The “coffee-table” book—a large-format monograph written by a recognized authority and accompanied by lavish color reproductions—has long been an art publishing staple. But there’s another, lesser-known version of it that also makes an occasional appearance. It features fewer reproductions and a much briefer text; it is usually easier to lift. The main difference, though, is that the text is written by a well-known personage from another walk of life, a celebrity. A decade ago, the Whitney Museum asked Michael Crichton, the best-selling author of The Andromeda Strain, to write the catalogue for its Jasper Johns retrospective, and there have been several examples since. Now Abrams, long known as a pioneer of the respectable kind of coffee-table book—the sort where a sober text cools the seductive appeal of the color plates—has made a contribution to this subgenre with Alex Katz, by Ann Beattie, a writer known for her fiction but heretofore unheard from on the subject of painting.

To judge from the cover of the book, on which the names appear in equal size, the correct title of this offering is Alex Katz by Ann Beattie—we read both names in one breath. The pairing is clearly intended by the publisher to signify the special status of the author in this enterprise. Far from playing second fiddle to her subject, Beattie is given an equal role. Anne Yarowsky, an editor at Abrams, explains the origins of the project in a prefatory note: “What would occur,” she wondered, “if