The Boom in Art Books

by LOUIS KRONENBERGER

THE place of Art, of painting and her sisters, in American life today is — well, often very expressive of American life today. Art has an unprecedented money value, commands a particular status value, has become the cultural exception to Philistine rule, the businessman’s French poodle, the bull market’s darling. It is also, among the arts, the avant-garde exception to middle-class resistance and mockery. But the whole situation isn’t quite so tinged with commerce as these remarks may suggest. True (as was reported in the New York Times), a stockbroker’s wife sued Knoedler’s, arguing they had sold her a “fake” Modigliani — on the grounds that she in turn couldn’t sell it at a profit. But in contrast to this current type of aesthete, many businessmen seek the best in pictures for the best of reasons — the pleasure they provide. Again, if museums still speak officially for art, the Met itself must give us pause in acquiring Rembrandt’s Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer for well over $2 million and then exhibiting it, in its front hall, to price-bemused multitudes who might have been staring at the Koh-i-noor. More accurately, picture-collecting in America, from once being the plaything of elderly strike-it-rich Fricks and Kresses, is now a moneycome-lately middle-class phenomenon, on occasion serving people who don’t know what to do with their wealth, or their Saturday afternoons, or how better to dazzle their associates. Certainly never before has Art so vied for chic with cars and yachts; and never have artists, without painting down, so struck it rich themselves.

Of course there’s a reason for all this: the fine arts are the one form of high culture you can personally own. (Books, plays, symphonies, operas, ballets belong from the outset to the world; and owning the manuscript or score is to acquire rarity at no real loss to society.) Hence picture-buying can simultaneously satisfy an acquisitive instinct, a love of display, a concern for status, a form of speculation, and a feeling, of one kind or another, for art. It can also, to be sure, simply satisfy this last desire alone.

Far from irrelevant to all this is the great surge of expensive-art-book buying, which since World War II has more and more infiltrated our cultural life. True enough, scholarly art books and textbooks, popular art books, catalogues raisonnés have long served the public at every level: a whole generation went to school to Élie Faure’s fourvolume History of Art, a smaller one went to libraries for the great and high-priced Propyläen Kunstgeschichte series. But the emergence after World War II of, as I remember it, the Skira Books opened a new age. A certain alluring glossiness, a certain neither too academic nor too popular air, set such works apart; and appearing in bookshop windows just when “originals” multiplied on affluent suburban walls, they set a new current going. There was a ready market for these and the many other books that now tumbled out under new imprints. The scholar, the critic, the historian of the fine arts might raise an eyebrow, but the appreciative layman welcomed the New Look; was grateful for cleanly produced work on his favorite painters or periods; was given new facts unavailable in old compilations; was often drawn to new subjects, or simply roused by the magic of color where he had been left cold by black and white. Such buyers, none of those I am thinking of professionals, differed considerably not just in their taste in art but in their taste in art books. Some sought informative texts, but more of them welcomed attractive colorplates, while still others clung, for budgetary reasons, to the art-book table d’hôte, the bulky and bountiful “survey.” But whether informed or ignorant or somewhere in between, all these people were genuinely attracted to art.

As time went on, the output became more varied; and so did the market. To highish-priced books on painting and her sisters were added handsomely illustrated ones on architecture; more than just utilitarian ones on furniture or porcelain; books, too, on illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, arms and armor; and at length, luxurious works on luxury subjects, from jewels to palaces. Meanwhile, an apparent obstacle somehow vanished: the high price of the books no longer seemed bothersome, a fact that suggests the high incomes of the buyers. Picture buyers would of course buy picture books, and so would prospective picture buyers. And where price caused no pain, here were books to give pleasure, whether to oneself or, as flattering gifts, to one’s friends. At this point the “coffeetable book” entered our lives and our vocabularies. I have had some doubts of the extent of its sway, but am reliably informed that it is a very considerable one, and a real measure of status — twenty dollars’ worth of Impressionists on the table creates a very nice impression, twenty-five dollars’ worth of Post-Impressionists creates a nicer one. In giftbuying, something a little more stately or massive is appreciated — a Leonardo, say, at thirty-five dollars. Moreover, at Christmas, corporations and advertising agencies now frequently favor the coffee table over the wine cellar or the humidor, with art books from fifteen dollars to fifty dollars advising you where you stand.

It is still arguable, however, that the coffee table is the French pastry side of art books, and that the bread-and-butter side is really the sale to a substantial number of libraries. Sales, I am told, seem little affected by book reviews, even in publications where book reviews normally matter. Imprints, on the other hand — Abrams, Skira, Thames & Hudson — have not only the real selling names but the right selling techniques, such as publication in five or six languages, which considerably cuts down the cost in each one. Almost all art books are printed abroad, in Switzerland, Holland, Germany, Italy, France, not, it seems, because we can’t acquire equal expertise but because we can’t avoid extra expense. There is also a great traffic in low-priced art books, including paperbacks.

Status aside, statistics aside, this abundance of attractive art books has conferred great benefits on a host of no doubt mixed-browed but genuinely responsive people. Such people are much like buyers of “classical” records, and they primarily, I think, want to look, as the record buyers want to listen. Reading about art and music is secondary, although the comment in art books, if sometimes all too flossy, is usually superior to that in record albums. Surely the best reading matter in both fields is to be sought off the premises, in the best art and music criticism. For me, a diet of art-historian or musicologist hardtack, if far more scholarly, is often little more rewarding than blurbologist mush.

As with recording sound, so there have always been problems with reproducing color. There seems to be a certain tendency to make up for inadequate brightness in the past with undue glossy brilliance today. Still, even museums must have color problems to grapple with, what with hanging and lighting and often the glare from glass frames. Faced in art books with less than perfect accuracy, what I think one can demand and find sufficiently satisfying is a complete and attractive unity of tone. There can be great disparity: I’ve just laid out the various colorplates I have of Velasquez’s Maids of Honor, and the prevailing “tone” ranged from a chilly lemony silver to a warmish orangy gold. Certainly, brilliant plates are in general far better than dull ones, but brilliance can be damaging where nuances, atmospheres, a painter’s very special coloring enter in; with Claude, say, or Corot. For all-round art-book education, the structured scholarly texts of the Pelican History of Art series are probably, despite a lack of colorplates, the most satisfactory. Still, there is to be had from color a far more than dilettantish pleasure, indeed the only real substitute for the pictures themselves; and this more and more as color improves. What do need to improve are some of the texts. Where text and plate are on facing pages, there is often very useful comment on painterly matters; but the comment can also resemble a pundit’s dismal “close reading” of a poem, with the language in double jeopardy: art jargon soaked, as it were, in sudsy translatorese.

TODAY’s profusion of coffee-table books makes for notable variety and notable differences. My own reactions in what follows are altogether a layman’s and an amateur’s — the homme moyen esthétique, much less critically appraising a book’s merits than responding, or resistant, to its appeal.

Painters first. No single recent book on a painter has offered more valuable and fascinating new material — photographic and lithographic, biographical and bibliographical, juvenilia and memorabilia — than P. Huisman’s and M. G. Dortu’s Lautrec by Lautrec. The book, moreover, has been splendidly put together; and if the textual approach is sometimes not up to the rest, this is yet the kind of book one longs for and lingers over. A Titian and a Goya, published more recently, are both very welcome, offering as they do great painters in pictorially brilliant form. Antonio Morassi’s Titian, when it turns to color, provides a plate-by-plate description, much of it very usefully historical and factual. The plates are well chosen, and there is also a kind of bonus, since Morassi, advancing boldly in disputed territory, assigns to Titian two of the glories of Giorgione, the Sleeping Venus and the Concert Champêtre — a bonus to book buyers, but a blow to those for whom the Concert in particular seems the very essence of Giorgione and of his magical aura. With both pictures I cling to Giorgione, though someone else may have “finished” them. José Gudiol’s Goya traverses a long, many-faceted career with an informative text and a judicious representation of Goya’s varied talents. If most often we get, in handsome color, the superb portraitist, we also get the more savage Goya of the drawings and prints, of the Proverbs and Disasters of War.

Skira’s Treasures of Spain, resembling in its sumptuous appeal the earlier Treasures of Venice, spreads a wider net and presents over several centuries the whole visual culture of Spain. The generally fine colorplates are of much value in reproducing cathedrals and palaces, chapels and tombs, retables and monstrances, tapestries and frescoes, sedan chairs and armor, and some of the finest pictures in the world. The frequent danger with books like this is a tendency toward a cultural hodgepodge and a riot of color; the great virtue can be a cultural panorama glowing with color, which is true here.

What might have been called Treasures of China — Chinese Art, covering all varieties in four volumes — concludes with the second of two volumes on the minor arts. Here, as earlier, is fine bookmaking, and here on this occasion is the expert guidance of R. Soamc Jenyns. In some cases, as in using brilliant blue backgrounds for small objets (Part, the color is far too intrusive; but for the most part color does notable justice to objects in horn and tortoiseshell, coral and glass, rock crystal and agate, and to silks and velvets, carpets and hangings. As art some of these objects are for my taste ill-conceived or overelaborate; but much else, like the snuff bottles, has charm, and much has distinction and beauty.

Most books on interiors and luxury merchandise might, I think, be coffee-tabled for a while. Thus, though Great Family Collections usefully records great accumulations still in private hands, and pictures some very fine paintings, furniture, and works of art, a little too much of it suggests the family’s taste rather than the connoisseur’s, and an acquisitive itch rather than a selective instinct. There are garishly overdressed rooms and fierce clashes of decor — the English houses come off best —and on occasion one recalls Horace Walpole’s remark of a great establishment that it “looks like the palace of an auctioneer who has been chosen King of Poland.” I do, however, find two attractive exceptions to these gilded guided tours. One is Nigel Nicolson’s Great Houses of Britain. Here “family” helps: as the son of Sir Harold Nicolson and V. Sackville-West, Mr. Nicolson writes of his subject from the inside; and, also as their son, he writes well. His text is both enjoyable and informative, and the book and plates breathe a certain elegance.

I must confess that for all its history and celebrity, Mr. Nicolson’s own vast ancestral pile, Knole, seems aesthetically unimpressive; and I take comfort from finding that none of Mr. Nicolson’s own claims for its greatness are intrinsically aesthetic ones:

It is very large; it has a distinguished history; its two main periods blend with remarkable sympathy; its contents are unique; it remains in the occupation of the Sackvilles.

The second exception, the most unusual, colorful, and rewarding of all the interior books I have seen recently, is Mario Praz’s An Illustrated History of Furnishing, in which the brilliant author of The Romantic Agony, using four hundred paintings, drawings, and prints — there are no photographs — has traversed some five hundred years of furnished rooms. Though it is pleasant to come upon famous names, from Van der Weyden and Cranach to Degas and Vuillard, these pictures are historically and culturally most revealing where least inspired; indeed, the obscurity of the painter is in proportion to the opulence of the scene. What the book approximates is a superb resume of upper-class life indoors, and a marvelous document in the history of taste, or (as is so frequent and so fatal among the highborn) of tastefulness. But there are engaging surprises, such as the wholly unadorned Biedcrmeier music room of a certain Archduchess Sophie.

Moving to the outside of houses, Arthur Upham Pope’s Persian Architecture must balance a text by one of the greatest authorities on Persian art and culture against a serious production weakness. This is the only book under consideration that was manufactured in America; and though the letterpress is good, as are most of the 33 colorplates, the 370 plates in black and white are often fadedlooking, or dull-looking, or both. Did expertise falter here, or expense forbid? In any case, America fell short.

Concerned more with America, but happily manufactured abroad, is Werner Blaser’s Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure. This cleanly produced book, though perhaps chiefly aimed, what with its many technical plans and sketches, and its specific subtitle, at the professional, yet has much to please and instruct the sympathetic layman. The great bulk of the book discusses and illustrates Mies’s work since 1940.

As against coffee-table wares, today’s wide choice of low-priced student-lamp ones is decidedly reassuring. Thus, the latest volume in the Q. L.P. (whatever that means) series, Raymond Cogniat’s hard-cover Chagall, generously offers at $3.50, along with drypoints and pencil sketches, close to sixty mostly full-page and full-bodied colorplates. Just completed is the paperback Compass History of Art in twelve volumes ($2.25 each). Here success in color reproduction tends to vary with the kind of things reproduced. Thus Twentieth Century Painting, with its brilliant abstractions, and with strong color contrasts rather than nuances, is for the most part good. Good also is the volume on illuminated manuscripts, and much of Gothic and other early art. Color, however, is often damagingly off-color in Nineteenth Century Painting, marring Ingres’s glow, Corot’s tone, Renoir’s flesh; and there are color troubles with the centuries just preceding. What this perhaps sifts down to is that the color goes wrong with living textures. But the series can be well recommended: offering over two thousand plates and very serviceable texts for $27.00, it spans four thousand years much more happily in these neat, compact little books than do three or four — often rather seedy-looking — surveys at much the same price.

Possibly, for the nonspecialist, the most attractive of modest-priced ventures is the Art of the World books. Having, in a long first series, covered virtually everything except Europe, they have now started a European series with Rome and Her Empire and the High Gothic Era. The books are well printed and bound, with good plates on all phases of their subject, and with scholarly texts. Thus the late Marcel Aubert’s High Gothic offers cathedrals and castles, paintings and sculptures, painted wood carvings, frescoes, friezes, ruins, arches, and illuminated manuscripts. The color photographs do remarkably well with surfaces and substances, so that, almost literally, one gets the feel of a whole period or cultural movement. The price per volume is an inelegant but humane $6.95.