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THE ART OF THE PUPPET by Bil Baird. 251 pages. Macmillan. $17-50. Puppeteer Bil Baird's book is not a history but an appreciation of the theatrical form whose genesis, lost in time, goes back thousands of years. Punch and Judy were born before Diarist Samuel Pepys, who watched their antics in the 17th century. Punch's ancestor, a hook-nosed Turkish bully named Karaghioz, preceded him by several centuries. The special exaggerated magic of the marionette, which lives only in the minds of its spectators and often requires three human puppeteers to give it movement, is affectionately evoked by a man who has been quickening his own mannequins for 40 years.
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PRIVATE VIEW by Bryan Robertson, John Russell and Lord Snowdon. 298 pages. Nelson. $18. Lord Snowdon's marriage to Princess Margaret has not interrupted his professional career. His camera plays with lively, inventive and sometimes mischievous effect on the faces and figures that comprise Britain's art establishment. On a pedestal in the basement of the Tate Gallery, surrounded by cocooned statues that have fallen from public favor, sits Sir John Rothenstein, looking a bit discarded himself (he was on the eve of retirement as the Tate's director). Britain's new generation of artists are shown in their untidy studio lairs, and although their names may not resonate beyond art circles, Lord Snowdon brings them all very much to life. The artists are represented by specimens of their work, many in color. Text by Bryan Robertson, director of London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, and Art Critic John Russell of the London Sunday Times.
THE VOYAGES OF ULYSSES. 261 pages.
Herdar Freiburg. $19. When Troy fell 3,000 years ago, the warrior Odysseus, king of Ithaca, set sail for home. The direct route was only 550 miles, but Odysseus was b'own all over the Mediterranean, took te'n years to reach his native land. Homer first recorded the voyagers' adventures in his epic poem The Odyssey. Now Photographer Erich Lessing has trained his camera on the very scenes that may have met the voyagers' astonished eyes: the shores of Djerba, off the Tunisian Coast, where Odysseus—here given his Roman name of Ulysses—tarried among the Lotus Eaters; the brooding Lake Avernus in Italy, where he descended into the Underworld; the bay of Port Vathy, where at last the voyage ended on the sands of home. Lessing has overburdened his superb pictures with too much borrowed text. The Homeric passages that embellish the pictures would have sufficed.