rt lovers didn't rack up as many frequent- flier miles to see shows this year as they did to check out new museum buildings. Everybody who could went to Richard Meier's Getty, in Los Angeles, and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, in Spain. The really with-it also made a pilgrimage to Helsinki, to see Kiasma, the dazzling new contemporary art museum by another American architect, Stephen Holl. All these peregrinations have made Victoria Newhouse's ''Towards a New Museum''(Monacelli Press, $45) the most thumbed-over and valuable of this year's art books. She offers an opinionated analysis of what the museum's role is and should be - a big topic, given that the last three decades have seen more than 600 art museums spring up in the United States alone.
Art travelers on a less global level will appreciate John Villani's ''The 100 Best Small Art Towns in America''(John Muir Publications, $16.95), which ranks Northampton number one.
Travel of a grimmer sort sparked ''Vietnam: Reflexes and Reflections''(Abrams, $45), with essays by Eve Sinaiko and Anthony Janson and reproductions of 200 works of art by men and women who served in that war whose memory still rattles uncomfortably in the national consciousness. Some of the work is cathartic; an important exception is by the Boston-based sculptor Ken Hruby, whose ''War Trophy'' invites meditation and multiple interpretations.
Moments before a devastating 1997 earthquake caused incalculable damage to the art-rich Italian town of Assisi, Ghigo Roli completed the most extensive series of photographs ever made of the famous frescoes of the town's 13th-century church. Those priceless photos, on which the restoration will now depend, make up ''The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi: Glory and Destruction''(Abrams, $24.95).
During the Cold War, little was published in the West on Russian art. That's changed. Among the best new books on this big field is ''The Russian Museum: A Centennial Celebration of a National Treasure''(Abrams, $60), with authors Vladimir Gusyev and Yevgenia Petrova leading a tour through collections that extend from medieval icons to Kandinsky and Malevich. The Russian Museum has always played second fiddle to the Hermitage; this book shows why it deserves to be better known in the West. Mikhail Guerman's ''Russian Impressionists and Post-Impressionists''(Parkstone Press, $55) is particularly valuable for its dramatic close-ups of brushwork. And Matthew Cullerne Bown offers an astute examination of art of the Soviet era in ''Socialist Realist Painting''(Yale University Press, $75).
A sea change in politics also inspired ''German Art from Beckmann to Richter: Images of a Divided Country''(Yale University Press, $65), edited by Eckhart Gillen. This massive tome tracks the responses of German art to Nazi rule, the Holocaust, and the nation's division into two separate countries.
Authors with Boston connections contributed heavily to the year's list of choice art books. Helaine Posner, former curator at MIT's List Visual Arts Center, has produced an opulent monograph, ''Kiki Smith''(Bulfinch Press, $60), about one of the most significant artists on the scene. Posner's essay is a perceptive gem. In ''Pictures of People: Alice Neel's American Portrait Gallery''(Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, $45), art historian Pamela Allara has written an excellent account of an artist whose scatological content sometimes anticipated Smith's by half a century.
Anne Higonnet, who teaches at Wellesley College, has written a fascinating history of images of childhood, from innocent to eroticized, in ''Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood''(Thames and Hudson, $39.95). Richard Kendall's ''Degas and the Little Dancer''(Yale University Press, $50) examines in depth another image of childhood, Degas's iconic ''Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,'' a sculpture we think of as merely sweet: Kendall explores its complexity, both physical and psychological.
Wellesley College architectural historian Alice Friedman offers a new angle on familiar modernist landmarks in ''Women and the Making of the Modern House''(Abrams, $39.95), in which she examines six houses by architects including Frank Lloyd Wright and Robert Venturi, each commissioned by a strong-minded and independent woman.
Harvard University Africanist Suzanne Preston Blier also mixes art and sociology in ''The Royal Arts of Africa: The Majesty of Form''(Abrams, $24.95), an exploration of the court art traditions that flourished in West and Central Africa in the centuries just before and after those kingdoms' first contact with Europe. In ''The Tribal Arts of Africa''(Thames and Hudson, $50), Jean-Baptiste Bacquart takes an even broader look at the continent, dividing it into 49 areas and offering examples of art from each, all gorgeously photographed. And in ''Ancient West Mexico: Art and Archeology of the Unknown Past''(Thames and Hudson/The Art Institute of Chicago, $50), editor Richard Townsend presents an array of intricate earthenware tomb sculptures made by a society whose sophistication we're only now discovering.
Two titans of 20th-century abstraction are the subjects of 1998 retrospectives accompanied by important books. Both Kirk Varnedoe's ''Jackson Pollock''(Museum of Modern Art, $75) and David Anfam's ''Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas''(Yale University Press, $125) are opulent as well as scholarly. In ''Anish Kapoor''(University of California Press/Hayward Gallery, $35), Pier Luigi Tazzi and Homi K. Bhabha document the work of one of the finest of mid-career sculptors. Kapoor plays with perception, making walls and floors bulge or disappear, posing teasing questions about spatial depth. But his work transcends mere trickery: It belongs to a spiritual realm.
Peter Sutton, former curator at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and now director of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, pays homage to a 17th-century Dutch master who has long languished in the shadow of Vermeer in ''Pieter de Hooch''(Yale University Press, $45.) The book accompanies the first-ever de Hooch exhibition, which opens at the Wadsworth Dec. 17. Another artist coming in for overdue attention is post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard. In ''Bonnard''(Abrams, $60), John Elderfield and Sarah Whitfield place a painter who has been on the periphery smack in the center of 20th-century art. The many color reproductions are luscious; so many are of Bonnard's wife in the bathroom that you can imagine her saying, ''Could I please get in here alone just once?''
Another particularly lush book is Torsten Gunnarsson's ''Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century''(Yale University Press, $65), which looks at landscape art in the nature- worshiping nations of Scandinavia. Most of the names will be unknown to general readers; one that is familiar is August Strindberg, a gifted painter as well as a great writer.
Among the oddities the art book trade has produced this season is Gillian Riley's ''A Feast For the Eyes''(Yale University Press, $25), which pairs paintings in London's National Gallery with appropriate recipes: Cezanne gets a compote with apples, and so on. Riley stops short - but just barely - of sunflower soup to go with van Gogh.
RoseLee Goldberg has a long history with performance art: Her 1979 book ''Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present'' is the bible of this most ephemeral form of visual art. She's come up with a valuable sequel, ''Performance: Live Art Since 1960''(Abrams, $60), just when the field is under fire, its chances for federal financing diminished by the ''decency clause'' Congress has imposed on the National Endowment for the Arts.
With sexual prudery gripping America and art, so that sexual content is once again under attack, John Clarke offers a book that puts things into perspective. In ''Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100 B.C. - A.D. 250''(University of California Press, $39.95), Clarke looks at a sophisticated civilization's enjoyment of all manner of erotic pleasures, as recorded in paintings and sculptures so graphic they're a how-to. What a delightful irony that this book comes out just in time for the holiday that celebrates the birth of the religion that, in its more unfortunate forms, has done so much to make us feel bad about our bodies.
