Budding Baby Warhols can fix their gaze on this oversize board book of 12 eye-stimulating patterns, credited to well-known artists. Each picture features chunky black-and-white shapes to catch a child’s attention. Some pop pieces, like Takashi Murakami’s deliriously happy-faced flower, resemble conventional child fare. Others are unorthodox but promising choices: Kazimir Malevich’s modernist Black Cross
is an enormous plus sign, and Julian Opie’s stylized human portraits have smiley-face dot eyes and serious mouths. A few pages offer familiar subjects: a duck silhouette, a pear or a carrot, while the intersecting ovals of Josef Albers’s Together
could suggest a family or a nest, and Keith Haring’s iconic Radiant Baby
—a crawling figure emanating exclamation-point lines—graces the cover. Little ones unmoved by figurative work can linger on abstract compositions like conceptual artist Damien Hirst’s grid of grayscale dots or ’60s op artist Bridget Riley’s aggressive zigzags. The images repeat on three folded “friezes,” tucked into the back of the book, ready for installation in art connoisseurs’ play spaces or bedrooms. The high-contrast art should prove mesmerizing; no batteries required. Up to age 3. (Sept.)
