Best Books 2003: Must-have exhibit catalogs are at top of art-book stack

Editor's note: It's that time of year again, when publishers vie for your gift-giving dollars. Over the past few weeks, we've brought you lists of notable books on pop and classical music, and stage and screen. Next week, we'll top off our coverage with a list of top picks for arts and entertainment gifts.

By Sheila Farr
Seattle Times art critic

	E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Related stories Best books 2003: These performing-arts books deserve a round of applause Best books 2003: Know the score on classical-music gifts Coffee-table tomes for rock 'n' roll aficionados

"Philip Guston Retrospective" organized by Michael Auping (Thames & Hudson, $50).

An artist's artist who influenced and inspired awe for much of the 20th century, Philip Guston furthered abstract expressionism in the 1950s then forged ahead of his times. Now he's remembered for his primal and utterly distinct figurative paintings that probe the underbelly of human nature — and give new weight to the color pink. The book features the most comprehensive selection of Guston's work to date, and includes essays by critics Michael Shapiro and Dore Ashton among others, as well as an essay on "Faith, Hope, and Impossibility" by the artist. (The exhibit continues at New York's Metropolitan Museum through Jan. 4.)

"El Greco" edited by David Davies (Yale University Press, $65).

The gaunt-cheeked, elongated figures of the 16th-century painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos — known as El Greco — walk the line between heaven and hell. A native of Crete who migrated to Spain by way of Venice and Rome, El Greco was not consistently admired during his lifetime — the distortions and overwrought spirituality of his images offended some art pundits (as did his criticism of Michelangelo's skill as a painter). But it's the very strangeness of El Greco's style that's made the work endure. Color illustrations, 175 of them, offer a comprehensive look at the artist's output, including the eerie, iconic "A View of Toledo," and lots of the famous portraits. It's the next best thing to being in New York for one of the hot shows of the season (which continues at the Met through Jan. 11).

"Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle" essay by Nancy Spector (Distributed Art Publishers, $65).

If you saw the movies, but missed last summer's Guggenheim exhibit, this hefty tome will fill in the gaps. Barney — one of the most talked-about artists working today — created a surreal five-part cycle of films and expanded it into a multimedia museum show. With a body like a Greek god and one of the world's weirdest sculpture mediums (Vaseline), Barney took center stage in the whole production. The book documents the most encompassing, operatic, bizarre and downright amazing piece of visual art to emerge in recent times.

"Goya" by Werner Hofmann (Thames & Hudson, $75).

He painted some gloriously beautiful pictures. He also made some of the scariest images ever of war, madness and monstrosity. The 18th-century artist Francisco Goya y Lucientes gives a pre-Bush-era interpretation of the words "shock and awe" in his "Desastres de la Guerra," a series of 82 etchings on the horrors of war. And if you are smitten with the art and want more background on the artist, check out the juicy new biography "Goya" (Alfred A. Knopf, $40) by art critic Robert Hughes.

"The Flemish Primitives" by Dirk de Vos (Princeton University Press, $55).

For the connoisseur on your list: Painters of the Northern Renaissance like Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck created allegorical masterpieces of such mesmerizing color and exquisite detail, the word beauty might have been invented to describe them. Just what the paintings mean, however, can be a mystery and this book helps decode images of religious ecstasy, martyrdom, beheadings, apocalyptic doom, and downright strangeness. The gorgeous reproductions, with many large details, are as good as they come with a text that's readable and informative.

"Rajasthan" by Pauline van Lynden (Assouline, $65).

One woman's love story to India's second largest state, "the land of Kings," told almost entirely in the kind of melt-in-your-mouth color photographs that do justice to this vibrant ancient culture. Interspersed with occasional bits of van Lynden's travel journal to bind them, the images deliver some of the wonder that we of the cold, gray north feel when exposed to the utter sensual abandon of color, pattern and form in such a place. A truly sumptuous book.

"Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion, Architecture" edited by Marianne Aav (Yale University Press, $60).

Nothing says "1960s" chic like the big bold textile designs of the Marimekko Corp. of Finland. The company was founded in 1951, but it wasn't until the '60s that its look really took over the international fashion world and Marimekko became a household word. With mid-20th-century design back in vogue, this is a timely history of the company and a delightful reminder of the days when it wasn't at all strange to wear a bit of pop art or op art in the form of a knee-skimming shift — say in shades of orange and purple.

"Kate Malone: A Book of Pots" by Lesley Jackson & Kate Malone (The Overlook Press, $50).

British ceramist Kate Malone can make the most pristine classical forms or bowl you over with outrageous inventions that look squirmy and multi-eyed as creatures of the deep. The book features a blow by blow of Malone's career, as it progressed from her days at the Royal College of Art to her major public commissions in London: A welcome gift to the ceramist on your list for its pragmatic information on glazes, kilns, clay and technique. I, however, like it for the yummy pictures.

"The Pop-Up Kama Sutra" by Sir Richard Burton & F.F. Arbuthnot (Stewart Tabori & Chang, $22.50).

This little book gives new meaning to the term "pop-up" — in fact, it's hard to talk about it without lapsing into puns. Certainly, "The Pop-Up Kama Sutra" takes best of show for an inspired idea, but when it comes to performance ... oh dear. The text still charms in the antiquated language that Sir Richard Burton contrived in 1883 when he and a couple friends translated the nearly 2,000-year-old Hindu love manual. The many 18th- and 19th-century Indian miniature paintings that illustrate the book range from tenderly suggestive to downright explicit. But many of the action pictures — engineered by Keith Finch to do what comes naturally to birds, bees and humans — get stuck or otherwise fail to function. Judging by the hilarity that greeted the book here at Entertainment & the Arts, in this case performance may not matter.

Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com

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