ART BOOKS : Inspired, Not Made

Marcel Duchamp, elusive magister, more known about than known, lurks in the shadows in every corner of modern art: cubism; surrealism; Dada; experimental film; the conceptual art of the found, chance, or “readymade” object; the portmanteau work of obsessive self-documentation; and the shaggy sub-genre of the art joke. Even though “the last forty years of his life were largely devoted to chess,” as a dictionary entry drily concludes, his circumferentiality has come to seem more and more central to the art history of our time. Since he is impossible to dismember, it has always seemed best to try and swallow him whole, but his cryptically pervasive influence, his legendary status, and the scattered sources and works have made that difficult until now. This extraordinarily attractive and entertaining volume, MARCEL DUCHAMP (text by Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont. MIT Press: $60 until Dec. 31, $75 after; 650 pp.) is surely the Summa Duchampiana to take us well into the next millennium. Actually, it’s two volumes: open one cover and you have a catalogue, mostly in color, of Duchamp’s extremely miscellaneous paintings, sculptures, and objects. It’s illuminating to have these varied productions convened in one place. Turn the book over and you find a gargantuan chronology of the artist’s life, with more than 1,000 illustrations, that reads like a postmodern novel. A fifteen-year labor of love by two Duchamp scholars, this obsessive documentation is great fun to dip into and undoubtedly will prove to be a gold mine for future research. To ensure creative interaction rather than dull biographical rehearsals, it’s organized by the day of the year: the “September 12” entry, for example, lists the occurrences on that date throughout Duchamp’s life.

The word “influence” is tossed around quite loosely in art history. As part of the continuing discovery of America, Barbara Braun’s fascinating and wonderfully illustrated treatise, PRE-COLUMBIAN ART AND THE POST-COLUMBIAN WORLD (Abrams: $50; 340 pp.) establishes the profound influence that Mesoamerican art, artifacts, and architecture had on five modern artists. Three of these cases are quite surprising, and Braun’s investigations promise to open up whole new thoroughfares of research and interpretation. Paul Gauguin we immediately associate with Tahiti, but he had Peruvian ancestry and spent his formative years there. Braun demonstrates numerous other connections as well, particularly regarding Gauguin’s familiarity with Peruvian ceramics. Though Henry Moore often spoke of the power of pre-Columbian sculpture, its central influence in his work has not been generally recognized. Moore visited Mexico before he saw Italy, and the imprint it left is well documented here. Frank Lloyd Wright’s exposure to pre-Columbian carving and architecture was second-hand, but the lovely juxtaposition of photographs in this chapter is truly revelatory. Diego Rivera and Joaquin Torres-Garcia are the other two artists examined. In both cases the artist’s cultural background might predispose us to find a Mesoamerican influence unsurprising, but Braun limns specific connections so assuredly we can only remain in awe of her insight.

THE UNKNOWN MODIGLIANI by Noel Alexandre (Abrams: $85; 464 pp.) is a lavish package in celebration of a major resurrection--450 drawings, never before made public, that flesh out an important period of Modigliani’s life and artistic development. These were collected by Paul Alexandre, a physician, friend and patron of the artist, who ran a salon and artists’ commune in his home, complete with chess games, risque “theatricals,” “hashish sessions,” and lots of “free and easy young women.”

Alexandre always planned to publish these works with a monograph designed to shift the critical balance toward Modigliani’s seriousness and away from his dissolution, but he never did, and so they stayed in storage. These undated drawings, many of which are exquisite, are grouped thematically: drawings inspired by the theater, caryatids, sculptural heads (in which we recognize the working-out of the stylized elongation in Modigliani’s mature portraits), nudes, and portrait studies. One hates to strike a churlish note with such a beautiful book, but it does occasionally strike one as almost too much of a good thing. The complete documentation of this hoard is undoubtedly a boon to scholars, but this is not a scholarly book. The primary texts, memoirs by Modigliani’s mother and Alexandre, are fascinating but anecdotal. The framing essay by Alexandre’s son is workmanlike but uninspired. The book’s twelve expensive-to-produce gatefold pages are just showing off. Nonetheless, there are numerous small treasures here.

The question of whether we will witness a resurgence of arts patronage in the coming decades, with CEOs replacing Renaissance princes, is just one of the subjects raised in ART FOR WORK by Marjorie Jacobson (Harvard Business School Press: $29.95; 224 pp.), a very well written and researched book. It’s not a guidebook for either corporations or artists, though artists and other readers will find rare insights into the thinking that leads to corporate art acquisitions. Forty large art-collecting organizations are profiled, and numerous interviews with executives and art consultants excerpted. The big picture is one of progressiveness: a midwest bank whose collection of 3,000 artworks made since 1980 rivals many museums’ or Liz Claiborne Inc., whose search for a “cause-related marketing campaign” has led to a public art program targeted at provocative women’s issues. The author is sanguine about the future relations of art and business, conveying, alongside many excellent color reproductions, attractive ways in which the twain may meet.

“I think of my studio as a vegetable garden,” Miro once said. “Things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water . . . “ JOAN MIRO by Carolyn Lanchner (MoMA/Abrams: $75; 480 pp.), published to accompany the centennial exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, allows one to see the aptness of the metaphor, not only in the artist’s vegetal and vinelike forms but also in the way that he worked in carefully planned series. Even the well-known “dream” paintings of 1925-27, often considered to be examples of the unconscious automatism of the surrealists, are seen to be the result of conscious premeditation. Carolyn Lanchner’s explorations of Miro’s sketchbooks and writings significantly enriches our appreciation of his fecund imagination.

Paul Klee’s inventiveness was so prolifically consistent and yet so modest and free of bluster that books devoted to his work are sometimes disappointing, simply because they seem artificially curtailed, incomplete. Why this and not that? He was not a “masterpiece painter,” whose signal achievements define and organize whole periods and styles. Each piece was a new and untried exploration, and he changed directions constantly. His inimitable works ultimately communicate best through and with each other; one finally wants to see all of them together. The current book, PAUL KLEE AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM (introduction by Lisa Dennison, Essay by Andrew Kagan. Guggenheim/Rizzoli: $75; 206 pp.), necessarily more limited in scope, has three strong virtues: It is the catalogue of a coherent permanent collection, thus avoiding arbitrariness; organized chronologically, it includes work from his boyhood to his death in a very wide variety of modes; and it is gorgeously and elegantly produced. Andrew Kagan’s introductory essay is a sensitive and informative overview of a remarkable artist.

Southern California’s indigenous and truly original contribution to art history emerged in the late sixties not as a coherent movement but as a constellation of mavericks. “Light and Space” art, as it has come to be known, largely eschewed materiality and “objectness” in favor of exploring the situational and perceptual roots of the art experience. “I am totally interested in space and not in form,” said the gnomic James Turrell, one of the more visionary pioneers examined in THE ART OF LIGHT AND SPACE by Jane Butterfield (Abbeville: $50; 272 pp.), and similarly radical and paradoxical statements might underlie most of the work herein. “Light and Space” art is the meditative, austerely sensual wing of conceptual art, and Jan Butterfield knows it better than anyone. The Art of Light and Space documents a highly elusive genre about as skillfully as it can be done, through rich description, interviews, extracts from the artists’ writings, philosophical epigraphs, and on-site photography (though in general photographic representation is totally antithetical to the spirit of this work). Butterfield’s blend of history and criticism has great personal immediacy; her ability to convey the impact of these powerful but ephemeral works without forcing them into any mold is admirable. Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Maria Nordman, Douglas Wheeler, Bruce Nauman, Eric Orr, Larry Bell, DeWain Valentine, Susan Kaiser Vogel, and Hap Tivey are the artists surveyed. Unfortunately, to this eye, the book’s design is perversely cluttered in light of the clarity and purity of the work it examines.

The preface to this best-selling interactive pop-up course in art history, theory, and appreciation, THE ART PACK by Christopher Trayling, Helen Trayling, and Ron Van Der Meer (Knopf: $50) explains that it is designed “for readers who have an active and committed interest in visual art, but not a very informed interest.” A great deal of material--on perspective, color, proportion, composition and other matters--is covered in a small amount of space, assisted by 3-D examples and removable accouterments. Users will find themselves assembling a camera obscura, a phenakstiscope, color-mixing disks, and other items. In an effort to beef up what could be considered an 18-page book, “The Art Pack” offers a pull-out art dictionary, a fold-out set of indifferently reproduced masterpieces (predominantly classic European paintings, with short shrift given to sculpture, modernism, and world cultures), and an energetic cassette commentary on these works. This would probably work best for the bright teenager who’s wavering between interests in art and science.

William Hood, professor of art history at Oberlin College, is an evocative writer as interested in the social surroundings of art as in formal art-critical discourse. FRA ANGELICO AT SAN MARCO (Yale University Press: $50; 338 pp.) has, as a result, an extra measure of appeal; large portions can be pleasurably read even without reference to the skillfully chosen and beautifully printed selection of documentary images. He continually relates the sublime painting of this Florentine monastery to its architecture and to the practices of the Dominican order resident therein. A typical example: “One of the uses of the chapter room was the regular administration of the discipline or scourge. So important was this communal ceremony in the Observance that Fra Angelico marked the chapter room with a frescoed lunette showing Saint Dominic holding the scourge.” Text and pictures reciprocally draw one on in this discovery of a vividly depicted world.