Books: Readings of the Season

A celebration of society, nature and the imagination

$70 AND OVER

There were two James McNeill Whistlers. One was the artist of the putdown. Oscar Wilde: "I wish I'd said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar, you will." The other was the artist of subtle landscapes and unprecedented arrangements of color and light. The wit was amply recorded in his autobiography The Gentle Art of Making Enemies.

The innovator is revealed in The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler (Yale; two volumes; $150). In a way, these volumes, edited by four art historians, represent the truest kind of biography, for the decades have worn away old enmities, and what remains is the record of a genius who grew from American prodigy to European master. The attractive work should win the painter a new audience, and therefore deserves an alternative title: The Gentler Art of Making Friends.

Just to mention Japanese woodcuts is to evoke the name of Hokusai (1760-1849), who produced some of the finest examples of the genre. In The Art of Hokusai in Book Illustration (Sotheby Parke Bernet/ University of California; 288 pages; $110), Scholar Jack Hillier explores seven decades of artistry. Hokusai, who began by illustrating cheap 18th century novelettes known as kibyŏshi ("yellow-backs"), was prolific; he once illustrated 61 volumes of a Chinese classic. As Hillier observes, the man was an "encyclopedist of Japanese life and custom." That life and custom included portraiture, nature studies and some explicit erotic drawings that earn this book an X rating.

If one were to apply the Big Bang theory to art, the explosion could be said to have occurred during World Wars I and II. Avant-gardism—aggressive, impish, savage and wildly varied—still resounds throughout European and American culture. Jean-Luc Daval's Avant-Garde Art 1914-1939, (Skira-Rizzoli; 223 pages; $85) is a sequel to the author's Modern Art 1884-1914: The Decisive Years. The new work's 75 color reproductions and 270 black-and-white pictures have been chosen to illustrate Daval's brisk chronological text. By dividing his subject into 89 bite-size chapters, he is able to draw fine distinctions among the numerous unruly schools that flourished during those fertile 25 years when such men as Matisse, Picasso, Duchamp, Mird, Dali, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright changed the look and perception of the modern world.

Likenesses of Abraham Lincoln stare down from monuments and up from pennies and $5 bills; his mythic face is surely one of the most familiar in history. Yet no two of the 120 known surviving photographs of him look exactly alike, a fact surprisingly documented in The Face of Lincoln (Viking; 201 pages; $75). Editor James Mellon spent years combing the country for Lincoln pictures; when original plates or negatives were available, they were meticulously developed to bring out all retrievable detail. This work has brought forth images of astonishing clarity; it sometimes seems possible to number the hairs in the President's beard. Another byproduct is mystery: Lincoln's craggy features and soft eyes still contain as many secrets as they reveal.