ART

Au revoir, Monet, hello Leonardo

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 12/2/2001

How refreshing to report that this year's crop of art books is lean on Impressionism. Is there anything left to say about Monet?

Not that 2001 is short on famous names: They're just earlier ones. Leonardo and Vermeer are both having banner years in terms of tomes analyzing their work. The 1490s were not great years for Leonardo, who used experimental techniques and media on the ''Last Supper'' he painted for the refectory of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. The famous fresco flaked while the master was still working on it, and has suffered ever since. The celebrated conservator Pinin Brambilla Barcilon has spent 20 years working to save it; the record of her efforts is ''Leonardo: The Last Supper'' (University of Chicago Press, $95), coauthored by Pietro C. Marani. The text is riveting; so are the close-up photos of details of the damage.

In ''Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper'' (Zone Books, $43) Leo Steinberg argues that we think we know the Milan fresco because it's been reproduced and even parodied for centuries, but that its multiple meanings had not been previously plumbed. Donald Sassoon takes the same tack with ''Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon'' (Harcourt, $30). And in ''Leonardo on Painting'' (Yale University Press, $16.95), edited by Martin Kemp, Leonardo gets in his own two cents.

On to Vermeer. Harvard curator Ivan Gaskell uses the enigmatic painter's ''Woman Standing at a Virginal'' as a case study of how sociology, politics, and context affect the reading of a work. The result is ''Vermeer's Wager: Speculations on Art History, Theory and Art Museums'' (Reaktion, $27). Philip Steadman spins a detective story about whether Vermeer used a camera obscura, in ''Vermeer's Camera: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Masterpieces'' (Oxford University Press, $25). In ''Vermeer: A View of Delft'' (Holt, $26) Anthony Bailey reconstructs the painter's world so vividly you can almost tell what that Dutch city smelled like in the 17th century. Bailey explains Vermeer through his environment; Walter Liedtke puts him in the context of other painters of his time and place in ''A View of Delft: Vermeer and His Contemporaries'' (Yale University Press, $75).

James Putnam extends the current discourse on the relationship between museum and artist in ''Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium'' (Thames & Hudson, $45). The front and back cover images are enough to lure you inside: On the back is a straightforward shot of a classical white-walled gallery hung with historical paintings; on the front, the same space has been invaded by 40,000 rudimentary little terra-cotta figures by contemporary sculptor Antony Gormley: They look like they've just arrived from Mars.

A pottery figure over a thousand years older than Gormley's graces the cover of E. Michael Whittington's ''The Sport of Life and Death: The Mesoamerican Ballgame'' (Thames & Hudson, $50), a fascinating account of the games played by Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs from at least 1200 BC - ''games'' that could end in human sacrifice.

This is a year for offbeat or unexpected subjects in art books. An example is Boston College professor Jonathan M. Bloom's ''Paper Before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World'' (Yale University Press, $45), the story of how Muslims acquired papermaking skills from China in the early eighth century, how the medium influenced Islamic culture and dissemination of information, and ultimately, how paper influenced the entire medieval world. Another technique-oriented book is by artist-author David Hockney, whose ''Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters'' (Viking, $60) is an entertaining examination of how centuries ago artists were using lenses and mirrors to project images onto flat surfaces, then tracing them onto paper or canvas.

For those who forget that in Western painting the lady with the wheel is St. Catherine of Alexandria or that the gentleman in the rough brown hooded tunic is St. Francis of Assisi, there is the latest National Gallery Pocket Guide, ''Saints'' (Yale University Press, $10), which is slim enough to carry around a museum or church. Recognizing saints, writes author Erika Langmuir, ''is as comforting as running into old friends.''

''Juan Munoz'' (University of Chicago Press, $50) wasn't intended as a memorial to the 48-year-old Spanish artist who died in August. Munoz was one of the few contemporary sculptors able to make figurative work fresh. His Everymen hang, tilt, perch in trees, and appear to converse with each other. The new book - actually the catalog of the artist's first major survey in the United States - comes with insightful curatorial essays.

A century before apartheid fell in South Africa, European Jews were gradually freed from the limitations on where they could live and work. In ''The Emergence of Jewish Artists in Nineteenth Century Europe'' (The Jewish Museum, $50), several authors examine how these artists alternated between secular and religious subjects, started painting nudes, and, in some cases, became significant participants in the string of 19th-century ''isms.'' Most of the artists are little known; the only household name among them is Camille Pissarro. The book serves as catalog for a current show at the Jewish Museum in New York.

Westerners tend to evaluate traditional African art as they would the art of the West - as beauty for its own sake. In ''African Forms: Art and Rituals'' (Assouline, $50) African art authority Laure Meyer explains the work's spiritual functions and roles in the culture at large, tackling themes including the difference between tribal and royal arts and how sculptors follow directives from diviners.

Traditional African societies understand their art as part of life, not originally meant to be confined to museums. In America, there is a gap between art and life; Americans in general are uncomfortable with art, especially of the cutting-edge variety. That discomfort, and controversy over art that some considered sacrilege or even pornography, led the US Congress to terminate the Visual Artists Fellowship program of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1995. In ''A Creative Legacy: A History of the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists' Fellowship Program'' (Abrams, $49.50) current NEA head Bill Ivey and other authors lament the loss in the most persuasive way - by discussing and reproducing works by such distinguished recipients as Jackie Winsor, William Wegman, and Bill Viola. They're among the most internationally important artists of our age, which makes the canceling of a program that supported them especially disturbing.

One of the most sobering - and beautiful - of this year's art books is ''Vanishing Histories: 100 Endangered Sites from the World Monuments Watch'' (Abrams, $60). The World Monuments Fund compiles the list, which includes Brancusi's ''Endless Column'' in Romania, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Petra in Jordan - and New York's Ellis Island: America is probably less aware of its architectural heritage than other developed countries. The book's dedication cites the two 170-foot Buddhas of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, which the Taliban blew up this year. ''Intolerance, war and politics can be as much the enemies of humanity's inheritance as natural disasters and the passage of time,'' reads the text. ''Nothing is sacred, and we must be eternally vigilant.''

Christine Temin, a Globe Staff member, covers the visual arts.

This story ran on page E4 of the Boston Globe on 12/2/2001.
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