Art and Architecture Books for this Christmas

‘Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters’

Edited by LEO JANSEN, HANS LUIJTEN and NIENKE BAKKER

If you are prepared to go for broke, by all means go for “Vincent van Gogh: The Letters,” a fabulous six-volume hardcover edition of the artist’s complete surviving correspondence, edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. Van Gogh was a prolific, eloquent, emotionally unguarded writer, as the more than 900 letters here demonstrate. And what he couldn’t fully say in words, he drew in the middle of letters and in the margins: sketches of people, landscapes and interiors, many of which appeared, verbatim, in his painting. They are like snapshots of his creative process and they are all reproduced in the six volumes, along with family photographs, maps of the artist’s whereabouts from year to year, and reproductions of art, by himself and others, that he refers to in the letters. The set costs $600 and weighs a ton, but as a total immersion experience, it is worth every penny and hard-to-lift pound. (Thames & Hudson in association with the Van Gogh Museum and the Huygens Institute, $600).

‘Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés’

By MICHAEL R. TAYLOR

A notable byproduct of the recession has been a flurry of small museum shows with very large catalogs. Can it be that, freed from having to track down hundreds of loans, curators are able to devote more time than usual to research? I don’t know, but the book titled “Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés,” which accompanies a fall exhibition focused on a single work by Duchamp at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (through Nov. 29), is both immense and immensely entertaining. Written largely by the curator Michael R. Taylor, it gives an exhaustive account of “Étant Donnés,” the artist’s final masterwork — inspired by a clandestine affair, and kept hidden from the world for 20 years — and still manages to be a terrific read. (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press, $65)

‘Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans’

By SARAH GREENOUGH

“Looking In: Robert Frank’s ‘The Americans’” accompanies an exhibition of the same title now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 3). In some ways, the book is a more cohesive and complete experience than the show itself. At the Met, the 83 pictures that made up Mr. Frank’s touchstone 1958 cross-country travelogue wind disjointedly through several galleries . In the book, they are presented in their intended clear sequence. In addition, images from the hundreds of contact sheet images from which Mr. Frank edited the book are far easier to see and follow in the reproduction than in the gallery display cases. If you add to those features a handful of deeply engaged and readable scholarly essays and the original introduction by Jack Kerouac, you have a book that is already a classic: a monument to a monument. (Steidl and the National Gallery of Art, $85)

‘Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist’

Edited by HARALD FALCKENBERG and PETER WEIBEL

The American artist Paul Thek is not a marquee name, at least not in his homeland. A hippie-era visionary who died of AIDS in 1988, he has long been influential in Europe, where he lived for years. And it is thanks to a recent retrospective in Germany that we have the visually intoxicating book titled “Paul Thek: Artist’s Artist,” edited by Harald Falckenberg and Peter Weibel. Most of Mr. Thek’s installations, part ritual, part fairy tale, were made of throwaway materials and are now long gone. Yet they reappear, like pure magic, in hundreds of photographs, along with reproductions of paintings, drawings, letters and diaries. Anti-establishment (including the art establishment) and anti-market, pro-spirit and pro-poetry, he embodied a side of 1960s and ’70s art that we still don’t know. With luck, the Thek survey scheduled for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2010 will help reveal it. (MIT Press, $54.95)

‘Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era’

By JULIA BRYAN-WILSON

“Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era” by Julia Bryan-Wilson, is an intensive account of how four important figures — Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris and the critic Lucy Lippard — combined creativity with activism to make political art in the 1960s and ’70s, which extended to agitating for artists’ rights. Ms. Bryan-Wilson’s book is of immediate, practical value to young artists today who want to re-establish art as an alternative place in the culture, though her clean prose will also make the book inviting to more casual readers. (University of California Press, Berkeley $39.95)

‘Amamonzeki’

One of the year’s outstanding beauties, “Amamonzeki: A Hidden Heritage, Treasures of the Japanese Imperial Convents” is in Japanese, with an English translation. In 2002 the World Monument Fund and the Institute of Medieval Japanese Studies at Columbia University began restoring the few remaining old Buddhist convents in Kyoto and Nara. Last summer, a display of material from those convents — paintings, textiles, and ritual objects — was mounted at Tokyo University of the Arts, and this rigorous, exceptionally tender, book was a result. (Sankei Shimbun, Tokyo $60)

‘In Iris Fields’

Edited by BARBARA RUCH and KATSURA MICHIYO

With it appeared a related publication, “In Iris Fields: Remembrances and Poetry by Abbess Kasanoin Jikun, Daishoji Imperial Convent, Kyoto,” edited by Barbara Ruch and Katsura Michiyo. The Abbess, who died in 2006 after living in her convent for almost 90 years, was a writer of rare, simple eloquence. If I could have only a single gift from my own holiday list, the choice would come down to one of these two modest-sized treasures. (Tankosha, Tokyo, $30)

‘Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting’

By BOB NICKAS

Art books and books about art may be two different things. Those in the first category show, with ample size and masses of pictures; those in the second tell, with writing on the subject outweighing reproductions of it.

“Painting Abstraction: New Elements in Abstract Painting,” a lively survey by the independent curator and critic Bob Nickas, is big and bright (six and a half pounds and cadmium red). Each of the 80 artists included in the book is represented by three or four full-page color images and a short essay (balancing show with tell). It is weighted toward young talent from New York, and not surprisingly peppered with artists Mr. Nickas has included in gallery group shows he has organized over the years. But it is great to have some order brought to “the persistence of abstraction,” as Mr. Nickas calls it. Think of this as a giant survey exhibition that didn’t — probably couldn’t, maybe shouldn’t — happen, and a useful tool in forming a sharper, broader sense of what is going on in the world of abstract painting. (Phaidon, $75)

‘Painting Today’

By TONY GODFREY

Also recommended from the same Phaidon series: “Painting Today,” by Tony Godfrey, which goes back to the 1980s for its nearly eye-bogglingly global view of the medium in all styles. ($75)

‘American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915′

By CARRIE REBORA BARRATT, MARGARET C. CONRADS, BRUCE ROBERTSON and H. BARBARA WEINBERG

Text and pictures battle to an illuminating draw in “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915,” the catalog to an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 24; opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Feb. 28). The show is an unprecedented gathering of American paintings both great and beloved — from William Copley’s “Watson and the Shark” to works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. The catalog — written by Carrie Rebora Barratt, Margaret C. Conrads, Bruce Robertson and H. Barbara Weinberg — represents an imaginative synthesis of usually contentious approaches. The social and historical are attended to without ignoring quality and progressiveness, all in eminently readable, clear-eyed prose. (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, $60)

‘The Age of Comfort’

By JOAN DeJEAN

“The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual — and the Modern Home Began” by Joan DeJean, a historian of French culture who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, is larded with vivid detail and sharp cameo portraits of various comfort-seeking individuals — often pro-active, design-conscious royal mistresses like the Marquises de Montespan and de Pompadour. It traces the often quite rapid development of things that most of us take for granted: domestic architecture and closets; the bathroom, bathtub and flush toilet; and above all comfortable seating, culminating in the sofa (derived from sopha, the Arabic word for cushion). Also part of the mix: less restrictive clothing and more relaxed behavior. (Only central heating seems to have lagged behind.) Ms. DeJean traces how the new interest in private spaces brought an awareness of people’s psychic interiors, along with words like living room, interior decoration, private life and, when the court of France ceased to be the world’s tastemaker, nouveau riche. (Bloomsbury, $28)

‘John Wesley’

One of the most talked about exhibitions that happened in conjunction with this year’s Venice Biennale was an extensive survey of the five-decade career of the painter John Wesley at the Fondazione Prada. The mammoth, 557-page catalog for that show is a visual and informational delight. It includes a profusely illustrated essay by the show’s curator, Germano Celant, and a wealth of other textual materials, but the main pleasure is delivered by the hundreds of crisp, color reproductions of Mr. Wesley’s oddly comical, formally scrupulous, often erotic, cartoon-style images. Including drawings, studies and source materials relating to many particular paintings, it sheds light on the creative processes of a great American original. (Fondazione Prada, $130)

‘Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield’

By CHARLES BURCHFIELD

If you have ever wondered what the world looked like to Ralph Waldo Emerson when he was having an attack of transcendentalist ecstasy, you could do worse than to consult one of the glowing, shimmering landscape paintings that Charles Burchfield produced in the early and late phases of his career. They are among the highlights of a traveling exhibition now at the Hammer Museum and scheduled to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in June. Surprisingly, that show was organized not by a museum curator but by the sculptor Robert Gober, whose simple, fragmentary notes in this excellent catalog provide an illuminating biographical background to Mr. Burchfield’s pantheistic visions. (Hammer Museum and DelMonico Books-Prestel, $49.95)

‘The Beats: A Graphic History’

By HARVEY PEKAR et al.

The Beats changed the course of American literary history. Who knows where we would be without “Howl,” “On the Road” and “Naked Lunch”? This book tells the story of their prodigiously messy lives and careers in comic book form with wonderful economy. Written by Harvey Pekar and five others and with chapters drawn by eleven different artists, it will be as grippingly entertaining for long-time fans of Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and all the rest, as it will be for the heretofore uninitiated. (Hill and Wang, $22)

‘Burtynsky: Oil’

Sized for coffee tables but more serious than the average book in that category, “Burtynsky: Oil,” the companion to a current show at the Corcoran Gallery, chronicles the Canadian photographer’s decade-long look at the fuel industry. Moving from Alberta oil fields to the Talladega Speedway to the ship-breaking yards of Bangladesh, Edward Burtynsky works on a global scale without preaching, and with an eye to sublime landscape paintings. His prints reveal epic waste and irreversible degradation, but carry a whiff of fantasy; the essayist Paul Roth refers to the world therein as “Petrolia.” Also worth reading is the down-to-earth travelogue by Toronto-based writer Michael Mitchell, who accompanied Mr. Burtynsky to auto shows, tire dumps and bike rallies. (Steidl/Corcoran, $125)

‘Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution’

By PHILLIP PRODGER

It’s hard to find a new angle on Charles Darwin, but “Darwin’s Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution” does just that. Phillip Prodger shows how early photography advanced the agenda of Darwin, whose “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” (1872) was one of the first scientific texts to use photographic illustrations. Darwin wasn’t much of a photographer himself, but he corresponded with artists and searched London shops, studios and museums for images that would help him identify universal facial expressions. He was looking for the kind of stop-action sequences later pioneered by Muybridge, but made do with the less systematic (and often manipulated) shots of Oscar Rejlander. The writing can be dry at times, but it’s enlivened by asides on physiognomy in art going back to the Renaissance — and, by many pictures of expressive faces. (Oxford University Press, $39.95)

‘Cezanne and Beyond’

Exhibition catalogs have varying life spans. Some are meant for the ages; others are clearly tied to a moment. In the first category is “Cezanne and Beyond”, the nearly-600-page companion to last winter’s stimulating show at the Philadelphia Museum. (Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, $65).

‘Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory’
In the second is “Younger Than Jesus: Artist Directory,” a kind of Yellow Pages for the under-33 art world published on the occasion of the New Museum’s first Triennial. With some 500 artists, it’s staggeringly comprehensive; yet, published on newsprint with bare-bones entries, it’s self-consciously ephemeral. (Phaidon, $49.95)

‘Learning from Hangzhou’

By MATHIEU BORYSEVICZ

The frantic pace of urbanization in China has made conventional urban planning strategies seem pointless. How, after all, do you plan cities that grow by a few million inhabitants in less than a decade? “Learning from Hangzhou” is a delirious effort to make sense of this historic urban phenomenon. The book, whose title is a witty reference to Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour’s 1972 book, “Learning from Las Vegas,” examines everything from the Chinese city’s rampant commercialization to the poor quality of housing for its migrant workers and the constant, 24-hour cycles of demolition and construction. This may be as close as you can get to seeing the future, and it’s both euphoric and terrifying. (timezone8, $45)

‘Bauhaus Women’

By ULRIKE MULLER

Although women formed the majority of the Bauhaus’s student body in its early years, the role they played in shaping the school’s radical agenda has been largely ignored. Now “Bauhaus Women” comes along to correct the historical record. The book touches on how women’s ideas about sexual liberation — refusing to wear corsets, exercising bare-legged in city parks — challenged the rigid class boundaries and sexual prudery of post-World War I Germany. But it was the spirit of creative collaboration they fostered — mostly working in the school’s textile, weaving, ceramics and industrial design workshops — that helped define the Bauhaus’s greatness. (Flammarion, $39.95)

‘Lost Buildings’

By JONATHAN GLANCEY

For gloom and doom types, “Lost Buildings” looks at a painful aspect of architectural history: the seemingly endless list of great monuments that have been callously demolished. Written by Jonathan Glancey, the architecture editor of The Guardian, the book bounces around the world, from Uruk to Moscow to Venice, London and Las Vegas. There are familiar stories here, like the demolition of Les Halles in Paris, Pennsylvania Station in New York City and John Soane’s Bank of England building. But the most compelling chapter may be the final one, “Left on the Drawing Board.” It includes unbuilt monstrosities like Albert Speer’s domed Volkshalle, influential fantasies like Etienne-Louis Boulee’s 1784 proposed cenotaph for Isaac Newton and Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 Monument to the Third International. (Overlook, $60)

‘Legacy: the Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks’

By JOEL MEYEROWITZ

“Legacy: the Preservation of Wilderness in New York City Parks,” a collection of photos by Joel Meyerowitz, debunks the notion that New York is a city of concrete and asphalt anchored by the singular splendor of Central Park. Instead, we are confronted with a sprawling metropolis that is constantly being encroached upon by nature, from forgotten wetlands in Queens to wild turkeys strolling through Battery Park City and an abandoned power station choked with weeds on North Border Island in the East River. It’s the foundation for the “green city” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg regularly preaches about, and it’s already here (Aperture, $65).