Charles Saumarez Smith's The Art Museum in Modern Times, devoted to works of art that house works of art, is itself a work of art. The book abounds with gorgeously reproduced black-and-white and color photos--of buildings and galleries, of their creators--that help the author tell the stories of each of 43 art spaces, from New York's Museum of Modern Art (1939) through Shanghai's West Bund Museum (2019). Smith, whose formidable credentials include a stint as director of London's National Portrait Gallery, scatters his engaging building bios with memorable remarks by the featured architects and their critics, one of whom felt that Frank Lloyd Wright's model for New York's Guggenheim Museum (1959) "looked something like a big, white ice cream freezer." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer