ARTES

Slim Aarons: Women explores the central subject of Slim Aarons’s career—the extraordinary women from the upper echelons of high society, the arts, fashion, and Hollywood. The book presents the women who most influenced Aarons’s life and work—and the other remarkable personalities he photographed along the way, including Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy, Diana Vreeland, and Marilyn Monroe, all featured in unforgettable photographs. The collection contains more than 200 images, the majority of which have not appeared in previous books, along with detailed captions written by one of Aarons’s closest colleagues. Showcasing beautiful women at their most glamorous in some of the most dazzling locations across the globe, Slim Aarons: Women is a fresh look at the acclaimed photographer through the muses who inspired his most incredible photographs. Also available from Slim Aarons: Poolside with Slim Aarons, Slim Aarons: Once Upon a Time, Slim Aarons: A Place in the Sun, and Slim Aarons: La Dolce Vita.

The development of Soviet realist painting over fifty years through a selection of works from Russia's leading museums. Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content as opposed to form and restoring the central role of traditional practices, socialist Realism was the declared opponent of the modern movement, and in fact represented the only completely alternative artistic system. Created by the great Russian artists (Deineka, Malevic, Adlivankin, Laktionov, Plastov, Brodskij, Korzhev) the works present a multiplicity of questions, themes and formal approaches to art spanning from the last phases of the civil war to the beginnings of the Brezhnev era, stopping at the early 1970s when trends in official Soviet art took on varied and inconsistent directions such that the cultural supremacy of the socialist-realist current faded definitively. A non-monolithic view emerges, in which the movement does not originate exclusively as the product of totalitarian control and political pressures but as an evolving organism that reflected internal issues and echoed the great historic events of the twentieth century.

This superbly produced retrospective spans the artist’s work from early career to most recent pieces. Strong-Cuevas carves stone as well as models in wax sculpture that is then cast in bronze, stainless steel, and aluminum. Many pieces involve the human head; their planes and shapes resonate back to Egyptian and Mayan cultures. “Strong-Cuevas is a master of mass and monumentality (more particularly, the monumental scale, whatever the size of the work). Both are made more emphatic through the dramatic use of voids, the interplay of straight and curved lines as well as the geometric and organic, and, more broadly, an intricately displaced geometry.”