Dickens’ Bleak House; salmon fishermen haul in full nets on Cosy Corner beach; Movie Star Judy Davis (My Brilliant Career) leads Australia’s film renaissance at a Sydney studio. With the impact and dazzle of this extraordinary exhibit, Down Under bromides vanish. There are no kangaroos and boomerangs here, only the biography of a people and a nation apprehended in a Blakean work that allows readers to hold infinity in the palms of their hands and eternity in an hour.

Fabled lands and exotic cities send the imagination journeying in Tony Campbell’s Early Maps (Abbeville; 148 pages; $39.95), which offers cartographophiles a trip through time as well as space. From a 13th century psalter map that depicts the earth with Jerusalem at its center and paradise at the North Pole, through the great voyages of discovery, the globe as we know it emerges. Campbell’s commentary provides a rich and literate guide, while the charts are works of art as well as monuments to the early explorers’ curiosity and courage. For decades schoolboys have recited the couplet: “Geography is about maps, and biography is about chaps.” Early Maps is about both.

Botany, Britain’s public and private passion, is rooted in the late 18th century. In that formal, opulent era, imperial collectors sent a steady stream of exotic flora from the newly acquired lands of Africa and America, and the first plantings were made in what was to become the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In those heady years, Robert Thornton, a physician and amateur botanist, spent his passion and his fortune commissioning paintings and engravings that he hoped would become a national treasure. The Temple of Flora (New York Graphic Society; Ill pages; $35) is an exquisite review of his labor. Bankrupted by printing costs and later ridiculed for the romantic style of his notes, the collector left behind some of the most beautiful depictions of flowers ever produced, a treasure for the eye, if not for England.

UNDER $30

Of Muppets and Men (Knopf; 180 pages; $27.50) by Christopher Finch shows, in text and pictures, how that bizarre band of aliens, the Muppets, and their syndicated TV show are put together. No fan need worry that such behind-the-scenes scrutiny will spoil the fun. Knowing that a favorite character is composed largely of polyurethane foam, synthetic-pile fabrics and a couple of Ping Pong balls only seems part of the fun that these creatures and the inspired Muppeteers generate.

Seen through these photographs, the staging of The Muppet Show looks complex, sophisticated and just as zany as what appears on the screen. People strain to make their Muppets look comfortable; it is not easy being Gonzo. Author Finch devotes a little too much space to the human guests who have appeared on the program. Those singers, movie stars, comedians and classical artists are all well and good, but the book belongs to Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Scooter, Statler and Waldorf.

The wisest character in King Lear is the Fool, an observation few statesmen notice until the work of comic artists brings them down. In Masters of Caricature (Knopf; 240 pages; $25) the productions of savage and subtle comedians from William Hogarth to David Levine pass in review. Ministers of the 19th century wither under Daumier’s derision; Thomas Nast sweeps out Tammany Hall; George Grosz annihilates Germany between the wars. But Historian and Art Critic William Feaver’s text also makes room for such sly performers as Sir John Tenniel, who created a Wonderland for Alice, and Sir Leslie Ward (“Spy”), whose work has decorated lawyers’ offices for almost a century. Those with a taste for more recent vintages may find them in the pages of Man Bites Man, Two Decades of Satiric Art (A & W; 224 pages; $29.95) edited by Steven Heller. Although a few illustrations are pure character assassination, most are lampoons of contemporary trends. Gahan Wilson’s Senators complain about environmentalists through gas masks; Ronald Searle’s bird finds the sky too crowded and decides to walk; Bill Lee’s pilgrims beg heaven for a sign and are rewarded with one: WELCOME TO THE NEW JERSEY TURNPIKE.

The Japanese art of wood-block prints flourished in the late 18th century when masters like Kitagawa Utamaro illustrated kyoka, a form of comic verse. In A Chorus of Birds (Metropolitan Museum of Art-Viking; unpaginated; $17.95), the season’s most unusual book, Utamaro’s animated sparrows and hawks, roosters and owls move through a fused world of nature, art and literature. A further enchantment: the volume is not conventionally bound; the accordion-pleated illustrations open into a 30-ft. frieze.

In the mid-’30s, Technicolor films were rare, but studio photographers like Clarence Sinclair Bull snapped vivid publicity shots of the stars in something less than living Ektachrome. In Hollywood Color Portraits (Morrow; 157 pages; $15.95) Cinema Historian John Kobal has collected 74 of these astonishing pictures. Greats from W.C. Fields to Kim Novak are exposed in ways now unthinkable. A blurred, scarlet-toned Liz Taylor sports thick arm hair; a 5 o’clock shadow darkens Cary Grant’s cleft chin; Lana Turner’s forehead is marred by blemishes; and the Frank Sinatra of 1945 resembles a textbook definition of adenoidal irregularity. Kobal wisely concludes his collection at 1960. These days, color photographers flatter, airbrush and highlight cinema stars to idolized images. Lost is that earlier fragile humanity, peeking through the pancake makeup.

Like Children’s Author Beatrix Potter, Artist and Illustrator Sara Midda celebrates the English garden in delicate watercolors. In and Out of the Garden (Workman; 128 pages; $14.95) will give snowbound nature lovers and backyard farmers cause to revel in vividly rendered pears, potatoes and peas. Tendrils of painstakingly crafted calligraphy—herbal aphorisms from Solomon to Poet John Clare—curl through tiny landscapes. There are also illustrated guides to flowers, fragrances and remedies offered by the bewhiskered farmers and thick-waisted matrons who tend these jewel-like plots. As for the predatory animals, like a good gardener, Midda has banished them from the greenery.

The kitsch of the season is Dime-Store Days (Penguin; 128 pages; $12.95) by Lester Glassner and Brownie Harris. Lovingly assembled by a five-and-ten freak and movie junkie, this compendium of glittering gimcracks from the ’30s and ’40s provides a deep wallow in nostalgia. Among the glories of Woolworthlessness are cutouts of Carmen Miranda with the plaster-banana wall plaques she inspired, a Charlie McCarthy paper doll “with movable mouth,” and a lurid World War II poster of a starlet straddling a bomb inscribed TOKYO EXPRESS. ·