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Art appreciation was once a gut course—a simple matter of getting to know the styles and spellings of old masters. Modernism changed all that. Surrealism, Dada, cubism and, later, abstract expressionism, Pop, Op, minimalism and Happenings were too complex for simple appreciation. Edward Lucie-Smith, an English critic, attempts to pave a smooth, orderly path through this jungle of schools, styles, waves and blips. In Art Now (Morrow; 504 pages; $29.95) he efficiently gets the reader from abstract expressionism to superrealism. Like a package-tour guide, he hits the peaks and some of the troughs. The visual impact of the more than 350 color plates is vigorous. But the pace of the survey is so brisk that the reader may find himself thinking, "If this is Thursday, it must be Lichtenstein."
Wim Swaan is an impeccable photographer, a lucid writer and a dedicated medievalist. In The Late Middle Ages (Cornell University Press; 232 pages; $27.50) he proposes that the period from 1350 to the Renaissance in Northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula produced a "pyrotechnic blaze of glory" in art and architecture. The illustrations of Gothic spires and gargoyles, flying buttresses and Books of Hours, tombs and tapestries and town halls make the point spectacularly; the text puts it all into historical perspective. There are only 16 color plates, including a breathtaking interior of King's College Chapel in Cambridge, but what surprises and captures the reader is the hundreds of black-and-white photographs that demonstrate anew how glorious the medium can be.
Magnified 615 times with the scanning electron microscope, the body of a carpenter bee resembles a forest in a nightmare. At 13,818 times, a crack in an eggshell is a mysterious view of a devastating earthquake. In Magnifications (Schocken; 119 pages; $24.95), Photographer David Scharf takes the reader on a visual adventure into microspace. The images are beyond normal senses, but through the microscope Scharf puts the reader eyeball to eyeball with tiny insects like the Feathery Midge (in life about 2 mm. long) and allows us to make contact with beautiful, intriguing, minute parts of plants and minerals. He has combined scientific knowledge and photographic talent. With this book, we now have an Ansel Adams of inner space.
The first step in selling is stopping the eye. No one has mastered that rule of advertising as well as Adman George Lois. For more than two decades he has married the outrageous to the fantastic. The Art of Advertising (Abrams; 325 pages; $45) is a portfolio of his campaigns and some of the 92 covers he did for Esquire. Improbably enough, Lois has made advertising interesting; impossibly enough, he has made it fun.