Reason to Weep

Having made your way through “Picasso and the Weeping Women,the critically acclaimed exhibition currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, you’ll arrive at a Picasso shop stocked with Picasso-related souvenirs and books. Exactly what is the function of the shop? To make money for the museum? To further educate the museum-goer on Picasso? What were the criteria used by the bookstore in selecting the 20 titles it stocks, out of the dozens of books in print on Picasso?

“The bookstore is one of the few ways the museum has to raise funds, so salability is a consideration as far as what we stock,” says Marlene Kristoff, who oversees the museum stores. “But the primary function of both the main bookstore, and the auxiliary shops we sometimes install to accompany specific exhibitions, is as an educational facility.”

Proof of Kristoff’s words can be seen in the absence of “Picasso; Creator and Destroyer,” by Arianna Stassinopoulos, a controversial Picasso biography that was lambasted by art scholars when it was published in 1988.

“We might consider stocking a book with little academic credibility if there was a shortage of titles on an artist, but obviously that wasn’t the case with Picasso,” says Kristoff, who’s been at LACMA since 1985 (prior to that she was a buyer for Gump’s Department Store in San Francisco).

“We made our selections for the Picasso shop based on the suggested reading listed in the back of the exhibition catalogue by the curator and catalogue essayists,” adds Kristoff, “and we’re also stocking books on Picasso that we’ve previously carried in the museum store.”

The main bookstore, which carries roughly 1,500 titles, needn’t be too picky about what it stocks, however, because there simply aren’t that many art books published in a given year: associate book buyer Stephen Goff estimates that about 300 new art books come into print each year (if one includes exhibition catalogues, the number goes up to 500).

There are perennial bestsellers the store always keeps in stock--H. W. Janson’s ubiquitous textbook, “History of Art” is an example of that--and Goff says the store also does consistently brisk sales in books on costumes and textiles (one assumes the movie industry accounts for a good deal of that).

Beyond that, bookstore stock tends to evolve to reflect changes in taste. Books on the Impressionists sold like wildfire in recent years, for instance, but the store is presently seeing a surge in interest in Gustav Klimt (this is mysterious, considering that there hasn’t been an exhibition of Klimt hereabouts).

As to how the store screens the books it carries, Goff says no one actually sits down and reads them. Rather, he relies on information provided by publishers’ catalogues, sales representatives and his own considerable knowledge of art writers. Goff left his job teaching art to come to LACMA 21 years ago, and he’s seen a lot of art books come and go in the intervening years. So, if you’re inspired after an exhibit to take something of the artists’s work home, something say, between a postcard and the real thing....