Bookshelf: art & photography

You expect to find the boys in blond wigs and strap-on wings, the dry ice submerging dancers in a blue haze, a grinning Liza Minnelli doing the bump, or Halston painstakingly cramming Liz’s mouth with birthday cake. But some of the photographs by Felice Quinto in “The Legend: Studio 54” (te Neues Publishing Co., $29.95) are so frothily impromptu that they practically give paparazzi a good name.

Steakhouse owner Steve Rubell and lawyer Ian Schrager opened the club in 1977 on Manhattan’s West 54th Street. It offered, in the words of stylish essayist Anthony Hayden-Guest, “foaming waves of sound, spumes of light and a hectic, wet turbulence of flesh.”

Among the book’s images: The then-Farrah Fawcett-Majors in sandals and a wafting tunic, picking her way through the snow outside; Margaret Trudeau jigging in rolled-up slacks; Truman Capote with glasses perched on his trilby as he navigates a Lindy turn with Marion Javits; dapper 75-year-old maestro Vladimir Horowitz demonstrating a ballet step.

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At age 20 in 1910, Egon Schiele still had the hypersensitivity of an adolescent, which was good news for art. Using a spare, wiry outline and stylized splotches of color, he drew and painted his body as a painfully naked creature. The resulting combination of self-consciousness and louche exhibitionism seems particularly apropos in today’s narcissistic culture.

Schiele’s other big subject was young women--mostly adolescent country girls he hired to pose--shown in frank, skirt-raised poses that probe the juncture of obsessive lust and teasing display. Less well known are the delicately bleak landscapes, the intense evocations of illness (in “Sick Girl,” a half-hidden yellow face and a belly washed with milky whiteness), and the forbidden love of “Cardinal-Nun (Embrace).”

“Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection, Vienna” (Yale University Press, 364 pages, $60) samples the prolific Austrian artist’s work, which became disappointingly naturalistic in the years just before his death in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic. Collector Rudolf Leopold discusses the images in formal terms while Magdelena Dabrowski--a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where the originals are on view through Jan. 4--provides a larger cultural context.

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Ohio-born Berenice Abbott was 31 in 1929 when she returned from a European sojourn that transformed her from aimless bohemian to zealous photographer. Influenced by Eugene Atget, the great French documentary photographer whose forgotten work she rescued, Abbott had a grandiose idea: to photograph the breadth of Manhattan as it brashly reinvented itself with Art Deco skyscrapers.

“Berenice Abbott: Changing New York” (The New Press, 399 pages, $60) reprints the 305 elegant black-and-white images of a city in flux that she made between 1935 and 1939 while working for the Federal Art Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration. Shot with an 8x10 view camera that required long exposures and yielded rich detail, the photographs are arranged in a rhythmic sequence emphasizing urban juxtapositions.

The Waldorf Astoria Hotel soars above the ornate dome of tiny St. Bartholomew’s Church. Tiny festival lights lend unexpected delicacy to a Lower East Side street; on the facing page, sun beaming through the tracks of the “el” dapples the shadowy street below. A view of drooping wash, hanging outside the first “model tenements” on East 71st Street, contrasts with the austere classicism of the Duke Town House on 78th Street. Manhattan never looked so sturdily poetic.

Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman Flynn on audio books.