GIFT BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS

THE ARTS OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC by Jean Guiart. 461 pages. Golden Press. $25. This is Volume IV of the extraordinary "museum without walls" proposed by Andre Malraux and sponsored by the French government, which will eventually run to 40 volumes encompassing the whole of man's arts. Lavish in its illustrations, the present volume catches all the expressive, primitive power of Oceanic art while detailing its surprising variety and the age-old magic, mythic and ritualistic impulses that fostered it. A reader pondering its carved canoes and implements, its funerary and fertility figures and its grotesquely surrealistic ceremonial masks will catch more than a glimmering of what astounded and enthralled the eyes of great artists as different as Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Brancusi and Matisse.

ANIMALS IN AFRICA by Peter and Philippa Scott. 166 pages. Clarkson N. Potter. $12.50, and ANIMAL WORLDS by Marston Bates. 316 pages. Random House. $15. These volumes provide the armchair naturalist with some of the year's best animal photographs and the best substitute for a safari he is likely to find anywhere. Animals in Africa brings its lens to bear on all manner of African fauna, from elephants lumbering through the bush with ears spread like spinnakers to a striped chameleon inching its way into the center of a hibiscus flower. Animal Worlds, with photographs by Ylla, Fritz Goro, Eliot Porter and others, pursues fish, bird, insect and animal life from the tropics to the Arctic, with a text that makes their various worlds admirably clear.

THE BOOK OF THE AMERICAN WEST edited by Jay Monaghan. 608 pages. Julian Messner. $22.50. On the theory that, despite the efforts of television, there are still a few Americans who would not know a waddy (cowboy) from his gelding-smacker (saddle), this volume ranges over the life of the West, devoting whole chapters to its outlaws, reptiles, guns, big game, songs and legends. The text is informative, the paintings and drawings, by Remington, Bierstadt, Russell and others, are splendidly direct and realistic, and much of what a reader might have taken for shaggy Western lore turns out surprisingly to be unvarnished truth.

BEN SHAHN: PAINTINGS and BEN SHAHN: HIS GRAPHIC ART edited by James Thrall Soby. 2 volumes; 286 pages. Braziller. $25. With 96 reproductions of Shahn's paintings and more than a hundred reproductions of his drawings, the disturbing power of Shahn's lonely visions is apparent--in wiry filaments of sparse, nervous lines, in the awkward bulk of bodies out of their element, in chalky faces whose sad eyes peer from sooty sockets. The effect, as in all Shahn's work, is of gritty reality viewed through the distorting lens of a dream.

GREAT DRAWINGS OF THE MASTERS by Dr. Rolf Haensler. 234 pages. Putnam. $25, and ITALIAN DRAWINGS by Winslow Ames. 141 pages. Shorewood. $4.95. Drawing, it has been remarked, is the art of omission, and these two fine volumes display the art--and the inner workings of genius--at its highest. Great Drawings travels from 15th century Painter Jan Van Eyck's warm and perceptive silverpoint, Portrait of Cardinal Niccolo Albergati, to the sensual shorthand of Matisse's Female Nude from the Back. Italian Drawings, more modest in scope and quality of reproduction, restricts itself to the 15th to 19th centuries. The subjects in both books range from rustic landscapes to architectural fantasies, from figure studies to exquisite faces.

HEAD HUNTERS OF PAPUA by Tony Saulnier. 309 pages. Crown. $7.50. A fascinating account of the progress of a French photographic expedition across the unmapped waist of Dutch New Guinea. The trip, through nightmarish forests and mountain ranges, took six months and yielded the first photographic record of a people frozen in a way of life that began far back in prehistory.

THE AGE OF NAPOLEON by J. Christopher Herold. 420 pages. American Heritage. $18.95. Volumes as heavily freighted with plates, maps and other cargo as this one have a way of scanting facts for four-color fanfares. This is a welcome exception. The text is both sound and readable, and the 300-odd illustrations, most of them by contemporaries of Napoleon, serve quite magnificently to convey the age's arts, manners and personalities to the eye and mind of a reader.

SELF PORTRAITS by Manuel Gasser. 302 pages. Appleton-Century. $12.95. For four centuries it has been an unwritten law that an artist must look himself straight in the eye at least once in his lifetime and paint what he sees. This collection does not reproduce the artists' visions with particular distinction, but it is a comprehensive survey of the self-conscious art from Masaccio (1401-28) to Joan Miro and his grotesquely purple Self-Portrait of 1938. The lesson of the book is that a true painter always reveals more of himself than he knows--or perhaps wishes to. Rembrandt, the most prolific of all self-portraitists, paints himself at 60, his face crumpled in laughter but the eyes full of an old man's sadness. Van Gogh shows himself looking with slanted, anxious eyes at a world unfriendly and impossible to understand. And in perhaps the most macabre self-portrait ever painted, Caravaggio places his own horror-creased face on the severed head of the slain Goliath.

NEW YORK LANDMARKS edited by Alan Burnham. 430 pages. Wesleyan University. $12.50. A photographic survey of the architecturally and historically distinguished buildings of New York as selected by the little band of devout New Yorkers known as the Municipal Art Society. The book's 100-odd photographs, notes Brendan Gill in his foreword, constitute a "veritable Kama Sutra, or manual of instruction, in the wooing of this incomparable city." They also provide a fascinating guide to the paroxysms of borrowed styles--Greek revival, Gothic, Georgian, Italian Renaissance--that afflicted and sometimes ornamented all U.S. cities before they finally achieved in the skyscraper an architectural statement of their own.

VANISHED CIVILIZATIONS edited by Edward Bacon. 360 pages. McGraw-Hill. $28.50. Bolstered by 802 illustrations and 52 maps and charts, a dozen archaeologists ponder the mysteries of a dozen lost civilizations. Among them: the strange, illiterate people on the Nubian Nile known to archaeologists as the "X-Group" (circa A.D. 200-500), who filled their tombs not only "with human and animal sacrifices that reveal barbarism at its most primitive" but also with treasures from Rome, Egypt and Greece; the civilization centered about the great stone city of Zimbabwe in Southern Rhodesia; the white Ainu civilization of northern Japan, of which there are some 14,000 modern survivors. The narrative for the most part is clear and concise, and the best of the accounts marshal their clues and render their conclusions with all the drama and unpredictability of fine detective fiction.

THE ALPS by Wilfrid Noyce. 312 pages. Putnam. $15. An uninspired text is here compensated for by a rich collection of more than 200 stunning pictures that catch much of the dreamlike immensity and the white silence of the high alpine landscape a tourist rarely sees.

A LIFE IN PHOTOGRAPHY by Edward Steichen. 280 pages. Doubleday. $19.50. At 84, the great photographer pauses to tell his life story in text and pictures that are marvels of technique, economy and emotion. From the first Lincolnesque self-portrait, an 1898 platinum print, through the Vogue and Vanity Fair period to the late experiments in color, Steichen retained an uncanny ability to draw the mysteries of character and the spare logic of forms into his lens. The range of his interests is extraordinary: formal, friezelike fashion photographs, misty pastorals, portraits quick with feeling, and war pictures that include one of the most moving ever shot--four fingers thrusting like withered spears of grass through the rubble-strewn soil of Iwo Jima.

RODIN by Albert E. Elsen. 228 pages. The Museum of Modern Art. $8.50. With Rodin, Sculptor Constantin Brancusi once noted, "sculpture became human again." Rodin's revolt against the academic tradition was measured in the bones, muscles and ligaments of his favorite subject--the human body. Albert Elsen's excellent study, the most detailed of its kind in English, traces the progress of that revolt from the smooth academic marbles (Loving Thoughts, The Rose, Field Flowers) through those two tradition-shattering bronzes, The Age of Bronze and St. John the Baptist Preaching, to that masterpiece of Rodin maturity, the knotted nude study of Balzac, spread-eagled in a wrestler's stance. The fine illustrations include partial figures and fragments rarely photographed.

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