$45 AND UP
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE by Georgia O'Keeffe. Unpaged. Viking. $75. There are 108 exacting color plates in this spare, handsome book. The paintings were chosen by the artist, now in her 90th year; many have not been reproduced before. The wonder is that despite their stark eloquence, they are almost upstaged by the text—also by O'Keeffe. She describes her surroundings in Abiquiu, N. Mex., recalls the '20s when D.H. Lawrence was underfoot. Her voice is laconic, styleless, arrow straight to the point. About one of her pictures of bleached pelvic bones, she notes: "I was the sort of child that ate around the raisin on the cookie and ate around the hole in the doughnut. So probably—not having changed much —when I started painting pelvic bones I was most interested in the hole in the bone."
PRE-COLUMBIAN ART OF SOUTH AMERICA by Alan Lapiner. 460 pages. Abrams. $50. The pottery, statuary, textiles and metalwork of the ancient Americas are no longer considered mere artifacts of forgotten peoples but art forms that reflect the sophistication of complex civilization. The late Alan Lapiner chose to illustrate his book with outstanding examples of ritual tomb furnishings and gold and silver mummy ornaments from Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Brazil. The result is a trove for collectors and browsers alike.
THE UNICORN TAPESTRIES by Margaret B. Freeman. 244 pages. The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Dutton. $45. The seven magnificent tapestries depicting the hunt of the unicorn (on permanent display at the Cloisters in Manhattan) dazzle the eye. Woven into the tapestries' more than 1,000 sq. ft. is a graphic portrait of the medieval mind, frozen at a time (circa 1500) when thought was beginning to shift from heaven to earth. Thus while the tapestries tell the story of a bridegroom brought to the altar and of the death and resurrection of Christ, they also show the realistic hunt of a wholly believable unicorn. Margaret B. Freeman, a former curator of the Cloisters, has written a scholarly and enthralling analysis of the tapestries, including an explanation of the weaving techniques that were used to produce one of the glories of Western art.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART by John Walker. 696 pages. Abrams. $45. For those unable to visit the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this collection offers a distant second-best tour. Although the 1,028 color plates illustrate the gallery's estimable holdings, many are reproduced in a size somewhat smaller than that of a self-respecting post card. The saving bonus is the lucid running commentary of John Walker, who has been with the museum since its birth in 1939.
ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA by G.E. Kidder Smith. 832 pages. American Heritage/Norton. $45. The author motored 130,000 miles to see and photograph the structures that might best represent America's architecture. The trip was worth the effort. In this two-volume pictorial history readers will find old favorites (New England's shingled houses, the South's Greek Revival manors, the Southwest's adobe churches) as well as such modern masterpieces as Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, Eero Saarinen's Dulles Airport and Louis Kahn's Salk Institute.