Art Books of the Season: Part I.

For contemporary art and its immediate nineteenth-century background, there is much duplication. Only architecture lags, both in popular surveys and monographs. The chief use of an art book, as opposed to viewing a work of art itself, is to make one look closer or deeper. This requires, ideally, as much energy as is needed to read a piano score. "Claude Monet," by William C. Seitz, is a beautiful book with 48 excellent laid-in color plates that goes far to rescue Monet from recent perils to which his fair name has been subjected in its abrupt and rapacious revival.