Old and Other Masters

The renowned 11th-century Japanese literary masterpiece is receiving great attention these days (see PW Interview, Aug. 20). Here it is paid elegant tribute in The Tale of Genji: Paintings and Legends, introduced by Miyeko Murase (Bridge of Dreams), professor emerita at Columbia University and research curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Murasaki Shikibu, a 30-year-old woman, wrote the story in 54 chapters made up of 795 31-syllable poems; the full English translation exceeds 1,000 pages. The tale has captivated Japanese artists and has been rendered, variously and often, over the centuries. Murase presents one of the most famous series of paintings, called the Burke albums, initially attributed to the 17th-century master Tosa Mitsuoki, though Miyase finds reason to believe the series is the work of an anonymous painter of the Tosa school. The delicate, gold-inked illustrations (one for each chapter) appear alongside a summarized version of the story. Murase's excellent, accessible scholarship will give readers a deeper understanding of traditional Japanese painting. (Braziller, $45 144p ISBN 0-8076-1500-5; Sept.)

Accompanying an exhibit at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, edited by Nadine M. Orenstein, features the lesser known works of this famous 16th-century Flemish artist. In the introduction and essays, seven scholars, including museum director Philippe de Montebello, Manfred Sellink, Michiel C. Plomp and the editor, explore diverse biographical and artistic craft issues—e.g., all that is known for certain of Bruegel's life is that, though he painted peasants, and early biographers dubbed him the " 'Peasant Bruegel,'" he was in fact an urban intellectual. The exhibit treats these drawings in a new light thanks to the "transformative insight" of the late Hans Mielke—i.e., new attributions to Bruegel or his circle, such as a sketch formerly attributed to Hieronymous Bosch. The book features 274 illustrations (108 in color): Bruegel's 54 works alongside works by his colleagues, predecessors and successors. (Metropolitan Museum of Art [Yale Univ., dist.], $60 336p ISBN 0-300-09014-5; Sept.)

Sensitive American impressionist, major watercolorist, fauvist, dynamic landscape artist, acute and compassionate portrait painter: Alice Schille (1869—1955) held all those distinctions in her long career, adding to her various styles an impressive sense of speed, pale shades and bright curves. With 185 color and 34 b&w images, Alice Schille—companion for an exhibit at the Canton (Ohio) Museum of Art—provides an opportunity to view the Schille oeuvre in all its significant phases: fans of Mary Cassatt or of Walter Sickert will never be the same. William H. Gerdts, professor emeritus of art history at the City University of New York, covers both the life and the paintings in cogent, informed prose. (Hudson Hills, $50 216p ISBN 1-55595-181-3; Sept.)

Smile on Your Brother

Nudists, rural communes, urban wanderers, antiwar rallies, meditation, Rastas and the Jefferson Airplane: all made big news in the 1960s and early 1970s, and all turn up in I and Eye: Pictures of My Generation, a visually enticing memoir from photographer Peter Simon (Reggae Bloodlines; Playing in the Band). Simon (brother of singer Carly) documents with text and color photos his own youth and coming of age, his role in the free (nude) beach movement, his time with guru Ram Dass and (most affectingly) his trips to Jamaica. Later chapters cover key segments of Simon's later adult life, among them the 1979 No Nukes rock festival, the beauty of Martha's Vineyard and the ups and downs of the New York Mets. (Little, Brown/Bulfinch, $45 224p ISBN 0-8212-2645-2; Oct.)

Writer Frederick I. Ordway III worked with Werner von Braun in the early days of NASA; he also spent decades collecting pictures, paintings and diagrams of space voyages, real or imagined. With hundreds of big images in glossy color, Visions of Spaceflight: Images from the Ordway Collection makes available Ordway's hoard. Etchings of 18th-century trips to the moon, with great vultures and giant balloons, dominate one section; another includes a cover from the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (1934). Collectors may love the sometimes garish rockets and grinning spacemen from the 1950s periodicals Colliers and This Week. Arthur C. Clarke provides a one-page foreword. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $50 176p ISBN 1-56858-181-5; Oct.)

Unexpectedly, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, head of the occupying forces in postwar Japan, was met with abundant respect there. In fact, respect is one of the milder attitudes and emotions in evidence in Dear General MacArthur: Letters from the Japanese during the American Occupation, assembled and annotated by Sodei Rinjiro, MacArthur biographer and professor emeritus at Hosei University, Tokyo. Letters of gratitude for kindnesses to POWs, for replenishing the fishing industry, for being "able to live in peace"; requests to repatriate families from overseas and to refrain from trying the emperor; reports of anti-U.S. sentiment; and heaps of gifts, including many likenesses of the general, are among the hundreds of adoring communications in the book. Less congratulatory letters were scarce, but one Hiroshima resident, for instance, sent her book about the bomb's effects (published in 1949, after the U.S. relaxed the ban on such materials). This fascinating book is ideal for cultural studies curricula. 30 b&w photos. (Rowman & Littlefield [NBN, dist.], $29.95 340p ISBN 0-7425-1115-4; Sept.)

An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes (and What Happened Afterwards) usefully gathers together two of Andrei Codrescu's earlier memoirs, the 1975 Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius and the 1983 In America's Shoes, along with a new preface and afterword. The earlier memoir is much the best, telling with enormous verve the Algeresque story of how little Andrei Perlmutter, a bright kid growing up in the Stalinist backwater of 1950s Romania, manages to vault himself into the heart of '60s American counterculture as Andrei Codrescu, Transylvanian exotic and man of letters. The second volume is the work of one a little older and wiser, and is a more sober and digressive account. But together the books provide not only a self-portrait of the future poet, travel writer, NPR broadcaster and vampire novelist but a thumbnail history of recent American literary bohemia. (Black Sparrow, $30 400p ISBN 1-57423-160-X; Sept.)

Lights, Camera, Action Painting

Though abstract expressionists made a cult of drip and brushstroke, many of them also created beautiful, strange and energetic prints. A spectacular accompaniment to an exhibit at the Worcester (Mass.) Museum of Art, The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints presents 100 such prints from dozens of artists, among them De Kooning, Frankenthaler, Gottlieb and Kline. Curator David Acton not only introduces the collection but writes at length about each print. Composer David Amram and poet-critic David Lehman add essays about these artists' links to music and poetry. 109 color plates, 43 b&w. (Hudson Hills, $65 296p ISBN 1-55595-213-5; Oct.)

Invitingly quirky and rich in subtle hues, the landscapes and other canvases of Milton Avery (1885—1965) made him America's closest approach to Matisse. Avery's 1982 retrospective drew crowds and rave reviews, but his reputation has fallen: Was he too pretty? Was he apolitical? Milton Avery: The Late Paintings aims to restore his prestige, with big, handsome plates of his work (87 images, 52 in color). Intelligent text by curator Robert Hobbs links Avery's oeuvre to 1950s trends, to über-critic Clement Greenberg and to the poet Wallace Stevens; Hobbs also reprints Greenberg's own essay on Avery. The corresponding exhibit arrives at the Milwaukee Art Museum in November, and then moves to West Palm Beach, Fla. (Abrams, $35 112p ISBN 0-8109-4274-7; Oct.)

In 1933, fledgling photographer Walker Evans was asked to make photographs of Cuban society for radical journalist Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba, an exposé about Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado's corruption and Cuba's exploitation by the US. In Walker Evans: Cuba, from the collection at the Getty Museum, the 73 images of people, urban landscapes and Cuban business-as-usual seem influenced by Diego Rivera's politicized content, Hemingway's "stripped down, minimal style" and the "characteristic emptiness" of Eugene Atget's photography, says the Getty's Associate Curator Judith Keller in her introduction. This portrait of pre-Castro Cuba reminds viewers that Cuba has experienced social strife since early on, and that Cuban-U.S. relations have long been problematic. Poet and novelist Andrei Codrescu's essay investigates Evans's artistic and political sensibilities at this early point in his career, and the entrenched complexities of the country he attempted to represent. (Getty, $24.95 96p ISBN 0-89236-617-6; Sept.)

Photographer Joel Sternfeld turns his exacting eye to American faces, social classes, character types and stereotypes in Stranger Passing. Sternfeld—who wowed critics in 1987 with American Prospects—devotes a remarkable (and remarkably large) volume to 60 hard-edged, full-color studies of individuals from Manhattan to Malibu, Austin, Texas to Appalachia, in candids and portraits by turns comic, disturbing, angry, pathetic and silly. A surprised lawyer struggles with bundles of laundry; a lumberjack shows off his truck, his logs and his belly button; and "two men on vacation in Bigfoot, Montana" smile through big mustaches at their tiny dog. Journalist Ian Frazier (On the Rez) and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Douglas R. Nickel contribute short essays. (Little, Brown/Bulfinch, $50 144p ISBN 0-8212-2752-1; Sept.)

From early, career-establishing Vogue magazine work like The Spilled Handbag (Theatre Accident) of 1947 through his images of bones and other detritus (Bone Landscape, 1980) to his recent pictures of cuttlefish, Irving Penn has masterfully evinced the secret lives of objects. Ninety-eight of Penn's greatest images (45 color, 50 tritone, 3 duotone) are assembled in Still Life, a publication personally supervised by the artist. Still making funny, strange and lovely editorial photographs for Vogue and other magazines (an ant crawls on a melted Brie; a mannequin gazes out from under a bell jar), Penn also continues to experiment in his personal work: components of traditional still-life paintings like skulls, fish, paintbrushes and dice, for instance, arranged artfully and bizarrely, shot in black and white. (Little, Brown/Bulfinch, $85 144p ISBN 0-8212-2702-5; Sept. 7)