ARTES

This panoramic collection showcases stadiums, venues, and pitches, from the quirky to the historic, covering both men’s and women’s leagues, professional to amateur, wherever the game is played with enthusiasm and great style. For those who love the sport, either from birthright or from newly kindled passion, there’s a distinct and beloved resonance and local character to each stadium. This is one of soccer’s great charms, and this book is a road map to a pilgrimage to 1000 arenas that anyone in love with the beautiful game would want to visit in person: some visionary and new, some ageing but iconic, some remote yet picturesque, some tumbledown, quirky yet historical and utterly lovable—but all with such genuine personality, the fans’ hearts beat a little faster to see a match there.

A key contributor to Nouveau Réalisme in early 1960s Paris, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) worked alongside artists such as Arman, Yves Klein, and Jean Tinguely, scavenging real objects in place of traditional art materials. She connected art to life by instrumentalizing household items, machine parts, and even toys for her early assemblages. Saint Phalle created her first shooting painting, or Tir, in 1961, and went on to conduct these performances in such varied locations as the Impasse Ronsin in Paris, a garden in Amsterdam, a sandpit outside Stockholm, and the Malibu Hills. Reliefs made of plaster, small objects, paint, wood, and wire were punctured by the bullets of a gun.

Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Lloyd Wright were neither competitors nor direct collaborators. Yet these romantic heroes of twentieth-century art and architecture largely operated in parallel. In this seminal book, Rovang weaves together their compelling life stories, examining newly discovered links between them and, in the process, offering a fresh perspective on their work, their intermittent yet poignant friendship, and their closeness to the desert.  Starting in 1933, O’Keeffe and Wright exchanged roughly two dozen letters in which they expressed admiration for one another but also their passion for the places that informed them—many of which they had in common. Both were born in rural Wisconsin and built their careers in Chicago and New York. However, both sought inspiration and fulfillment in places farther afield, including in Japan and the desert landscape of the American Southwest. Juxtaposing images highlighting shared aspects of their individual biographies and work, this unique take on American creative expression explores the nature of artistic friendship and the idea of “home.” Rovang’s text gives rich context to the allure and romance of her visual subject, offering readers new ways to appreciate O’Keeffe’s and Wright’s monumental contributions to American culture.

It was the Belle Époque, a time before air travel or radio, at the brink of a revolution in photography and filmmaking, when Burton Holmes (1870–1958) began a lifelong journey to bring the world home. From the grand boulevards of Paris to China’s Great Wall, from the construction of the Panama Canal to the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Holmes delighted in finding “the beautiful way around the world” and made a career of sharing his stories, colorful photographs, and films with audiences across America. He coined the term “travelogue” in 1904 to advertise his unique performance and thrilled audiences with two-hour sets of stories timed to projections of multihued, hand-painted glass-lantern slides and some of the first “moving pictures.

Buried in the 14th century BC but unearthed by Howard Carter in 1922, the objects entombed with Tutankhamun are an invaluable window into a long-extinct belief system. Seen today, they create an intricate picture of how the ancient Egyptian people viewed the perilous journey to paradise, a utopian Egypt that could only be entered following the final judgment. When acclaimed photographer Sandro Vannini started his work in Egypt in the late ’90s, a technological revolution was about to unfold. Emerging technologies enabled him to document murals, tombs, and artifacts in unprecedented detail. Using the time-consuming and strenuous multi-shot technique, Vannini produced complete photographic reproductions that revealed colors in their original tones with vivid intensity. Through these extraordinary images, we discover the objects’ quintessential features alongside the sophisticated and cleverly hidden details.

Las memorias de la leyenda del heavy metal, concluidas poco antes de su muerte. Últimos ritos narra las historias de los últimos y premonitorios encuentros de Ozzy con la muerte, con su voz impávida y humor negro que tanto le caracterizaba. «La gente me dice: Si pudieras volver a empezar, sabiendo lo que sabes ahora, ¿cambiarías algo? Y yo les digo: Ni hablar. Si hubiera estado sobrio y limpio, no sería Ozzy. Si hubiera hecho cosas normales y sensatas, no sería Ozzy. Mira, si se acaba mañana, no me puedo quejar. He viajado por todo el mundo. He visto un montón de cosas. He conocido a gente fenomenal. Me ha ido bien. Me ha ido mal. Pero ahora mismo, no estoy listo para ir a ningún lado. He perdido muchas cosas, pero aún conservo la cordura... o la que alguna vez tuve. Es bueno estar vivo. Me gusta. Quiero estar aquí con mi familia. Y más que nada en el mundo, estoy feliz de haber regresado a donde todo empezó: Aston, Birmingham. Pero nunca engañas a la muerte, no realmente. Siempre lleva la cuenta. Y tarde o temprano, cobrará su deuda final...» A los sesenta y nueve años, Ozzy Osbourne estaba en una triunfal gira de despedida, tocando en estadios llenos y recibiendo excelentes críticas por todo el mundo. Y entonces, el desastre. En cuestión de pocas semanas, pasó de estar hospitalizado por una infección en un dedo a tener que abandonar su gira —y toda vida pública— al enfrentarse a una parálisis casi total del cuello para abajo.