Books February March 2001 BOOKS / EXHIBITION CATALOGUES / VIDEO Shaker Life, Art, and Architecture: Hands to Work, Hearts to God Metall Design International 2000 The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox Miró: Playing with Fire Modern Pots—Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and their Contemporaries: The Lisa Sainsbury Collection World Ceramics: From Prehistoric to Modern Times Musical Instruments: Traditions and Craftsmanship from Prehistory to the Present American Modern 1924-1940: Design for a New Age Design for Living: Furniture and Lighting 1950-2000 Made in California: Art, Image and Identity 1900-2000 Appearance & Reality: A Visual Handbook for Artists, Designers, and Makers Fantasy Worlds
	TOP Shaker Life, Art, and Architecture: Hands to Work, Hearts to God by Scott T. Swank, 1999, Abbeville Press, New York, NY, 800-278-2665; 240 pages, notes, chronology, photographs by Bill Finney. $60. This splendidly illustrated study explores Shaker art, architecture and design in the context of the daily lives, beliefs, and behavior patterns of the religious community. Scott T. Swank, a historian and is director of Canterbury Shaker Village, in New Hampshire, now a National Historic Landmark site, suggests that Shaker design cannot be fully understood in 20th-century stylistic terms, because it is primarily an expression of the larger social structure of Shaker order, which in its emphasis on communal solidarity and de-emphasis on the individual seemed to challenge the American values of individual expression and achievement. Through the diaries, letters, maps and old pictures of this one community, which remained prominent for 200 years, Swank brings to life the legacy behind Shaker objects, so highly esteemed in our time for their craftsmanship, sense of proportion and simplicity. "Perhaps the essence of Shaker achievement in art and architecture," Swank writes, "lies in the process of creating a spirit-filled village plan, in which the Shakers differentiated raw space with a set of distinctive visual codes in service of their belief system."
	TOP Metall Design International 2000 by Peter Elgass, 2000, Hephaistos, Werdenstein, Immenstadt, Germany, distributed by Centaur Forge Ltd., Burlington, WI, 414-763-9175; 231 pages, text in German and English, illustrated. $45. Compiled by Peter Elgass, the editor of Hephaistos, a bimonthly German magazine covering metal craft in Europe and internationally, this yearbook presents the varied work of eight blacksmiths: Klaus Dommers, Manfred Bredohl, Paul Zimmermann and Alfred Bullermann (Germany), Hans Tritscher (Austria), Vladimir Sokhonevitch (Russia), Giovanni Zeppieri (Italy) and Tom Joyce (United States). The handsome black-and-white photographs of their work are accompanied by biographies and descriptions of their technical and philosophical approaches. The book is the second in an annual series beginning with Metall Design International 1999 (available, $42).
	TOP The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox by Kenji Ekuan, edited by David B. Stewart, 1998 (reprint edition 2000), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 800-356-0343; 195 pages, illustrated. $21.95 paperback. The makunouchi bento, or traditional Japanese lunchbox, is a highly lacquered wooden box divided into four equal compartments, each containing an artfully arranged cluster of delicacies. The diner can gaze with pleasure on the contents, while savoring the food. Reading the lunchbox as object and metaphor, Kenji Ekuan, a Japanese industrial designer, uses its formal beauty as a key to understanding the Japanese way of making things. He explains how this "etiquette of form" is also to be found in such contemporary Japanese products as mini-calculators and cars, as well as in Buddhist altars and teahouses. "The spirit of form exemplified in the Japanese lunchbox," Ekuan writes, "points to an ingenious technology that will help preserve a rich legacy for the future." He dedicated this account of how design intersects with everyday life to the late American industrial designer Arthur Pulos.
	TOP Miró: Playing with Fire edited by Ann McPherson, 2000, George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, Toronto, Canada, 416-586-8080; 120 pages, essays by McPherson, Joan Punyet Miró, Joan Gardy Artigas, Edward Lebow et al., illustrated. $26.95 paperback. During his long career, the renowned Catalan painter Joan Miró devoted himself periodically to clay, usually in collaboration with the ceramist Josep Llorens Artigas, also from Barcelona. Nearly 60 examples of their free, idiosyncratic forms, most produced in the 1940s and 50s and many bearing the fantastical imagery familiar in Miró's paintings, are presented in this catalog of a show recently at the museum. Joan Gardy Artigas, the ceramist's son and collaborator with Miró on several works, sheds light on the latter's singular approach to the medium, Anne McPherson outlines the development of his ceramic oeuvre and analyzes his visual vocabulary, and Edward Lebow discusses the profound impact that the Miró/Artigas work had on the American ceramic movement emerging in the 1950s.
	TOP Modern Pots—Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and their Contemporaries: The Lisa Sainsbury Collection by Cyril Frankel, 2000, University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, distributed by Antique Collectors' Club, Wappingers Falls, NY, 914-297-0003; 240 pages, photographs by James Austin. $75. One of the preeminent British collections of ceramics is that of Lisa Sainsbury, who, with her husband, Sir Robert Sainsbury, began purchasing the pots of Lucie Rie in the 1950s. The couple's friendship with Rie led to their acquisition, in 1983, of 43 works by Hans Coper, Rie's colleague and fellow emigrČ to England from Central Europe. Lisa Sainsbury also collected works by Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada and Janet Leach, by Rie and Coper's students—Ian Godfrey , Ewen Henderson, John Ward and others—and by younger potters who seem to share the pristine aesthetic of the two masters. In this elegant book, Cyril Frankel tells the story of the collection (now at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia), recounts the lives of Rie and Coper, and sketches in the careers of the other artists.
	TOP World Ceramics: From Prehistoric to Modern Times by Hugo and Marjorie Munsterberg, 1998, Penguin Putnam, New York, NY, 212-366-2000; 191 pages, illustrated. $45. This survey is broad, though not encyclopedic. Rather, the authors deal with ceramics as a major form of artistic expression by presenting masterworks of civilizations past and present all over the world, drawing primarily on museum collections in the United States and Great Britain. The book was begun by Hugo Munsterberg, a specialist in Asian art who died in 1995, and completed by his daughter, Marjorie Munsterberg, who contributed material on African art and an epilogue on postwar American ceramics, in which some 15 major artists are represented.
	TOP Musical Instruments: Traditions and Craftsmanship from Prehistory to the Present by Lucie Rault, 2000, Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 800-345-1359; 232 pages, illustrated. $60. In an approach "more intuitive than scholarly, more instinctive than methodical," Lucie Rault, who heads the ethnomusicology department at the MusČe de l'Homme in Paris, traces the evolution of musical instruments and discusses their contribution to cultures around the world. Among the variety of instruments portrayed in excellent photographs are dung-chen, gigantic telescopic trumpets played by monks in Tibet, a richly decorated tar lute from Iran, an array of gongs, bells and drums from Asia and Africa, and amusingly anthropomorphic harps and sound boxes. Many photographs focus on handcraft—the making of bamboo pan-pipes in the Solomon Islands, for example, or a violin under construction in a workshop in Cremona, Italy, home of the Stradivarius. There are also depictions of musical instruments in art, from the mouth-held bow in prehistoric cave paintings to fourth-century Roman mosaics of Orpheus and his lyre, to violins in the paintings of Marc Chagall and Juan Gris.
	TOP American Modern 1924-1940: Design for a New Age by J. Stewart Johnson, 2000, Harry N. Abrams, New York, NY, 800-345-1359, in association with the American Federation of Arts; 232 pages, illustrated. $60. Sleek cocktail shakers by Norman Bel Geddes, colorful and curving dinnerware by Russel Wright, "skyscraper" furniture by Paul Frankl, Henry Dreyfuss's "Big Ben" alarm clock, Donald Deskey's Bakelite and aluminum table, the Electrolux vacuum cleaner—these are some of the objects pictured in this catalog of an exhibition recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The more than 150 works in all media by some 50 designers are drawn from the Met's modern design collection and from the John C. Waddell Collection, a promised gift to the museum. In his essay, guest curator J. Stewart Johnson traces the emergence, even before mid-20th century, of an unmistakably American design aesthetic, distinct from the contemporary Modernist design movements in France, Germany and Scandinavia. The exhibition will tour under the auspices of AFA to Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (May 25-August 19), and other venues through 2002.
	TOP Design for Living: Furniture and Lighting 1950-2000 by David A. Hanks and Anne Hoy, edited by Martin Eidelberg, 2000, Flammarion, Paris and New York, and Montreal Museum of Decorative Arts/Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada distributed by Abbeville Press, 800-278-2665; 240 pages, illustrated. $50. From "Good Design" and traditional Modernism to Pop Art, Postmodernism and current preoccupations with ecology, pluralism and spiritualism, this lively book surveys the last 50 years of design through 130 examples of furniture and lighting׫one-of-a-kind and mass produced—by international designers and architects, in the Liliane and David M. Stewart Collection of the Montreal museums. The entries on each object profile the design process and the designer, while other illustrations show these works in their period settings. Among the icons are George Nelson's Marshmallow sofa, Charles and Ray Eames's plywood and metal storage units and classic chairs, Frank O. Gehry's corrugated cardboard armchair and ottoman, and Gaetano Pesce's cartoonlike Polyurethane foam sofas and chairs. Among the more recent works is Chest of drawers: You Can't Lay Down Your Memories, composed of old drawers haphazardly bound together with a furniture mover's belt, by Tejo Remy of Droog, the Dutch design collective. It cleverly employs recycling in the service of nostalgic social comment, as does his hanging lamp of sandblasted milk bottles.
	TOP Made in California: Art, Image and Identity 1900-2000 by Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein, Ilene Susan Fort, 2000, Los Angeles Country Museum of Art, CA, in association with University of California Press, Berkeley, 510-643-5036; 351 pages, essays by Barron, Bernstein, Michael Dear, Howard N. Fox and Richard Rodriguez, illustrated. $65 hardcover, $34.95 paperback. California in the mind of America, particularly as expressed through the arts, is the rich subject of this catalog of a multipart exhibition at the museum through February 25 (section one, through March 18). It is divided into five 20-year periods, each with a historical essay characterizing the era and analyzing its visual culture. Among the persistent themes are landscape, natural and manmade, and the connections California has had with Latin America and Asia. The more than 400 illustrated artworks in a range of media are complemented by tourist brochures, posters and other ephemera. The inclusion in the last three sections of figures like Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Viola Frey, Sam Maloof, Stephen De Staebler, Gy–ngy Laky, Marvin Lipofsky, Lia Cook and others attests to the vital role California has played in the contemporary craft movement, and, conversely, to the role such artists have played in shaping the image of the state.
	TOP Appearance & Reality: A Visual Handbook for Artists, Designers, and Makers by Stephen Hogbin, 2000, Cambium Press, Bethel, CT, 800-238-7724; 192 pages, illustrated. $29.95 paperback. The author of Wood Turning: The Purpose of the Object (1980), Stephen Hogbin, a designer, artist and lecturer living in Canada, sets himself the task of explaining how to make sense of visual experience using the disciplines of art, technology, design and science. In addition to analyzing such fundamentals as composition, color, expression, and pattern, he addresses current concerns like the environment, cultural diversity, community and regionalism. His key ideas are illustrated with 44 contemporary works of art, design and craft by makers in four regions—California, Eastern Canada, Southern England and Australia.
	TOP Fantasy Worlds by Deidi von Schaewen and John Maizels, edited by Angelika Taschen, 1999, Taschen, New York, NY, 800-343-4499; 291 pages, text in English, French and German, photographs by von Schaewen. $39.99. "Visionary environments," a fascinating offshoot of what has come to be known as Outsider Art, or Art Brut, is the term now used to characterize architectural creations such as Ferdinand Cheval's Palais IdČal, near Lyon in France, a labyrinthine stone and concrete structure embellished with sculptures and encrusted with ornament, or Nek Chand Saini's 25-acre Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India, densely populated with sculptures out of recycled materials, or Simon Rodia's giant Watts Towers, of steel, concrete and broken objects, in Los Angeles. Such works, usually begun casually, became obsessions of their creators, resulting in decades of ceaseless labor, often a lifetime. In vivid photographs, this hefty volume presents 103 of these eccentric creations, from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. These include, in addition to those mentioned, Samuel Perry Dinsmoor's concrete Garden of Eden in Kansas, Robert Garcet's stone Tour de l'Apocalypse in Belgium and Karl Junker's carved wood Junkerhause in Germany. The addresses of sites open to the public are listed.
	TOP ARCHIVE Oct/Nov 2007 Aug/Sept 2007 June/July 2007 April/May 2007 February/March 2007 December/January 2007 October/November 2006 August/September 2006 June/July 2006 April/May 2006 February/March 2006 December 2005/January 2006 October/November 2005 August/September 2005 June/July 2005 April/May 2005 February/March 2005 December/January 2005 October/November 2004 August/September 2004 April/May/June/July 2004 February/March 2004 December 2003/January 2004 October/November 2003 August/September 2003 June/July 2003 April/May 2003 February/March 2003 December 2002/January 2003 October/November 2002 August/September 2002 June/July 2002 April/May 2002 February/March 2002 December 2001/January 2002 October/November 2001 August/September 2001 June/July 2001 April/May 2001 February/March 2001 December 2000/January 2001 October/November 2000