New York's Finest

Five of the best new books from Big Apple museums.

by Robin Rice

Edward Hopper: A Journal of His Work

By Deborah Lyons, with essays by Lyons and Brian O'Doherty

Whitney Museum of American Art in association with W.W. Norton & Co, 105 p.,$25

		Edward Hopper's wife forced him to inscribe all nude drawings "To my wife, Jo."

Virtually every page of this unique book reproduces a page from a series of ledgers kept by Jo Hopper (Josephine Nivison Hopper), the wife of painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Jo, with the help of E.H., as she calls him in the ledger, documented every painting Hopper did in his professional career: its subject, exhibition dates and sales. Each was sketched by Hopper. The drawings in the later notebooks are superb distillations of his compositions into black and white.

Brian O'Doherty, who knew the Hoppers, contributed an introductory essay in which he describes Jo as "a woman of considerable complexity and several personae (there was a 'good' Josephine and a 'bad' Josephine ...)." Her habit of forcing Hopper to inscribe all nude drawings "To my wife, Jo" is well-known. The oddest thing about Hopper's collaboration in the ledger enterprise is the fact that he kept separate notebooks in which he recorded the same information in a more abbreviated format. Why? We'll never know. To fully appreciate this book, one must learn to decipher Jo Hopper's handwriting. It's curly but clear; however, only the most dedicated Hopper enthusiast will be up to it. Still, the drawings are amazing.

 

Twelve Centuries of Japanese Art from the Imperial Collections

Edited by Lynne Shaner, introduction by Ann Yonemura

Smithsonian Institution, 224 p., $65

		The Tale of Genji

As an introduction to Japanese art or for the more experienced student, Japanese Art from the Imperial Collections is a book to be savored. It marks the occasion of a unique exhibition of the finest calligraphy and painting drawn from the collections of the Imperial Household and the Imperial Household Agency at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. Some of these works are often available to the public at the Museum of the Imperial Collections in Tokyo, but the spectacular exhibition which closed March 8 is not traveling to any other venue in the United States.

A brief essay by one of several scholars accompanies each item, a format I find particularly seductive. Seven imperial poems, six by emperors and one by an honorary retired emperor, all from the Heian period (794-1185), all mounted on a single scroll are among the exceptionally rare and beautiful examples.

Paintings include portraits, illustrations of the Tales of Genji (for which metallic gold print would be a plus), maps of the world with depictions of its inhabitants reflecting the European baroque and mannerist styles, splendid renderings of horses and riders and many wonderful scenes of birds, animals, plants and seasonal evocations. Katsushika Hokusai's long vertical painting of Drying Watermelon Rind (1839) is both graceful and menacing, with twisting streamers of rind suspended above a halved melon covered with a black knife and a sheet of sheer cloth through which rosy flesh gleams.

Yamaguchi Hoshun's recent The Nachi Shrine of Kumano (1926) depicts not only a panoramic landscape of the sea, mountains, a waterfall and many buildings; it magically describes the time span of an entire day.

 

Fernand Léger at the Museum of Modern Art

By Carolyn Lanchner

Museum of Modern Art, 304 p., $60

Sometimes one is almost tempted to think of Fernand Léger as American. Aside from Duchamp, no European artist of his generation had such a gusto for this country of "unbelievable vitality" (his words). The catalogue to the Léger exhibition currently at the Museum of Modern Art (through May 12) is full of excellent color reproductions documenting the artist's love affair with cubism and enduring affection for the machine.

No doubt Léger's belief in the utopian power of machines fueled his interest in cubism (and America). Of the cubists, he is the most consistent in seeking and finding geometric chunks of stuff which he arranges with attention to scale so they become a veritable landslide of boulders, rocks and pebbles—all in motion.

Léger's later manner is more lyrical, with an odd emphatic line freed from color shapes. But it is still a celebration of the mechanical. Even in robotic figure compositions we see the neon sign and the steel girders of nascent skyscrapers. Léger's vitality was equal to America's.

 

Alvar Aalto: Between Humanism and Materialism

By Peter Reed

Museum of Modern Art, 320 p., $55

"Architecture cannot save the world, but it may serve as a good example," wrote Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976). Aalto's centenary is being celebrated through May 19 with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, where his work was exhibited in the museum's first exhibition of architecture in 1938.

Modernist architecture was well received in Finland because it united the avant-garde elite with the peasant design tradition of simplicity and frugality. Aalto is noted for putting machines and modular elements at the service of a humanist sensibility. For example, he spoke out against the tubular steel used in one of Marcel Breuer's famous chairs, saying (among other things), "A piece that comes into the most intimate contact with man, as a chair does, shouldn't be constructed of materials that are excessively good conductors of heat."

His experiences as a hospital patient influenced his design of the Paimio Tuberculosis Sanatorium. Making the patient rather than the staff the focus of his design, he eliminated ceiling lights which would glare into the eyes of the bedridden and arranged for warm air to blow on their feet.

Still, functionalism has a say: to contemporary eyes, an auditorium (Viipuri City Library) filled with backless round stools, no matter how elegantly stackable they are, seems harsh and inhumane.

The many elevations and plans will be of most interest to serious architecture buffs.

 

Paul Strand Circa 1916

By Maria Morris Hambourg

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 192 p., $55

The Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of Paul Strand's early mature photographs opened just a few weeks ago and will continue through May. The show and its catalogue make a relatively obscure part of this noted photographer's work available.

Although he began as a dreamy pictorialist, Strand was deeply influenced by the modernism he encountered in Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery and later in the Armory Show. He photographed still-lifes of crockery and fruit in a raw and abstracted manner influenced by the cubists—though his platinum prints are always meticulous. He traveled America documenting urban crowds scurrying from under the angled shadows of tall buildings, twisted telegraph poles in flat rural Texas and the abstract angle of a roof against a pale cloud-ruffled sky.

Strand also photographed the poor in a direct, unvarnished style that predates Dorothea Lange and is somehow more disturbing in its acceptance of the unacceptable. The photographs are beautifully reproduced on soft, thick, oversize pages, usually with no print on the reverse side. Strand's manner as documented here ended when he was inducted into the Army in 1918. Though he did not fight, he returned from the war (as many did) less optimistic, less daring, but still (unlike most) a great photographer.