HOLIDAY GIFT BOOKS : Dancers, Dragons and the <i> Tres Riches Heures</i>

The best thing about the 1989 menu of art books is the variety and diversity of meals you can select for yourself and your friends.

You can be adventurous and decide it’s time to sample some exotic foreign cuisine, or your palate may tend toward traditional fare. Either way you will find an abundance of delicious new art books to satisfy your appetite.

An entree that will please everyone, for example, is Twentieth Century Watercolors by Christopher Finch (Abbeville Press: $85; 312 pp., 264 color, 106 black & white illustrations).

The medium of watercolor, according to Finch, has served 20th-Century art well. It became wonderfully pliable in many hands. “Henri Matisse and Emil Nolde splashed it on color-drenched landscapes. Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall mixed it up with ink and chalk and whatever else was handy. Wassily Kandinsky and Georgia O’Keeffe used it to blur the edge between realism and abstraction . . . Quick to dry and easy to carry, it proved as useful for Paul Cezanne’s outdoor sketches as for Charles Demuth’s studio still lifes.”

The final chapter, entitled “Beyond Modernism,” is devoted to the works of present-day artists who have further refined the use of watercolor. Featured are the works of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Sandro Chia, Claes Oldenburg, Ed Ruscha, Red Grooms and more.

The last few years have produced a veritable feast of books on the Impressionists. This year, two more books have surfaced on Edgar Degas, the French painter who lived from 1834 to 1917 and who is probably best remembered for his ballerinas on and off stage.

Greater interest in Degas, who was a very private man, is a result of a large-scale retrospective--the first in more than 50 years--recently organized by the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, Paris, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (The retrospective continues at the Metropolitan Museum through January 1989.)

The catalogue of the retrospective has been released in a hardbound edition: Degas by Jean Sutherland Boggs, Douglas Druick, Henri Loyrette, Michael Pantazzi and Gary Tinterow (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: $45, cloth; $35 paper; 640 pp., 728 illustrations, 281 color plates).

This definitive book and exhibition have attempted to unite all of the various facets of Degas’ complex artistic achievements. Especially welcome are the black-and-white studies which, aside from reaffirming his genius as a draftsman, also pinpoint Degas’ relentless struggle for perfection in his art. He never ceased to be a student, and even at the height of his prowess he still took infinite care to “rehearse” his art in drawings and pastels, which he valued as greatly as his oils.

In Degas by Robert Gordon and Andrew Forge (Abrams: $67.50 until Jan. 1, 1989; $75 thereafter; 288 pp., 324 illustrations, 121 color plates), a beautifuly crafted volume of art and biography, we are further reminded that although he exhibited with the Impressionists, primarily landscape painters, “Degas sought to salvage the figure as the central subject of painting.” Indeed, Degas spent his life studying the human figure in its myriad poses and professions.

Even if you’re satiated with Impressionist reproductions, don’t overlook Monet Water Lilies, edited by Charles F. Stuckey (Hugh Lauter Levin Associates/Macmillan: $75, 132 pp., 65 color illustrations, 36 color foldouts, 0-88363-273-X).

Monet used some canvases that measured more than 6 feet high and 55 feet wide. Obviously no book could ever duplicate the scale, impact and sensurround pleasure of Monet’s 39-foot murals, as exhibited in the Orangerie Room of the Louvre, but Stuckey’s “Monet Water Lilies,” with its luscious 36 color fold-outs and accompanying quotes by Monet and his most ardent admirers, help us to understand what affect Monet’s paintings had on the history of art. As Stuckey emphasizes, “. . . Orangerie’s Monet rooms were the first in the history of Western art designed exclusively for nonutilitarian, nonceremonial visual meditations.”

Matisse: A Retrospective, edited by Jack Flam (Hugh Lauter Levin Associates/Macmillan: $75; 384 pp., 125 color plates, 120 black & white illustrations, 20 pages of color fold-outs 0-88363-073-7), is another succulent work that will delight Henri Matisse connoisseurs and undoubtedly attract new devotees.

Like Picasso, he never tired of exploring. Even at the end of his life, an old, ailing man in a wheelchair, Matisse rediscovered the “scissors,” creating a dazzling world of cut-outs “in order to get a more powerful expression of pure color through the sharpness of the outline.” Color meant everything to Matisse; it was his god and his handmaiden.

A wonderful companion meal to “Matisse” is David Hockney, a Retrospective, a catalogue of Hockney’s 1988 exhibition organized by Maurice Tuchman and Stephanie Barron of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Harry N. Abrams: $60; 288 pp., 343 illustrations, 235 color plates and 3 gatefolds).

All artists have found inspiration in the works of other great masters, and Hockney has made no secret about his two great idols: Picasso and Matisse. Hockney’s renderings of textures, fabrics, patterns and surfaces are pure Matisse, or better put, Matisse filtered through the unerring Hockney eye.

After you have studied Matisse’s ingenious scissor cutouts at the conclusion of the Matisse retrospective, take a look at the final pages of the Hockney book. You cannot help but smile in recognition at the Hockney commercial cutouts--printed on high-grade glossy paper--that Hockney created with an office photocopying machine--a brilliant Hockney variation on a Matisse theme.

(Hockney’s retrospective opened to a triumphant welcome this spring in Los Angeles, continued its journey to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for the summer and is currently bringing in record crowds at the Tate Gallery in London, where it will remain until January 3, 1989.)

For a sampling of exotic cuisine in art, try The Art of the Dragon by Yang Xin, Li Hihua and Xu Naixiang (Shambhala Publications/Random House: $50; 214 pp.; 183 color plates and 9 color illustrations, 0-87773-465-8).

For thousands of years, the most popular motif in the arts and crafts of China has been the dragon. Rather than invoking fear and trembling, as in most Western literature, the dragon has been adored in China as a magical bearer of good fortune, wisdom, virtue and strength. It is no wonder, then, that the dragon imagery appears on everything: in bronzes, jade, lacquerware, pottery, porcelain, painted silk, embroidered robes (for men and women), carpets, furniture and other art objects.

The works, gorgeously photographed for this book, represent a collection from the Forbidden City of Beijing, and most of them are now being published in the West for the first time, to coincide with the Chinese celebration of the Year of the Dragon.

Another foreign offering that should delight art lovers everywhere and further the cause of glasnost is Soviet Art: 1920s-1930s, general editor, Vladimir Leniashin ( Harry N. Abrams/Sovietsky Khudozhnik: $29.95, paper; 254 pp., 0-2399-8).

Personal art in the Soviet Union has been a luxury that many native painters--such as Kandinsky--could only enjoy in exile. This wonderful compilation of works by some 50 Russian artists--including Kandinsky, Filonov, Malevich, Shterenberg and many others--is the catalogue that was recently prepared to accompany the Russian Museum’s mounting of a retrospective in Leningrad.

Just as the exhibition of modern Russian artists earlier this year brought worldwide interest (and high price tags), this book should bring us a long way toward closing the gap between post-Revolutionary Russian art and Modern art in the Soviet Union today.

Another delectable offering to be savored this year is Illuminations of Heaven and Earth: The Glories of the Tres Riches Heures du Duc De Berry, with text by Raymond Cazelles and Johannes Rathofer (Harry N. Abrams: $95; 239 pp., 303 illustrations, 285 color plates, 0-8109-1128-0).

Referred to as the “King of Illuminated Manuscripts,” “Illumination of Heaven and Earth” was created in the 15th Century for Jean de Berry, a royal French bibliophile and noted collector.

In 1984, Harry N. Abrams published a complete facsimile edition of this medieval manuscript. Hailed internationally as a masterpiece, the few sets of volumes still available from that edition sell for $12,500 each.

But now comes an edition affordable to all.

In his foreword, eminent Italian scholar-novelist Umberto Eco, author of “The Name of the Rose,” describes the “Tres Riches Heures” as “a cinematic document, a visual presentation that reveals the life of an age. But no film could ever match the scrupulousness, the splendor, the moving beauty of its reconstruction . . .”

Eco invites each reader to explore the wonders of this manuscript, to open the book at any page, because as a truly “open book” it “encourages a thousand different journeys. You can turn to any page, choose your own door of entry, and then travel yourself through this ‘Garden of Delights.’ ”

Sometimes dessert can be a meal in and of itself. In this last book, Alexander Liberman and Random House have put together a revised and expanded version of Liberman’s classic The Artist in His Studio (Random House: $60, 340 pp., 160 color photos, 55 black & white photos, 0-394-56567-3).

Originally published in 1960 and out of print for many years, “The Artist in His Studio” was Liberman’s way of sharing his personal pilgrimage to the studios of the men and women who shaped and reshaped our world through their art.

A sculptor, painter, photographer and printmaker in his own right, Liberman knew exactly what he was looking for: the details of creation: the rooms they painted in; the light that entered or was banned from those rooms; the neighborhood; the landscape; the families that helped or hindered their progress; their tools; their collection of art and art objects that inspired them.

As you browse through the new stack of art books at your favorite bookstore, you may be reminded of the yearly incantation: “Moderation at Holiday Time!” But tempted by the lush, mouth-watering editions of art available this year, it will be almost impossible not to overindulge. So . . . Bon Appetit!