Art and Photography

Wars, Wall Street and street life are as important as hot-shot couturiers in “Fifty Years of Fashion: New Look to Now” (Yale University Press, 167 pages, $45), by Valerie Steele, chief curator of the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. A lively history of dizzying shifts in the way we look, Steele’s book puts clothes in the context of the rest of our lives.

Where else are you apt to read about Malcolm X’s opinion of zoot suits, or the way the films “Funny Face” and “Blowup” embody contrasting approaches to fashion? Other intriguing tidbits include the link between the postwar New Look (wasp waists and long, flaring skirts) and the sadomasochistic novel “The Story of O.”

Most of the clothes are shown on stiff museum-style mannequins that don’t bear much resemblance to Naomi or Kate (seen on the dust jacket). But, hey, there’s a cute photo of Mick Jagger in “military-influenced fashion” and a still from “Superfly” that makes a pretty good case for the Borsalino hat.

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Redolent of adventure, romance and escape, train stations became featured players in ‘40s films such as “Casablanca” and “Brief Encounter.” In “Station to Station” (Phaidon, 240 pages, $59.95), Steven Parrissien leads readers on an absorbing, copiously illustrated journey through the vaulted interiors of real-life rail terminals around the world, from the early 19th century English imitations of Gothic chapels to soaring contemporary fantasies in glass and steel.

Parrissien, assistant director of the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, is hardly a narrow-gauge train buff. His graceful narrative encompasses major shifts in civic history, design, popular taste and passenger requirements.

The author lauds L.A.’s Union Station, a gleaming blend of Mission and Art Deco styles, as “the last of the great American railroad stations of the 20th century”--even though few Angelinos are “even aware of its location.”

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The classic Eames chairs--the curves of molded plywood, the shells of fiberglass or wire mesh--are familiar to lovers of good design. But who were the Eameses? Combining a stylish layout with engaging essays by experts in architecture and physics, “The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention” (Harry N. Abrams, 205 pages, $49.50) brings a new breadth of focus to coffee table design books.

It introduces the couple who met at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit, migrated to Los Angeles in 1941, and used new technology developed for the aircraft industry to revolutionize casual furniture. Charles’ talent was primarily structural; Ray added the all-important spatial dimension that came from her training in abstract art.

But furniture was only part of the story. Believing in design and communication as tools of social change, they also made films that demystified scientific and mathematical concepts.

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A destitute child-abusing schizophrenic, permanently institutionalized in Switzerland in 1908, may sound like an unlikely candidate for posthumous fame. But the subject of “Adolf Wolfli: Draftsman, Writer, Poet, Composer” (Cornell University Press, 252 pages, $39.95) was a highly original draftsman and fantasist whose seemingly mild ornamental work seethes with sex and violence.

He inscribed his obsessive autobiographical writings with a dense carpet of images--figures, animals, landscape, architecture, mandalas--drawn from a photographic memory of village life and illustrations in books.

Although the essays on Wolfli by specialists in art, psychology and linguistics can be ponderous, the color plates plunge the reader directly into the seething patterns of the artist’s mind, where sweeping cosmological themes merge with childhood memories, rivers of numbers and rhythmic staves of music notation.

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Cathy Curtis reviews art and photography books every four weeks. Next week: Rochelle O’Gorman Flynn on audio books.