National Arts
Was Egypt's last queen a female Machiavelli, a goddess, femme fatale or—worse? Was she beautiful—or woefully overrated? Cleopatra, who died in 30 B.C., has long had fantasy and slander directed at her, without anyone from beyond her time and place knowing what she looked like. Timed to coincide with a British Museum exhibit (which then travels to Rome and Chicago) Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth analyzes the ways the queen's image has changed from the Renaissance to the present. Edited by Susan Walker (Roman Art) and Peter Higgs, deputy keeper and curator, respectively, in the department of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum, the book presents 364 color and 261 b&w illustrations of pieces from the exhibit, including jewelry, sculpture, ceramics, painting and mosaic. (Princeton Univ., $60 384p ISBN 0-691-08835-7; May) Boasting a history of 7,000 years and counting—from Neolithic jade carving to contemporary video installation—China may be the world's most "abundantly productive, staggeringly artistic continuous culture," according to the authors of Chinese Art & Culture. In presenting 230 b&w and 128 color illustrations, Robert L. Thorp, Washington University professor of art history and archeology, and Richard Ellis Vinograd (Boundaries of the Self: Chinese Portraits 1600—1900) devote admirable attention to social, political and economic contexts for Chinese work, examining, for example, the imperial ethos detected in an earthenware figure. The book's release coincides with an exhibit of 19th- and 20th-century Chinese painting at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which should help call attention to it. (Abrams, $85 440p ISBN 0-8109-4145-7; May) In the early 1950s, paint-by-number kits became, for watchdogs of America's artistic ambition, a metaphor for the commercialization, mechanization and "dumbing-down" of American culture. But consumers paid little attention to such finger wagging; in 1954, more "number" paintings hung in American homes than did original works of art. Using 185 color and 15 b&w exemplars, William Bird (Better Living: Advertising, Media and the New Vocabulary of Business Leadership) analyzes the phenomenon in Paint by Number: The How-To Craze that Swept the Nation, which accompanies an exhibition he curated for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (now hanging until December). Based on a Leonardo da Vinci technique for teaching painting, paint by number survives to this day, now collected, traded online and exhibited in galleries. (Princeton Architectural, $18.95 135p ISBN 1-56898-282-8; May 8) Called "the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century" by no less a skeptic than establishment art critic Robert Hughes, cartoonist R. Crumb has produced some of the smuttiest yet piercingly affecting—and quintessentially American—art since the 1960s. Fans of Mr. Natural, the Monkey Wrench Gang, Fritz the Cat, Devil Girl and Crumb's agonized self-portraits won't want to miss Odds & Ends, a new, chronologically organized collection of unpublished doodles, Valentine cards drawn during his employment at American Greetings, covers for underground newspapers, advertisements for porn theaters and bike shops, and record album covers. Crumb selected the myriad b&w and color drawings here, all displaying his dark and hilarious vulgarity. (Bloomsbury, $34.95 136p ISBN 1-58234-136-2; May 3)
Lifestyle Accessories
Worn by Greta Garbo, Liz Taylor and Jackie Onassis, Jean Schlumberger's jewels have been called the 20th century's most glamorous. Enamel insect hatpins; a sapphire flower in a real terra-cotta flowerpot; a crucifix in diamonds, amethysts and rubies—all are beautifully photographed for The Jewels of Jean Schlumberger, the catalogue for an exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Museum curators Marie-Noël de Gary, Chantal Bizot, Evelyne Possémé and Hélène David-Weill, president of the Union Central des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, give full explications of the 150 illustrations (90 color). The book's release coincides with a touring exhibition sponsored by Tiffany & Co., where the artist worked from 1956 until his retirement in the late 1970s.(Abrams, $39.95 160p ISBN 0-8109-4181-3; May) American-style decadence and comfort are no better epitomized than by the swimming pool—there are now an estimated 3.8 million in-ground pools in the U.S. In The New American Swimming Pool: Innovations in Design and Construction: 40 Case Studies, editor James Grayson Trulove (The New American Garden) carefully surveys 40 particularly striking forms—urban, suburban, oceanside and country—to isolate swimming pools' aesthetic and functional elements. Waterfalls, rock gardens, modernist geometries, dramatic illumination, tiling and terracing are all deployed. With its site plans, lists of materials and more than 300 color photos, the book will make a valuable reference for architects, landscape architects and homeowners—some willing to swallow unbearable envy, others to dream or try some small-scale renovations. (Watson-Guptill, $55 paper 228p ISBN 0-8230-3175-6; May) "Guns seem to have followed me around most of my working life," writes award-winning British photojournalist Zed Nelson, who has covered armed conflict in Afghanistan, Somalia, El Salvador and elsewhere, before photographing U.S. guns and gun owners. Gun Nation, a collection of 103 of Nelson's images, displays shots of gun shows, gunshot victims, Columbine survivors and mourners, a coffee klatch—style group of female gun owners, and police are interspersed with brief commentary that leaves no doubt as to where his sympathies lie. (Westzone [Trafalgar Square, dist.], $45 160p ISBN 0-9537438-3-7; May) In Popcorn Palaces: The Art Deco Movie Theatre Paintings of Davis Cone, the artist captures the paradoxes of these iconic showplaces from the perspective of the generation that inherited rather than created them; their tackiness, peeling paint, gaudiness and often neglect contrast with the cool assurance of their fantastical design—in its futuristic optimism, lurid wit and irony. Architecture writer Michael D. Kinerk and archivist and art deco collector Dennis W. Wilhelm compiled the paintings and provided an informative text. Cone has been photographing and painting theaters for more than 20 years; the 86 images presented here convey the richness of his effort. (Abrams, $29.95 144p ISBN 0-8109-4361-1; May)
20th Century Legacies
In 1952, near the end of Stalin's life, 15 Soviet Jews—including five well-known writers and poets—were secretly tried and convicted, wrongly, of treason and espionage, because they had protested Nazi atrocities on Soviet territory and been involved in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. That same year, 13 of them were executed in the basement of a Moscow prison. Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, edited by Joshua Rubenstein (Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg) and Vladimir Naumov (executive secretary of the Presidential Commission for the Russian Federation on the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression), presents the long-suppressed trial transcript, abridged. Rubenstein's introduction, drawing on other newly released Moscow documents as well as interviews with the defendants' surviving relatives, places the "trial" within the historical context of Stalin's larger-scale anti-Semitic campaign. (Yale Univ., $35 560p ISBN 0-300-08486-2; May) With photographs, paintings by Tom Freeman, and soldier and civilian testimonies, Pearl Harbor: The Day of Infamy—An Illustrated History memorializes a day of bitterness, sorrow and resolve for many Americans. Author Dan van der Vat (The Good Nazi) finds that "America's worst military disaster" became "her greatest triumph." Sen. John McCain's introduction expresses no ill will toward the Japanese, and van der Vat tells part of the story from the points of view of various Japanese soldiers: e.g., the ensign who bombed the U.S.S. Oklahoma, a bomber pilot who "had never felt so scared" and afterward "felt so sad and lonely to see all the empty beds." (Basic, $39.95 180p ISBN 0-465-08982-8; May 15)
