Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (Rizzoli, $35). If you want to get up to speed on Morandi, this lavishly illustrated monograph, published in 1998, is the place to start. The most lucid and sensible of present-day art critics, Wilkin explains with perfect clarity why the Italian painter’s soft-spoken, deceptively repetitive tabletop microcosms rank among the greatest achievements of twentieth-century art. Look first, then read–then look again (TT).
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
