Art and Photography

How many bloodthirsty spectators could pack into Rome’s Colosseum? Why did Shah Jahan build the Taj Mahal? Where could residents of Gamble House in Pasadena sleep on balmy evenings?

British architect Neil Stevenson supplies the answers (which are [a] 50,000; [b] as a mausoleum for his wife, who died in childbirth, and [c] on outdoor “sleeping platforms”) in “Annotated Guides: Architecture” (DK Publishing, Inc., 112 pages, $24.95). This clearly written, handsomely produced guide takes just two pages apiece to summarize the construction methods and significant features of 50 buildings around the world.

Large, annotated photographs and other materials--floor plans, biographical notes--illuminate projects ranging from the immense ancient Temple of Amun in Egypt, which took 1,200 years of slave labor to complete, to Renzo Piano’s new mile-long Kansai International Airport Terminal in Japan.

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The sculptor who gave the world the soft hamburger and the giant lipstick tube also turned his witty morphing skills to lithographs, etchings and other “Printed Stuff.” That’s the title of a delicious catalog (Hudson Hills Press, 453 pages, $125) of every graphic work Claes Oldenburg produced between 1958 and 1996, illuminatingly discussed by art historian Richard H. Axsom, with droll explanatory notes by the artist.

Oldenburg uses prints to refine the fluid sketches in which he first toys with the multiple possibilities of objects. The shape of early movie cameras gave him the idea for a flattened, geometric version of Mickey Mouse, visualized in a lithograph from 1968 as a hilltop sculpture and a city park with swimming pool “eyes.”

Surely no one else could have cooked up “Thoughts About the French Revolution While Eating a Shrimp Salad” (1989): a lemon wedge weeping sourly onto a tiny parade of upended blue forks spearing “executed” peeled shrimp that wear cocktail sauce cockades.

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Bon vivant photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue just couldn’t get enough of paradise: the languid Co^te d’Azur in the south of France. In a hazy 1920 autochrome (an early 20th century color process), his first wife, Bibi, sits pensively over the remains of an elegant lunch on a restaurant terrace overlooking a sun-dazzled bay.

The sensual photographs from the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s in “Lartigue’s Riviera” (Flammarion, 144 pages, $35) are populated by dapper men in tennis whites, damp beauties in knit bathing suits, carefree actresses idling on movie sets, and a moody chunk of nature replete with dramatic cliffs, sparkling water, luxuriant foliage and tropical showers.

Journalist Mary Blume (who interviewed Florette, wife No. 3) offers a genial overview of Lartigue’s charmed life and the narcissistic personality that caused him to tune out World War II. The photographs remain hugely seductive, composed with a lover’s eye and a stylist’s flair.

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French photographer Robert Doisneau, who died in 1994, wrote that he could only feel happy “in shoots where you see at the same time a pensioner with his white dog, a florist, a girl on roller skates and a fat man.”

In his rambling essay which serves as the preface to “Robert Doisneau: Three Seconds of Eternity” (te Neues Publishing Co., 144 pages, $29.95), such telling insights are few. But most of these black-and-white photographs, spanning more than four decades, retain their sympathetic feel for the daily lives of poor and middle-class urbanites.

Doisneau could isolate the incipient drama in a couple of tiny children adrift in an ocean of empty pavement and tall buildings, or the humor of workmen absent-mindedly cupping the breasts of a massive statue of Venus as they heave her onto a platform. This book, first published in France nearly 20 years ago, also includes scenes of wedding parties, children playing in the street, and bistro regulars--nostalgic reminders of a now-vanished Paris.

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