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Books 79 are executed with a palette of browns, greys, greens, ochres and mauve with a wide range of tonality. A monograph on this artist's earlier paintings, entitled Sabavala, with an Introduction and Notes by S. V. Vasudev, was published in 1966 by Vakil's House, Bombay, India. Clses Oldenburg: Large-Scale Projects, 1977-80. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Oldenburg. Rizzoli, New York, 1980. 100 pp., iIIus. Paper, $20.00. ISBN 0-8478-0351-1. Reviewed by Harry Rand* A collaboration between an art historian and an artist, this book is described as a chronicle based on the artist's notes, statements, contracts, correspondence and other documents related to these projects, and his cooperation has yielded as complete a picture of his artistic process as one is likely to have. (For another facet of these large-scale commissions, specifically the 'Bat Column', built for the USAmerican Government, see: D. B. Thalaker, The Place of Art in the World of Architecture (London: Chelsea House, 1980)and V. Mecklenburg, Across the Nation: Fine Artfor Federal Building, 1972-1979 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1980). The book is illustrated with photographs of sites and of the stages of each piece's development (as well as discarded preliminary concepts). The effect is both rich without being lavish and complete without being either exhaustive or exhausting. In addition to the chronicle, an essay by R. H. Fuchs entitled Monuments is appended; a discursive description of the characteristics of monuments as heirs of the Italianate example deriving from Roman and Renaissance examples. This essay neatly balances the statistical analysis of Oldenburg's productivity with which the book begins. That chart, rather than the works themselves, bespeaks the high seriousness of the enterprise. The Time Table, in several colors, spanning two pages, is a skeleton of a writer's concern with the pulse of Oldenburg's work. And yet, when the effort is expended on this book (faultless for its ambitions), my conclusion is that the silliness of these projects stands 'naked' as art, but, then, who does not like cavorting and fun? But were Oldenburg not an excellent draftsman, I could not take any of these projects seriously. I do not mean to sound dour and solemn, but that I find the ultimate conviction of his monumental art is borne not by the pieces themselves but by the wonderful drawings from which they stem (but then why not, since many buildings are sold on the basis of drawings and flashy models that when finished seem naggingly unsatisfactory?). However I feel about Claes Oldenburg's giant 'Switches', 'Flashlight' and 'Pool Balls' (which look fine as drawings but as executed look so much like the big hollow bells that are depicted in Magritte's landscape paintings) such that their representation of his and my times as the ambassadors to the future makes me wince. The best of Oldenburg's conception and grimly whimsical gambol with monumental art can be adjudged and fairly debated with the aid of this compact, well-designed book. Neither artists seeking insight into the processes at hand nor teachers attempting to arouse students' curiosity will find much lacking here. Fernando Botero. Exhibition catalogue, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Cynthia Jaffe McCabe et al. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1979. 119 pp., iIIus. Paper. Reviewed by Norman Narotzky** This catalogue presents a comprehensive view of Botero's work from an early early watercolor of 1949 to the large oils he is now painting. There are 66 black-and-white plates, 16 of which are repeated in color, in addition to various photographs of the artist and his studio and reproductions of related works. *National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Eight and G Streets, N.W., Washington, DC 20560, U.S.A. **Corcega 196, Barcelona 23, Spain. In a concise Introduction, McCabe, curator of the exhibition. reviews the pertinent facts of the artist's life, with extensive comments based on conversations that reflect his reactions to his experiences and his ideas on visual art in general and his own work in particular. She analyzes his style in early works with their Columbian and Mexican influences, the one he developed in the late 1950s when...

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