Fischl and Kincaid

The Whitney Museum's bound glory

LIMITED EDITION

You would have to go back to the seventies, to Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns's Foirade si Fizzles, to find a limited-edition illustrated book that works like Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip. It's a big book, twenty by fifteen inches, with a Jamaica Kincaid story— spare and dreamy and softly rhythmic, like all her Caribbean stories—and nine original lithographs by Eric Fischl. In the story, five girls on the very edge of womanhood, longedfor and feared, lie around and stare at the sky and wonder aloud. And Fischl really got it. "Jamaica's story might be this slumber party where some girls wake up women, and some

don't,'' he said. Matisse talked of making pictures for books that were "plastic equivalents," not rote illustrations, and that's what Fischl has done. There is a witchy, spooky feel (think of the Symbolists) to the prints at the beginning of the book; later, as the story unfolds, the girls in the pictures get more curvy, and Fischl renders them at sexy angles in loose wash strokes. Turning the pages, reading and looking, you rub words and images together and you feel heat. There are sixty copies of the book for sale through the Whitney Museum. Price: $ 1,500.

GERALD MARZORATI