BOOKS

Art you can afford: These books bring beauty to your coffee table

BY FABIOLA SANTIAGO

fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com

SCHIFFER PUBLISHING

'MIAMI CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS'

Few gifts can match the magic of a work of art, but let's face it: how many of us can afford such extravagance?

For the visual-arts lover on your list, an art book is the next best thing. Art books educate, illuminate and transport one through time and geography. Most are simply beautiful to peruse or display in an art-conscious house.

Here are some of the season's most interesting new titles:

Miami Contemporary Artists. Paul Clemence and Julie Davidow. Schiffer. 256 pages. $49.95.

Miami artists are not only spirited creators. They also are poetic, witty, nostalgic, blunt, realistic and forgiving, and their writing hits a high mark in this book, in which musings about how the city has influenced their work accompany gorgeous images of art as diverse as the place.

The striking cover image of a work by Gavin Perry catches the eye immediately, but what makes this book a must-have is its historical value. This is the first compilation of Miami artists who have become significant players in the city's contemporary art scene; 105 are featured, and the foreword by art critic Elisa Turner provides context. Compiled by Clemence and Davidow -- he a Brazilian architecture photographer and she a native Miami painter -- the book is a Who's Who of South Florida's creative world.

One caveat: The book is not all-inclusive; some artists of merit are not featured.

30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity Across Time and Space. The Editors of Phaidon. Phaidon. 1,065 pages. $49.95.

It's heavy (13 pounds), comprehensive and well-priced, considering its ambitious attempt to cover art history from the beginning of humankind to today. The artwork, showcased in chronological order, ranges from the first accomplished cave paintings and carvings to the conceptual art of the 20th century.

Thirty-five respected academics, museum curators and archaeologists from around the world contributed to the effort, culling thousands of entries. In addition to painting and sculpture, they surveyed fine and decorative arts -- textiles, masks, ceramics and jewelry -- to illustrate how human creativity has evolved.

Agile and entertaining, the book opens with The Lion Man, a mammoth ivory carving from the caves of the Altmühl valley in southern Germany. It ends, surprisingly, with Roden Crater, a most unusual work by James Turrell, who discovered the formation on the edge of the Painted Desert in 1974, bought the site three years later and turned it into an interactive light installation and observatory. The authors chose Crater for the work's references in art history to the Roman Pantheon (temple and man-made dial), and to Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids for its ''sense of mystery and monument.'' It is a relevant choice, given the increasing number of artists today who create light sculptures.

Havana Deco. Alejandro G. Alonso, Pedro Contreras and Martino Fagiuoli. Norton. 192 pages. $39.95.

As if anyone needed more proof of what was lost to the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, here comes Havana Deco with its colorful photographs of the gems brought to the Cuban capital by artists and architects in the 1920s, '30s and '40s, when they transplanted the Parisian Deco movement to the Caribbean.

''Deco is sultrier in Havana, jazzed up, with Afro-Cuban elements especially in its photography, painting and graphic arts,'' writes David Unger in the preface.

You have to believe him. Not even in Miami Beach's famed district do you see decorative panels like these or apartment buildings with such exquisite detail and exuberant Deco flair. Read, admire and weep, especially when you come to photographs of the deteriorated buildings of Centro Habana, so beautiful underneath the grime and decay. No Cuban collection is complete without this book.

Mario Testino: Let Me In! Taschen. $39.99.

It's tough to tell where fashion photography ends and celebrity photography begins, but both are getting some respect from the world of high art these days, and nothing proclaims that fact more eloquently than this coffee-table book of Mario Testino's behind-the-scenes photographs of celebrities in fashionable garb.

The photos are from Testino's personal archives and are said to have been taken spontaneously before, during or after seatings for Vanity Fair and Vogue. Testino is the photographer who took the graceful black-and-white Vanity Fair cover photograph of Princess Diana five months before her tragic death in August 1997.

This is how plugged in to the scene Testino is: Nicole Kidman wrote the foreword. He photographed Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher in bed. Kate Moss and Demi both appear naked, showing their rears with great aplomb.

Impressionism: 50 Paintings You Should Know. Ines Janet Englemann. Prestel. 135 pages. $19.95.

Has someone ever asked you: ''What is the difference between Manet and Monet?'' I've been asked (after a dinner/movie/book-browsing date). Seriously. This is the book for that someone. It's a basic readable guide to the masterpieces created in 19th century Europe, featuring the movement's most important works, including Claude Monet's dreamy Japanese Bridge in Garden at Giverny and Edouard Manet's sensational Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (Lunch in the Grass), the painting of a naked woman casually picnicking with two fashionably dressed men. Manet's masterpiece is the first pick in the book, which is slim in size but wide in its interesting choices of art and accompanying stories, all delivered in chronological order. Here's an idea: Beef up this present with a gift admission or membership to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, which features excellent examples of Impressionist art in its permanent collection.

H2O. Howard Schatz. Bulfinch.180 pages. $60.

For underwater photographer Howard Schatz, the deep end of the pool is a working studio. Schatz uses the flowing properties of water to create gorgeous pictures that are a tribute to movement and form, pairing models and dancers with water scenes. The result is a luminous, surreal world that is artful and gorgeous. This is some of Schatz's best underwater portraiture, and it's pure bliss.

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe . Sylvia Wolf. Prestel. 254 pages. $60.

You can't help but think that bad boy photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) would have approved of this out-of-the-box compilation of 300 samples of his work with Polaroids. (He made more than 1,500 from 1970 to 1975, and this selection was compiled by Sylvia Wolf, an adjunct curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.)

The themes that would define Mapplethorpe's photography -- flowers, nudes, self-portraits, sex -- were already apparent in the early black-and-white Polaroids, most of them never before exhibited. But these are more spontaneous photographs than the studied portraits he later made.

Beautifully packaged inside a white cover, the book is the perfect gift for the avant-garde art lover in your list and especially suited for a collector or gay man. Warning: Many of the photographs contain strong sexual content.

Sculpture Today. Judith Collins. Phaidon. 464 pages. $69.95.

It's been quite a year for sculpture, highlighted by Richard Serra's extraordinary exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Frank Stella's at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Likewise in South Florida, several significant sculpture shows and sculpture parks were inaugurated. So Judith Collin's comprehensive survey of contemporary sculpture couldn't be a more timely gift as well as a worthwhile guide to understanding the history of sculpture.

Organized by such themes as figure, architecture, furniture and minimalism, the book features an international cast of sculptors. Among them are Serra, an American minimalist known for his large-scale assemblies; Tokyo-based Yoshiro Suda, who makes beautiful wooden sculptures of plant forms; and the Brazilian Lia Menna Barreto, whose mixed-media sculptures comment on oppression and danger.

The section on memory is moving and illustrative of the innumerable ways in which artists tackle the subject of preserving and reflecting on the past. In the section titled ''Inspired by Nature,'' Turrell's Roden Crater also makes an appearance, as do neon sculptures and Olafur Eliasson's grand The Weather Project at the Tate in London, an installation made from light, a reflective panel, hazer, mirrored foil and steel.

There are some amusing examples of sculpture -- most vividly, Jake and Dinos Chapman's Death I, a painted bronze sculpture of two inflatable sex dolls on top of one another (and on a pool float) in a well-known numeric position. This is not a book for casual art lovers but for the serious art student and patron, as the text is heavily academic.

Chuck Close: Work . Christopher Finch. Prestel. 335 pages. $85.

The Miami Art Museum has two wonderful examples of Chuck Close's work in its permanent collection, two self-portraits, and so the gift of this book also should come with a trip to the museum to see them. (One was up when I last visited earlier this month.) Close is one of the most important living artists in the United States. He reinvented portraiture, and this book is a worthy tribute to his 40-year career.

Artist and writer Christopher Finch has known Close since 1968, and their thousands of hours of conversation are reflected in the readable text, which chronicles Close's life as well as his development as an artist, including his explorations into the art of printmaking.

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. John Richardson. Knopf. 592 pages. $40.

This long-awaited, third installment of John Richardson's mammoth undertaking to document in unprecedented detail and depth Pablo Picasso's life story is a fascinating read. It sheds light on the artist's greatly exaggerated reputation as a ladies' man. The book begins with Picasso's visit to Rome in February of 1917 when he is said to have been ''suffering from chagrin d'amour.'' It was to have been a wedding trip but turned into something else after his on-and-off lover, Irene Lagut, changed her mind about marrying him.

It was not the first time Picasso had been left at the altar; Lagut's predecessor, Gaby Lespinasse, had done the same a year before. In that state of heartbreak and rebound Picasso meets and falls in love with the 25-year-old Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova, who becomes his wife, a chaste woman who was unwilling to forgo her virginity unless she was assured marriage. Picasso quickly immortalized her in a drawing as part of the courtship -- the first of many drawings and paintings of Olga.

The book is elegantly scripted, as Richardson had unequaled access to the painter's family and his works. Another riveting tale reveals the details of the time in 1930 when Picasso discovered that his elderly mother, Doña María, had sold to a con man a number of his earliest works for 1,500 pesetas. An eight-year legal battle to get back his 391 drawings and 10 paintings ensued, and it led to great animosity against his mother and sister's family in Barcelona. His mother thought she was lending the works to a book project, but the document the con man handed her to sign was a bill of sale. Most fascinating is how the works ended up in the hands of reputable dealers -- an only-in-Paris story that involves connections and acquaintances made through lovers, among them Picasso's Eva Gouel, and the lovers of other Parisian figures of his generation.

This is no stuffy biography. It is simply a great read.

Fabiola Santiago is The Miami Herald's visual arts writer.