By Stuart Mitchner

Now is the time of year when an allegedly endangered species called The Book comes enormously into its own, making those
handy, battery-dependent little doodads called Nooks and Kindles look like sophisticated playthings. What a difference, to unwrap and open and hold in your hands the weighty reality of a big, handsomely/beautifully/lavishly illustrated volume you can feel the substance and texture of, something, say it again, to be held in both hands. It lends the gift a kind of majesty, like an offering placed on the altar of the occasion.

This year’s offerings cover a sweeping range of art forms and include handsome works by home-grown artists, as well as ones accompanying major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim.

TEXTILES: VISUAL THRILLS

“Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500–1800,” the Met’s new show, has been getting raves, notably from Roberta Smith at The New York Times, who eschews the integrity of artspeak, claiming there are “enough visual thrills and historical insights to knock your socks off.” This year’s “staggering overview of more than three centuries of art, commerce, craft and crosscultural fertilization” may be “even more outstanding than usual.” The exhibit runs through January 5, while the book published by the Met and distributed by Yale University Press ($65) under the same title puts “one of the great art experiences of the season” between covers forever. Edited by Amelia Peck, who offers a history of trade textiles at the Met and an essay on The East India Company textiles for the North American market, the 350-page volume includes a multi-author assortment of introductory essays on Indian textiles; textile traditions and trade in Latin America; Chinese textiles in Portugal; Japan and the textile trade; “Silks along the seas” in Ottoman Turkey and Safavid Iran; the European response to textiles from the East; and dyes and the dye trade. “Blue-Resist Panel,” the cover illustration for Interwoven Globe shown above with its title removed, is an example of the “every picture tells a story” aspect of the volume. The editor’s intriguing account of this “resist-painted and printed and indigo-dyed furnishing fabric” begins by admitting that it has “frustrated several generations of American textile historians” and “has been the subject of conferences, book chapters, and numerous articles.” Somehow the mystery fabric found its way from “probably India” to the American market in the mid- 18th century.

PAINTING: THE MYSTERY OF MAGRITTE

Speaking of mystery, another no less stunning work of publishing art accompanying a major new exhibit is Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 (Museum of Modern Art $65). After alluding to the ubiquity of René Magritte (“an artist we practically can’t avoid. The pipe; the giant eye; the choochoo in the fi replace”), The New York Times’ Holland Cotter admits the survey is “good solid fun, because Magritte is solid and fun.” One of the favored artists for designers of rock album covers, Magritte was born in Belgium and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. When he was in his early 20s he married his model Georgette Berger, whom he had known since he was 13. They were together until his death in 1967. Of his habit of juxtaposing unrelated objects, he said, “It is a union that suggests the essential mystery of the world. Art for me is not an end in itself, but a means of evoking that mystery.” On view at MoMA through January, the exhibit will move to Houston’s Menil Collection and The Art Institute of Chicago, both of which collaborated with MoMA in producing the exhibition and catalogue, which is co-authored by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Michel Draguet and edited by MoMA’s senior curator of painting and sculpture, Anne Umland. The painting on the book’s front cover, shown below, is The Secret Double, from 1927.

MOTHERWELL'S COLLAGES

Robert Motherwell: Early Collages (Guggenheim $45), text by curator Susan Davidson, with Megan Fontanella, Brandon Taylor, and Jeffrey Warda accompanies the exhibit at the Guggenheim scheduled to run through January 5, 2014. Devoted to Motherwell’s works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s, the book reexamines the origins of the artist’s style and his encounter with the papier collé technique that he described in 1944 as “the greatest of our discoveries.” It was at Peggy Guggenheim's early urging, and under the tutelage of emigre Surrealist artist Matta, that Motherwell first experimented with the technique. He recalled years later: “I might never have done it otherwise, and it was here that I found . . . my ‘identity.’” In addition to focusing on Motherwell’s early career with Peggy Guggenheim, the book features approximately 60 works and four essays that delve into other artists’ engagements with collage in the fi rst half of the twentieth century; Motherwell’s underlying humanitarian themes during World War II; his materials; and a reassessment of his work in the collage medium.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Emmet Gowin, who taught photography at Princeton University from 1973 to 2009, is the subject of a self-titled collection (Aperture $65), with text by Keith F. Davis, Carlos Gollonet, and Gowin. Those familiar with Gowin’s work will fi nd images of the subjects he’s best known for, his wife and family, landscape and aerial photography of Mount St. Helens, the American West, the Czech Republic, Italy, Mexico, Japan and the U.S. As the cover portrait of his wife suggests, Detail of Edith, Danville (Virginia) 1963, he’s chosen to highlight the human side of his work. In a hand-written letter from May 1967, when he was 25, Gowin wrote, “From the beginning, I wanted to make pictures so potent that I would not need to say anything about them.” His choice of this beautiful image of his wife at the dawn of their relationship suggests that of all the portraits of her, some of which are rigorous, stark, and sometimes unfl attering in their intimacy, the face on the cover comes closest to the essence of the woman he fell in love with. Gowin has described his portraits of Edith as “agreements” they made with each other: “My attention was a natural duty that could honour that love.”

Sacred Spaces—Turkish Mosques and Tombs (Quantuck Lane Press $54.92) is the work of photographer Mary Cross. Introduced by Peter Brown, the “beautifully produced” book that Dorothea von Moltke, co-owner of Labyrinth Books, Princeton, New Jersey, calls a “labor of love.” The book visually celebrates over twenty mosques and tombs built from the fi fteenth to the early seventeenth centuries in Istanbul, Bursa and Edirne. Among the photographer’s other books are Vietnam: Spirits of the Earth, in which her images were accompanied by Frances Fitzgerald’s text, and Morocco: Sahara to the Sea, with an introduction by Paul Bowles.

INTERIOR DESIGN

Terry Wood’s Farmhouse Modern (Stewart, Tabori and Chang $45) is the third installment of the farmhouse-style series created by designer Woods and photographer Kindra Clineff. The book profi les farmhouses in the Northeast that blend traditional and modern elements. Fans of Woods’s previous books will recognize the breadth of farmhouses profi led and the locales, from Vermont to Maine to New Hampshire. Known for celebrating imperfections, Woods designs homes fi lled with warmth, texture, and light, pairing the clean lines and industrial feel of modern design with the rustic, hand-forged, and natural elements of more traditional design, or, as a notice in atHome magazine puts it, “The gorgeous Northeast farmhouses ... blend a traditional, cozy feel with modern elements.”

THE LIBRARY AS ARCHITECTURE 

What better way to conclude a column celebrating beautiful books than with a volume devoted to the buildings that house them? The Library: A World History (University of Chicago Press $75) by James W.P. Campbell with photographs by Will Pryce, contains spectacular images of the architecture of libraries around the world, from the dome of the Library of Congress to the white façade of the Seinäjoki Library in Finland, to the ancient ruins of the library of Pergamum in modern Turkey, and back to the future for libraries in the Electronic Age.