Some day publishers will produce the ultimate Christmas book: an immense 6-ft. by 3-ft. volume upon which the purchaser can rest coffee tables. This year gift books reflect the bullish retail trend; add four legs and many would do for living room furniture. High prices, as always, are the greetings of the season. The 1975 record holder is The New York Graphic Society's luxuriant art book Gustav Klimt for $175. But scattered throughout the stores is a variety of handsome volumes for nearly every wallet and interest.
$45 AND UP
EGON SCHIELE'S PORTRAITS by Alessandra Comini. 556 pages. University of California. $65. THE ART OF EGON SCHIELE. Text by Envin Mitsch. 267 pages. Phaidon/Praeger. $45. Complementary books, both of them superb, about the prolific Austrian expressionist who died, aged 28, in 1918. In her discussion of the emotionally charged portraits, Comini vividly describes the intellectual ferment in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Mitsch concentrates on the art itself—anguished self-portraits, brooding studies, quasi-erotic studies. Handsome reproductions show the risk in trying to depict feelings at the end of the nerve: Schiele sometimes succeeds in limning only his neuroses.
ETERNAL AMERICA by Yoshikazu Shirakawa. 231 pages. Kodansha International. $60. Japanese Photographer Shirakawa is justly celebrated for his photography of mountains, especially for last year's monumental Himalayas. Here he turns his cameras on an entire continent. Some of the color work is in comparable: a dramatically textured shot of Death Valley dunes; the hot springs at Minerva Terrace in Yellowstone, which seem to rise from the surface of Jupiter. The black-and-whites, all infra-red shots, are disappointingly abstract. Shirakawa tries to compensate with a breezy, crotchety text that notes, among other things, that hippies spread lice.
ANGKOR by Bela Kalman. Text by Joan Lebold Cohen. 240 pages. Abrams. $45. Just before the Indochinese war engulfed Cambodia, Photographer Bela Kalman set down a color record of these sacred sandstone cities. Kalman's striking photographs (accompanied by a lucid text) record it all: brooding jungle setting, massive stone faces, tree-tangled mystery of unrestored Ta Prohm, eye-stretching vistas of Angkor Wat itself. Look hard: the temples were damaged in the Cambodian war, and they will never be the same.
THE MYTHIC IMAGE by Joseph Campbell. 552 pages. Princeton University Press. $45. The poet W.B. Yeats saw in dreams the beginnings of responsibilities. The noted scholar Joseph Campbell sees in dreams the origins of mythology, art and religion—not inconsiderable responsibilities. The Mythic Image is essentially a distillate of The Masks of God, Campbell's four-volume study of the world's mythologies and sacred beliefs. Illustrated with Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, European and pre-Columbian art, the book is a sumptuous short course in the human imagination.
$30 TO $40