The big expensive picture book is probably a fixed Christmas institution for the foreseeable future. As publishers recognize, its very size and expensiveness make it sell. Both price tag and poundage are an unarguably solid demonstration of the giver's regard. The presumed esthetic content is an implied compliment to the recipient's cultivation. Yet it can appear to be absorbed just by leafing through it; and duty done, the thing lends its own cachet as it lies there on the coffee table. Of course, for those with the courage to seek them out and match them with the taste of the recipient, there are even real pictureless books for real reading. This year, however, the surprise is that some of the picture books are actually readable too. Among the dog books and bird books, joke books and gardening books, gun books, horse books, bridge books and seemingly endless art books, the following stand out:
GOYA by Francisco Javier Sanchez Canton. 95 pages followed by 56 plates. Reynal. $100. Some of the double gatefold plates open out to more than 4 ft. in length. The typography is superb, the paper heavy. Each of the 193 reproductions was printed separately and with fanatic attention to accuracy of color, then pasted in. Goya is also a work of immense scholarship: the extensive text is by the director of Madrid's Prado Museum, who is the acknowledged Goya authority. Yet the book may prove curiously disappointing to those who are not specialists. Goya in his long lifetime produced many hundreds of works, from accomplished courtly portraits of Spanish nobility to the increasingly tormented later etchings and paintings of war and cruelty. All of Goya's phases are represented, but the book's emphasis (including all 56 large plates) is devoted to just 14 works, the "black paintings" with which he decorated the walls of his country villa toward the end of his life. The black paintings are massive, powerful, hell-ridden. But they are also sadly deteriorated with time, having been originally executed on plaster in oil paint that was transferred bodily to canvas many years later. Their power finally eludes even the great care and scale of these reproductions.
THE BIRTH OF GREEK ART by Pierre Demargne. 446 pages. Golden Press. $25. The incomparable flowering of Hellenic culture in the 5th century B.C., the era of the building of the Parthenon and the repulse of the Persians, was in fact preceded by at least 2,500 years of art and civilization in the islands and mainland of the Greek world. First came the full cycle of the pre-Hellenic civilizations of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans, with their varied and sophisticated achievements, which finally flamed out in the 12th century B.C.
Out of the ensuing dark age arose a new archaic beginning of art, which developed through several centuries to reach the purity of form and piety of humanistic vision usually conjured up by the phrase "Greek art." This ancient double root of the Greek experience is the subject of Author Demargne's engrossing study and its opulent page after page of illustration.
JAPAN-A HISTORY IN ART by Bradley Smith. 295 pages. Simon & Schuster.