In Lautner Homes, Room for the Unusual

In 1956, Mr. and Mrs. Willis Harpel asked architect John Lautner to design a house on a Hollywood hillside. Lautner, who believed in creating “timeless, free, joyous spaces for all activities in life,” came up with a startling idea: a giant trellis covering almost the whole property, partly closed off for living and entertaining.

As he relates in “John Lautner, Architect” (Princeton Architectural Press, 296 pages, $45), Harpel, a busy radio announcer, spent eight hours a day on the job site pouring all the concrete himself. Lautner had a knack for finding clients who believed in his visionary work, which included such innovations as movable walls.

A freewheeling, hands-on guy indifferent to fashion, Lautner, who was based in Los Angeles, is probably best known for the “Chemosphere” (1960), an engineer’s home in Hollywood. A central concrete column suspends the spaceship-like structure over a vertiginous hill reached by electric cable car.

This is the only book on Lautner’s work, which spanned the late ‘30s to the early ‘90s (he died in 1994) and, fittingly, it is truly user-friendly. Accompanying the 500 photographs are nuggets of text in which the architect--a former associate of Frank Lloyd Wright--lays out his ideas in no-nonsense language and talks about the experience of putting each house together. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you have to agree that they are the product of an abiding interest in marrying people’s domestic needs to unusual spaces.

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Need some art for your pocket? Here’s a book the size of a small sandwich that’s crammed with more than 200 illustrations of American works, from John Sloan’s etching of a woman kneeling on her bed to turn out the light (1904) to Charles Ray’s fiberglass sculpture of an unnervingly tall little boy in short pants (1992).

Flipping through “American Art of the Twentieth Century: Treasures of the Whitney Museum of American Art” (Abbeville Press, 286 pages, $11.95) means sampling a dizzying array of styles through the decades. The famous names are here, of course: There are six paintings by Edward Hopper, three by Andy Warhol and one by Andrew Wyeth. Better yet, there is plenty of work by artists who aren’t household names--like Helen Levitt’s photograph of little girls drawing on the sidewalk and Alfred Jensen’s patterned painting that looks like a piece of cloth.

Of course, one important thing you don’t get from the book is a sense of the art’s size: Beginning in the 1950s, paintings grew as large as the American dream. Still, as a portable diversion when you’re waiting for your car at the shop or for your child to straggle out of summer camp, this little volume opens up an engaging universe of personal visions.

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When leggy Marthe de Meligny walked into Pierre Bonnard’s life in 1893, he was a 26-year-old Parisian artist whose favorite themes were members of his family. Marthe was a bird-like, mysterious woman who broke away from her kin, moved to the big city and lived under an alias--a fact the reticent Bonnard didn’t learn until their marriage in 1925.

She appears in 384 of his sensual paintings, densely constructed works with intricate arrangements of objects and light-struck color. Lying dreamily in her bath, pulling on a stocking, resting in the garden, standing nude in front of a mirror, slouching in a chair--Marthe always looks preoccupied, her head turned away or not even in the picture.

Sometimes her body practically melts into the luminous background of the bathroom, her hideaway during years of ill health. Although she was middle-aged, even elderly, when some of these images were painted, Bonnard invariably gave her the body of a young woman, often using natural-looking poses borrowed from classical statuary or works by his contemporaries.

“Bonnard” (Abrams, 272 pages, $60) includes 237 painting reproductions--112 in color--as well as an engrossing overview by art historian Sarah Whitfield and a recondite essay by Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield. Describing the elusive beauty of rooms furnished with tantalizingly vague colored shapes, Whitfield writes: “It is as though the painter has either forgotten what they are or failed to recognize them.” He is, she concludes, “a painter of the effervescence of pleasure and the disappearance of pleasure.”

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Beckoning sweaty, sun-blasted motorists of the 1940s and ‘50s with names like “Ghost Ranch” and “Silent Wheels Ranchome,” Arizona desert motels once blinked their neon signs in colorful profusion. Now bypassed by interstates, the crumbling buildings and weather-beaten signs remain testaments to a unique form of Americana.

In “Vacant Eden: Roadside Treasures of the Sonoran Desert” (Balcony Press, 96 pages, $23.50), photographers Abigail Gumbiner and Carol Hayden pluck out picturesque elements of the old motels--the painted statue of a worried-looking Native American at the Apache Tears Motel; the perky mock-up of desert hills and cactus on the Sunland Motel sign; the ubiquitous brightly painted metal chairs.

Vivid reds and yellows and cool blues convey an eternal vacation-time hopefulness in these images. Even the shabby, bulky air conditioners, abandoned furniture and drained pools have an oddly timeless quality under the searingly bright desert sky.

* Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks.