An Illuminated Coffee Table
The memory of art books
I am not entirely sure what an art book is, and the tautological solution, that it is a book with art in it, only stokes my uncertainty further.
During my senior year of college I spent many nights heaving art books from one shelf to another in the basement of the campus library. A professor emeritus, I believe someone at Berkeley, had died and willed his collection of art and design tomes our way. This donation was so massive it forced a sweeping reorganization of the basement art wing so that it could be shelved in its entirety. Old books that had not been checked out in decades were retired to the library archives by the cartful. It was archeological work, dusty and dry. The basement, lying at the bottom of an internal lightwell in the library, had the exact atmosphere of a dig site. I spent many shifts alone down there, sneezing and dry-eyed, sorting my way through Weimar Expressionism or mokuhanga.
Art books tend to be hardbound to protect the pages within from deforming on the shelf, and they also tend to be printed on thick, glossy paper, which is a good deal denser than whatever pulp stock goes into a Penguin. They are the heaviest genre in publishing. I never expected the library job to contribute much to my physique but by the end of this project I had, if not the shoulders of Michelangelo’s David, a good idea of how they could be obtained. As I worked, I trawled through enough of these books to substitute a summary course in art history. Breaks between one shelf and the next were passed by flipping through Carvaggio, Hokusai, Schiele. From books with deficient spines — old glue, frayed strings, stiff binding — there could fall any given masterwork. Some days Vermeer would land at my feet. Deep in this dust-pit, whole syllabi glowed round me. There was a good deal of esoterica down there as well — I remember encountering one morning Paolo Soleri’s architectural-ecological-utopian book of eschatology The Omega Seed. It was a glorious time – some of the most entertaining, enriching work I have ever done.
Many of these art books had their prices printed on the back cover. One could spend as much time staring at, and have the same reaction to, these little gold numbers as one had to Guernica. They depressed me. As I handled all these thrillingly dense books I naturally began to inculcating a desire to own them. More than once I fantasized about what could be euphemistically termed their “adoption,” especially that of the books doomed to archival. But I never carried through on that, never took off with a summary of 16th-century Italian architecture or anything. When the project ended, I went back to my usual shifts – walking laps through the stacks, manning the desk in the media collection. For years after I didn’t buy a single art book – not even a cheap one.
Quite frankly, I never understood why I should, either. I buy books for one of three reasons: I want to read them but cannot get them at the library, I intend to take notes on their pages, or I have good reason to believe I will love them and want them to be on hand at all times so that I may reread them whenever the urge strikes me.
Only this last reason can apply to art books. The first – that the book cannot be found at the library – is a little ridiculous, considering there are high-quality scans accessible online of every major artwork in a public collection. Many art books have essays appended to them, but frankly these are not often worth $60 or more. The second reason – the intention to take notes – simply does not apply to my motives with an art book. The only reason I could have to spend so much money on an art book is that I simply and truly love the art.
The first art book I ever bought was an exhibition catalogue from the Kochi Museum of Art. The show, Women Between Hopes and Fears, was a collection of portraits by Japanese painters. The paintings depicted modern women; the majority of the works were done in the Western style, though several impressive Japanese style nihonga were displayed alongside these. Many of the portraits were very well done and so I spent a while looking at them. One of them, Kyoto Maiko by Nakazawa Hiromitsu, was excellent. I came back to Kyoto Maiko three times, drawn by the deep strokes of green, the way they seemed to pull back at the young woman in the center, the way her eyes and lips shone like a foregone conclusion. It was the saddest depiction of a maiko I had ever seen. It was like Millais’ Ophelia, but shorn of Pre-Raphaelite gaudiness. It was – is – one of my favorite Japanese paintings.
I looked for a postcard of Kyoto Maiko in the gift shop, though to no avail. The exhibition catalogue, however, contained a reproduction of every work in the show. The book was ￥3,000, about three times the cost of the average Japanese paperback, but given that no reproduction of Kyoto Maiko exists online, the price seemed less objectionable. The catalogue now lies on a coffee table in my apartment. It turned out to be an inaugural purchase broke a psycho-economical barrier for me; suddenly there was no price too high for an art book. My coffee table is now well-cluttered with the catalogue of a Japanese design exhibit at the Tochigi Museum of Art, a book of Monet’s paintings organized by location, storyboards of the original Evangelion series, and the catalogue of a Takeuchi Seiho show put on at the Kyoto Museum of Art last year. I’ll be in Tokyo twice during the holidays; I look forward to visiting the Tsutaya bookstore at Ginza Six, which specializes in Japanese art. The goal this time will, I think, be a book of Kanae Yamamoto prints.
Living by myself in a city that, though it boasts many charms, does not claim much in the way of entertainment, I have found it necessary to practice diligence against the million false promises offered up by the dark rectangle of a TV, computer, or phone screen. Yet the eyes are demanding organs and must have their novelty somehow, somewhere. The stack of art books in the center of my apartment has proved a steady line of defense against my own roving gaze. Ten minutes with Monet at Vétheuil unchains my mind from day-to-day life – a quick glance at Takeuchi’s Posing for the First Time can remind me of human beauty even amidst the wide solitude of my under-furnished apartment.
I suppose the difference between art books and TV, film, and social media is that they invite, but do not demand, participation. Everything about them is inert. Not only is there the stillness of the page, there is also the fact that a reproduction is shabby, even artless if one does not remember and imagine beyond it. Looking at Kyoto Maiko, for example, I must tilt the page this way and that, turn off the room lights and turn on a lamp, then open the blinds halfway in an attempt to recreate the lighting at the Kochi Museum of Art. Never having seen a Monet painting in real life, the Monet book demands a similar kind of looking beyond, only in the case of these paintings I am creating something which is inspired by the other Impressionist paintings I have seen. The reproductions found in an art book – more like the myth of art than art itself – are meant not only for those with the eyes to see but also the mind to embellish.1
Art is a separate connection. Its uselessness, its non-participation in the shared world of things – the fact that I will never be able to “quote” a painting as I might quote Auden – delineates it from the rest of experience. Art resists simple utility as well as the desire and manipulation utility entails.
Yet art is not fully transcendent of human nature. It does not conform to instrumental desire, but instead creates a desire unto its own. I do not refer to whatever it is that drives a collector to pay millions of dollars for a canvas – I know nothing of that. I mean to talk about the kind of desire I experience when I decide to open up one of my art books. When I meet a piece of art I love, I am alone with it; there is no world beyond myself and the piece, or rather, the world is inspirited by the piece as I not only look at its reproduction, but imagine the further reality behind it. This meeting is what my eyes really want, to look beyond their own wet fleshiness, and to me such meetings are promises made by art and art exclusively. As a human being it is my lot to be strung up with desire, but in the moment when I am looking at Kyoto Maiko and trying most desperately to make this printed green the actual green, the printed red the actual red, my desire is trained fully on that one thing, and I experience something close to freedom. If visitors to the Sistine or Mark Rothko Chapels report a feeling of religious wonder, a realization of their smallness as they stand beneath the great, towering originals, then perhaps it is the case that, when we lean over a two-inch by five-inch reproduction in an art book, we are inverting the relationship. Ultimately, art books, like all other books, are an attempt (always futile, but rarely empty) to wrestle memory into permanence, and like all other books, they are created by the reader. Perhaps for those of us concerned with the future of human imagination, there is significant training to be had in them.
More on imagination from “Short Views”:
And perhaps this is why some of the first examples of art books in the West were devotional in nature (The Book of Kells, The Lindisfarne Gospels). The other strain in illuminated/illustrated manuscripts in Ancient and Medieval Europe was that of the scientific encyclopedia, and were intended similarly to engage the intellectual as well as the aesthetic sensibilities of those who read them.
lovely post, really enjoyed this, thank you
That Kyoto Maiko painting really is fantastic - even if I am only looking at a print of it on a laptop screen.