Cover to Cover

Art books is a term only a little slipperier than best of. It covers picture-rich volumes so heavy they can collapse a coffee table, slim meditations on theory and arcane limited editions published by artists themselves. For present purposes, it means more or less what pops into most people’s minds: nice-looking but substantial books about art. As for best of, the concept is wildly subjective, but suffice it to say that you shouldn’t miss any of the following.

Anselm Kiefer is an “important” living artist, in every sense of the word. He takes on big themes—the Holocaust and German guilt regarding it, the individual trapped in the mud slide of history, even mortality itself—in big ways: huge paintings clotted with bits of assemblage and sculpture. And he fetches big prices. So if anyone deserves a 10-pound coffee-table book with nearly 300 full-page color reproductions and a lead essay by Germano Celant, it’s Kiefer. Of course, Anselm Kiefer (Skira, $100) is also the catalogue for the artist’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao, a show that ran for five months in 2007. I’m not the most passionate Kiefer fan; his physically confrontational but beigely tasteful paintings would go nicely in any upscale modern furniture store that could find room for them. But the book does convey the sense of a complete modern and postmodern artist who can, as they say in sports, really bring it.

Not all artists with prodigious talents, however, require heavy lifting. The 18th-century draftsman and polymath Gabriel de Saint-Aubin is a good example. He could draw like a bandit and tackled everything from a life-size design for a pocket watch festooned with relief sculpture to a swirling depiction of General Pompey’s triumphant return to Rome in 61 b.c. The current Frick Collection exhibition of Saint-Aubin has yielded Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, 1724–1780 (the Frick Collection, in association with Somogy and Musee du Louvre editions, $60), a model of scholarship as well as a deeply gorgeous catalogue. Suzanne Folds McCullagh’s essay on the artist’s techniques and influences, in particular, matches the precision and impact of the reproductions.

About 200 years after Saint-Aubin, and across the Atlantic, another artist also worked as an illustrator to pay the bills but eventually acquired a reputation as a painter that allowed him, for most of his professional life, just to paint. Edward Hopper (1882–1967) was six feet seven inches tall and would be played in a Hollywood biopic by former senator Fred Thompson. But Hopper, too, had knowledge that ranged far beyond the studio and the palette. Walter Wells, author of Silent Theater: The Art of Edward Hopper (Phaidon, $70), calls him “among the best read of painters,” producer of a “formidable body of what feels very much like visual literature.” Despite the accessibility of Hopper’s work, he’s often seen as supremely alienated. Wells, a professor emeritus of American studies who now lives in London and has no particular art-historical credentials (sometimes an advantage for art writers), emphasizes the alienation aspect, labeling Hopper a “dour creator of suspended dreams.”

Personally, I’m a little alienated from the alienation focus. Perhaps because I’m a painter myself, what I see first in Hopper are his wonderful, often witty, sometimes joyous solutions to formal problems. That’s why, in spite of the indisputable quality of Wells’s prose, I’m more attracted to Edward Hopper (MFA Publications, $65), the catalogue of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ retrospective, with essays by curator Carol Troyen and four others. Similar to Wells’s book in size and lavish production but unlike it in taking a more common-sense approach without seeming bowdlerized, Edward Hopper complements the professor’s volume, serving as a less-psychological pendant. Another benefit of owning both works is seeing the astonishing difference in reproductions. The ones in Silent Theater are noticeably darker and bluer than those in the MFA catalogue, with the ink seeming to have bled a minimillimeter into infinitesimally less slick paper stock.