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Review: 'Big Book' is for artful resolutions

A challenge to Collins: Put it online and add venues

By Porter Anderson
CNN

"The Collins Big Book of Art" was released on HarperCollins' Collins Design imprint on November 1.

'BIG BOOK OF ART'

Editor: David G. Wilkins

Collins Design

Art

528 pages

Review: In praise of 'Humble Masterpieces'

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(CNN) -- Take heart: 2006 can be different.

How many times in the past have you made a New Year resolution to see more art, learn all about it, broaden your cultural horizons? This year, for sure, you say, it's time to get beyond that childhood trip to England when, for once ("we're on vacation"), your family actually stepped into some museum and there was this really cool painting in which you could see somebody in the foreground through a mirror in the background ...

That was the National Gallery in London your family visited, on Trafalgar Square (you'll recall the pigeons, of course). And the painting you saw was Jan van Eyck's 1434 "Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife." It's thought that van Eyck himself may be one of the figures you see in that famous mirror's curved reflection.

But how are you supposed to know that? We're not all born curators, are we?

An imprint of HarperCollins called Collins Design has quite suddenly stepped into the artsy-resolutions vacuum with a perfectly timed release with a delightfully straightforward title, "The Collins Big Book of Art."

It's a big book. It's full of art. And it's informative in ways so many more essay-oriented fine-art surveys can never be.

That's not a swipe at the famous Janson franchise -- the late H.W. Janson and now his son Anthony have been revising the "History of Art" standard for decades (Prentice Hall, 6th Edition, 2004). And for good company, you can't beat Thomas Hoving, the former Metropolitan Museum of Art director, whose "Art for Dummies" (1999) is always a smarty's choice.

But in "Big Book," editor David G. Wilkins brings to the table the kind of sure-shot understanding of how to organize a compendium that can only have come from the years he's spent at the helm in the University of Pittsburgh's art and architecture program. He knows what you need to know and how to get you to it.

There are two great organizing themes waiting for you right up front, after you've been spooked by the snaky coiffure of Caravaggio's 1598-1599 "Medusa" and the antidote: the ravishing beauty of Agnolo Bronzino's 1551 "Portrait of Maria de' Medici."

"The Chronology of Art" is richly useful to our modern minds, which are so programmed to understand our world in time increments. It lets you zero in on a period, with a handy brief explainer, and get right to the page you need. Example: On page 236 you'll be in the 1800-1900 period when "The invention of photography changes the role of the artist, c. 1830."

"Themes in Art" -- on the facing page to the chronology -- is what you need if you're looking for a category. Take page 368, for example, where the theme is "The Body." You're about to learn that while art focused on the ideal male form comes from the classic Greek period and was revived by Renaissance artists Donatello and Michelangelo and others, the reclining-female tradition originated later, probably with another Renaissance master, Giorgione.

As Wilkins suggests in his neat, efficient introduction, use the book the way you'd like. Even self-indexing with Post-Its is perfectly appropriate.

And if you'll permit a certain bias here, so is news-indexing. Do you recall the report on CNN.com a couple of weeks ago about the theft of a Henry Moore sculpture in Hertfordshire? (Read the story from December 19)

Check the "Big Book" index and you'll find the image of another Moore "Reclining Figure" in the context of one of Wilkins' "Turning Point" essays, this one on how the 1930s arrival of psychoanalysis had an impact on many major artists. Here are Dali, Moore, Giacometti, Picasso. The "Big Book" has intelligently cross-referenced you right into a quick study of one type and period of work, starting with a news story and rooting you in the chronological and thematic ties that relate to it.

Resolutions for Collins

A sample page from "The Big Book of Art" illustrates the layout of the book with its useful timeline of artworks running along the tops of pages.

The "Big Book" has more than 1,000 images and reproduction is quite good, always in color, sometimes taking a full page to show you a detail from a work. Lorenzetti's charming "The Effects of Good Government in the City" is printed over a page and a half so you can properly appreciate the neighborly ideal recommended by the artist in the late 1330s. Even the horses are beautifully civil.

So what could make the "Big Book" better? Two things, and it's a pleasure to challenge Collins Design to look into both of them.

First, the only real disappointment of this book is that in using the mighty Scala Group Picture Library's 60,000-image archive as its source, the book's high-quality images are presented without a note as to where each piece is held. Some are in private collections, of course, but it would be a huge enhancement if, when planning your next trip, you could find in the "Big Book" which pieces you could see while in Paris or Los Angeles or Rome. So perhaps in an upcoming edition, that information could be added.

Second, the "Big Book" should be online. The good people at Collins certainly have the resources to do at the very least a CD-ROM version. But what's really wanted is a regularly updating online version of the book -- password protected, of course. The advantages are an incalculable leap in search capacity and the speed, luminosity and accessibility that online formats offer.

(Think of it: While in London before leaving your hotel for the National Gallery, you could access your "Big Book" online to be sure you had the right van Eyck in mind. Amaze your docent: Ask her if "Arnolfini and His Wife" is on display and tell her you've always thought 1434 was a special year, what with oil painting coming into its own.)

"The Collins Big Book of Art" is probably about as effective a hard-copy print edition as you'll see. (Moreover, at $39.95, it's a bargain.) It's a boon to anyone whose resolutions this year include the kind of cultural upgrade that opens the mind, injects perspective and reminds us, time and again, that great talents have been working to understand and talk to us about our lives for millennia.

With luck, HarperCollins may accept as its own 2006 resolution, a determination to take Wilkins' valuable overview -- "From Cave Art to Pop Art," as the subtitle has it -- from the printing press to the electronic sphere.

If Collins Design accepts the challenge, the "Big Book" could become "The Book of Art" for a world that now knows all art is data. Gorgeous, ingenious, powerful data.

Happy New Year.

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