Liubov Popova.

It is hard to imagine that Liubov Popova was a contemporary of Monet, and that her uncompromising forays into pure, cubistic form were coeval with the languid late-summer reveries of Monet's Water Lilies. For those with a taste for irony, few works could be more stimulating than Abrams's new monograph on this Russian avantgarde artist, Liubov Popova. It is precisely the dullness of the prose, written by Soviet art-historians Dmitri V. Sarabianov and Natalia L. Adaskina, that makes it so fascinating a document. Speaking of "the spiral movement of the lines and bands that form the conical funnels and the cylinders," Sarabianov says that "this movement clears a path for itself, intersecting the color planes, changing their coloration along the way, and shoving the spiky acute angles, the crescent moons, the numerous small shapes to the edges." In other words, this is hard-core formalism of the most conservative and anti-Marxian kind imaginable. While art critics in the West have, with all too few exceptions, fallen like dominoes before the glamor of dialectical materialism, critics in the Soviet Union quietly churn out works of the most staid and conservative formalist analysis.

What is best about this book is its exhaustively thorough reproduction of this great lady's finest works, most of them in full color. The majority date from the years immediately before the Revolution. But they nevertheless recall to us those vertiginous first moments of the new dispensation, before the Stalinist crackdown. It was a time when the state allowed Russian artists, for the first and last time, the freedom to paint as they wished, thus bringing into being the first and last moment in which Russian artists would achieve anything of international importance. Liubov Popova's series of Painterly Constructions from 1920 possess a cyclonic restlessness and indiscriminate violence, drawing within their grasp elements of constructivism, fairy-tale images, and synthetic cubism. The real world of three dimensions is ever encroaching upon these august meditations on pure form. There is an aggressive and naive love for shapes and color in these paintings, with their rich, deep tones and interlocking planes. Far more interesting than Sarabianov's unimpeachably acute formalist analysis is Natalia Adaskina's discussion, in the second half of the book, of the artist's theoretical researches, her work for the theater, her textile designs, and her friendships with many of the leading figures of the Russian avant-garde.

So far we have proceeded from the premise that the donor will like the person upon whom he bestows the art book he has selected. As it would be naive to suppose that this will always be the case, and in the interests of covering all the bases, we heartily recommend Bob Colacello's incandescent new hagiography of Andy Warhol, Holy Terror, as the perfect stocking stuffer for that one person, be he relative or acquaintance, whom you simply cannot abide. Imagine the look of anguished chagrin on his face the moment he opens the wrapping paper and sees Blondie's all too familiar, voidoid expression staring back at him, and actually imagines that you think this is just the sort of thing he wants! The subtitle, Andy Warhol Close Up, suggests that the book will get down to brass tacks. In fact, it is really a rambling, inarticulate paean to the foremost mediocrity in history, extending through five hundred semi-literate pages:

"Well, shall we go somplace [sic] for a nightcap?" Calvin Klein asked Halston.

"Your place or mine?" asked Halston.

We went to Halston's. When we arrived, Halston took Calvin and his new wife, Kelly, on a tour of the upper level, Bianca and Dick Cavett sat at one end of the huge living room discussing the Nicaraguan situation, Steve darted from group to group, and Andy, Paige and I sat at the other end, not knowing what to talk about.

Multiply that five thousand times, and you get the idea of the book. Strictly for the cultist.