BELLAS ARTES

Longtime music icon John Mellencamp’s artistic expression has never been limited to song. The acclaimed singer-songwriter John Mellencamp has been an accomplished painter for more than four decades. This definitive survey—curated by Mellencamp himself—of his large-scale oil portraits and mixed-media assemblages documents America’s heart and soul, revealing unsettling but beautiful truths with an antiestablishment frown and a rich sense of narrative.   “Although we may primarily know Mellencamp as a rock star, one of the highest-selling of all time and a Hall of Famer, he is also a great painter, as this book shows. Not a musician who also paints... No, John legitimately belongs in the modern art pantheon,” says Bob Guccione Jr. in his essay that delineates the connection of Mellencamp’s music and art, both imbued with the earnest voice of America’s heartland.

Longtime creative collaborators Tilda Swinton and Olivier Saillard present an illustrated tribute to the costumes of legendary Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s iconic films. Retracing Pier Paolo Pasolini’s entire cinematography—which continues to fascinate audiences almost half a century after his passing—Embodying Pasolini explores the costumes that brought his films to life. From The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and Arabian Nights (1974) to Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Pasolini’s movies are known for their provocative flair—making them staples of art cinema’s golden age. Styled by Danilo Donati, the costumes—garments, coats, and hats—enlivened the films with their rich textures, volume, color, and embellishments.

Readers will respond to the warm and sophisticated work of Hugh and Simon Jacobsen, whose style of architecture and interiors might best be described as American modern vernacular—the place where traditional comfort and modern design meet. Hugh Newell Jacobsen, the legendary architect and late co-founder with his son, Simon, of Jacobsen Architecture, once said “the best house is polite to her neighbors and never shouts.” This statement is a key to the philosophy of the firm, whose houses are suffused with a kind of quiet sophistication that mingle elegant, subtle modernism, with respect for local vernacular traditions. Low-key on the outside, on the inside these houses offer dancing symphonies in white. Unmarked by moldings, walls and ceilings express simple volumetric forms composed of solid planes and voids, while, upon floors of burnished wood or travertine, furniture, much of it designed by the firm, allows for serene repose and practical, unfussy use. Featured here are exemplars of the firm, from Harbor Hill—a cluster of 12 small structures, appearing at first as a group of smallish shingled Nantucket cottages, that reveals itself as a single serene residence overlooking Nantucket Harbor—to Windsor, a Florida Colonial abstraction in Vero Beach. Featuring inviting interiors, exteriors, and gardens, the book is an expression of eloquent design.

Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements, and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality. This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson,Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor. Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.

Abstraction shook Western art to its core. In the early part of the 20th century, it refuted the reign of clear, indisputable forms and confronted audiences instead with vivid visual poems devoid of conventional representational imagery and characterized by allegories of emotion and sensation. This radical artistic adventure established new artistic means, as much as narratives. Expression became characterized by shocking juxtapositions of color, light, and line. Artists abandoned the conventions of brush and easel and played with new materials and methods of artistic gesture: commercial paints and housepainter’s brushes, working on unstretched and unprimed canvases, moving the canvas to the floor, and applying paint with hands.

The Wunderkammer, or “cabinet of curiosities,” saw collectors gathering objects from many strands of artistic, scientific, and intellectual endeavor, in an ambitious attempt to encompass all of humankind’s knowledge in a single room. From the Grand Duke Francesco I de’ Medici and Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to Archduke Ferdinand II of Habsburg, these aristocratic virtuosos acquired, selected, and displayed the objects in real-life catalogues that represented the entire world―spanning architecture, interior design, painting, sculpture, gemology, geology, botany, biology and taxonomy, astrology, alchemy, anthropology, ethnography, and history. Marvel at the unicorn horns (narwhal tusks), gems, rare coral growths, Murano glasswork, paintings and peculiar mechanical automata. Browse through illustrations of exotic and mythical creatures and discover the famed “Coburg ivories,” an astounding collection of crafted artifacts. These collections are nothing short of a journey through time, from the Renaissance and Age of Discovery, the Mannerist and Baroque periods, up to the present day. Although many of these cabinets of curiosities no longer exist, others have been meticulously reconstructed, and new ones born.