ART REVIEW : Exhibits Fuse Art and Fine Book Publishing

Most of the books we buy were born to lead a casual life, to be squashed in tote bags, fingered by greasy hands and sprawled face-down to suffer cracked backs and missing pages. But these carefree volumes have some very grand distant relations--fine press books--which turn the act of reading into a sensuous and ceremonial event.

Two concurrent exhibitions of illustrated books from Arion Press in San Francisco--at Scripps College’s Clark Humanities Museum in Claremont (to Friday) and Site 311 gallery at 1662 12th St., Santa Monica, (to June 9)--offer a seductive taste of the marriage of significant text with distinctive typeface, format, paper, binding and illustrations.

The particular charm of these diverse volumes (ranging from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to the “Apocalypse,” the mysterious, prophetic last book of the New Testament) lies in unusual pairings of artists and authors.

One of Arion Press founder Andrew Hoyem’s inspired ideas was to ask architect Michael Graves to illustrate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” So when playboy protagonist Jay Gatsby shows the novel’s narrator around his vast estate, the reader sees it--sunken Italian garden, snub-nosed motorboat and all--rendered in delicate little sketches that present 1920s opulence with a slight diffidence suggestive of Gatsby’s East Coast society milieu.

Los Angeles photographer Lou Stoumen’s black-and-white prints illustrate Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep.” In Chapter 22, when the mystery writer evokes the image of Monterey cypresses “that shadowed off into nothing toward the cliff above the ocean,” Stoumen obliges with a moody, blue-toned view of fog-bound trees in a setting that looks like Ocean Boulevard in Santa Monica.

Other notable collaborations include Jim Dine’s ruggedly mystical woodcuts for the “Apocalypse,” Jasper Johns’ hermetic frontispiece etching of a silhouetted figure for the poems of Wallace Stevens, and work by Dine, Richard Avedon, Alex Katz, Larry Rivers, Willem de Kooning and others assembled in the round steel case that serves as the “cover” for poet John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”

The newest of the press’s 27 publications is “Ulysses,” with etchings by the elegant Abstract Expressionist painter, Robert Motherwell. Seemingly an odd choice of artist to illustrate such a redoubtably earthy--albeit mythologically based--novel, Motherwell actually is a longtime Joyce devotee. He turned out a series of almost formless little sketches (each on a different background color) that capture the major divisions of Leopold Bloom’s long day in an elliptical way that suggests some of the experimental quality of the text.

In Motherwell’s hands, the tower on which “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” mocks the Eucharist with a shaving bowl and lather in the very beginning of the book is a broad, tiered object--assembled out of a welter of abrupt lines--that also rather resembles a human head.

The bed in which Bloom finally sleeps at the end of his wanderings around Dublin--and where his wife Molly launches into her long, intimate and punctuation-free monologue--becomes a restless gathering of quick lines. They conjure up the image of rumpled sheets as well as one of Bloom’s “big square feet,” which Molly complains about (he likes to sleep with his feet next to her head).

One drawback with virtually all exhibitions of fine press books is that the costly volumes--prices for the Arion “Ulysses,” in an edition of 150, begin at $7,500--are generally displayed in locked cases. That means viewers are restricted to staring endlessly at two pages of a book, unable to page through it in the normal way to appreciate its virtues.

At Scripps, however, visitors with special interest in one of the books may ask to have it removed from the case for perusal within the Clark Humanities Museum library. At Site 311, all 40 feet of John Baldessari’s fan-folded illustrations for Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” are on view, as is Motherwell’s separate suite of the 22 “Ulysses” etchings. Other books on display may be handled by viewers on request.