BELLAS ARTES

The time is right for a fresh look at this incomparable sunny city. Longtime Angeleno Tim Street-Porter chronicles today's vibrant buildings, coastline, and gardens of this glamorous global metropolis. Visit Los Angeles with a photographer who knows how to get the lighting right to highlight the spectacular architecture of the city. Stylish museums, such as the Broad, and a flourishing Arts District illustrate the explosive art scene, while Hollywood's Chateau Marmont and the historic Beverly Hills neighborhood add a chic dynamism. Across town, Culver City, home to the tech industry, features blocks of futuristic architecture by Eric Owen Moss. The modernist homes by Richard Neutra and John Lautner, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock House, are shown against dramatic backdrops of sky and sea. The visual sweep of this oversize book also encompasses the Los Angeles of film and television. Los Angeles is a city of dreams, and Los Angeles Today is a glorious portrait of the city in its infinite variety.

This book will represent one of the most effective and extravagant visions of architecture, one that links the new generations and the old world. In the past few years, Mexico has brought to light a new generation of architects whose extraordinary vision and productivity has positioned the country among the most creative design cultures of the world. Under his own firm FR-EE, since 2000 Fernando Romero has designed and created a number of projects which represent a new vision of Mexican and world architecture. Romero's approach to architecture is innovative and an inspirational tool for empowering future generations. The volume will focus on three themes that intertwine throughout the content of the book. On-site photographs (mainly aerial views) highlight the different places where FR-EE works, from urban centers to the desert. The location is what drives FR-EE's creative work, while the practice strives to investigate the dynamic forces of each site and client. Inspirational photographs give the reader a vision of how Romero's perspective shifts between different focuses of references, and reimagines them in new symbolic visions of the world (from monuments to colors, from natural elements to animals). The images include renderings, photographs, diagrams, plans, and sections. The projects are presented in situ and through architectural drawings, so as to explain the projects' concepts and contents.

The first book to explore the extraordinary musical life and remarkable paintings of one of America's greatest ever songwriters. Best known for having written and produced some of the seminal records of American popular culture--from 'Big Girls Don't Cry' for the Four Seasons to 'Silence is Golden' for the Tremeloes and 'Lady Marmalade' for LaBelle--Bob Crewe was a multifaceted artist for whom a passion for painting and the visual arts provided a lifelong counterbalance to music. Collected here are more than 80 of Bob Crewe's artworks, stretching from his first forays into abstract expressionism in the 1950s and 1960s to more complex, tactile compositions made on his full-time return to painting in the 1990s--accompanied by archival images and ephemera that reflect Crewe's simultaneous contribution to popular music. Essays by Jessica May and Peter Plagens explore the development of an artist whose influences ranged from Rauschenberg and Johns to Warhol and Bacon; legendary record producer Andrew Loog Oldham captures the period of radical experimentalism in which Crewe wrote many of the most memorable songs in the canon of modern pop; and Donald Albrecht's introduction ties together the many complementary aspects of Crewe's personal and creative lives.

The world appears to be divided into cat and dog lovers, but fortunately Walter Chandoha, the 20th century’s greatest pet photographer found himself happily in the middle. He loved these intriguing creatures equally for their unique beauty and individualism, and as subjects to photograph in a career spanning over 70 years. While working on his critically acclaimed TASCHEN book Cats, Chandoha handpicked his favorite dog photos for a potential follow-up title, putting into carefully marked boxes hundreds of contact sheets, prints, and color transparencies, many unseen for at least 50 years, and some totally unseen. Chandoha sadly passed away in 2019 at the age of 98, but his legacy lives on in this dashing sequel dedicated to man’s best friend. “Walter Chandoha’s photographs of dogs are compelling not just because dogs have an inherent charm, but because the person behind the camera was a master of his craft,” writes the photography critic Jean Dykstra in the book’s introduction. We see terriers, collies, beagles, bloodhounds, poodles, small dogs, big dogs, show dogs, working dogs, and many more, featuring over 60 breeds photographed in both black-and-white and glorious Kodachrome.Spanning a 50-year period, the book is divided into six sections, and each chapter reveals Chandoha’s exceptional combination of technique, versatility, and soul. The opening chapter “In the Studio” focuses on formal portraiture; next it’s “Strike a Pose” where our canine companions ham it up for the camera; in “Out and About” they get to roam and play, often photographed with Chandoha’s own children; next it’s “Best in Show” with Chandoha using his reportage skills to capture vintage dog shows from the Mad Men era; in “Tails from the City,” the dogs are hitting the streets of mid-century New York; and in the closing chapter “Country Dogs,” it’s back to nature, the fields, and the beaches. Dogs is an unleashed photographic tribute to these lovable and loyal creatures.

Pop artist, painter of modern life, landscape painter, master of color, explorer of image and perception―for six decades, David Hockney has been known as an artist who always finds new ways of exploring the world and its representational possibilities. He has consistently created unforgettable images: works with graphic lines and integrated text in the Swinging Sixties in London; the famous swimming pool series as a representation of the 1970s California lifestyle; closely observed portraits and brightly colored, oversized landscapes after his eventual return to his native Yorkshire. In addition to drawings in which he transfers what he sees directly onto paper, there are multiperspective Polaroid collages that open up the space into a myriad of detailed views, and iPad drawings in which he captures light using a most modern medium―testaments to Hockney’s enduring delight in experimentation. This special edition has been newly assembled from the two volumes of the David Hockney: A Bigger Book monograph to celebrate TASCHEN’s 40th anniversary. Hockney’s life and work is presented year by year as a dialogue between his works and voices from the time period, alongside reviews and reflections by the artist in a chronological text, supplemented by portrait photographs and exhibition views. Together they open up new perspectives, page after page, revealing how Hockney undertakes his artistic research, how his painting develops, and where he finds inspiration for his multifaceted work.

Después de que Egon Schiele (1890-1918) se librara de la sombra de su mentor y modelo a seguir, Gustav Klimt, solo tuvo diez años para inscribir su característico estilo en los anales de la historia moderna antes de que la gripe española se cobrara su vida. Siendo como era un niño prodigio muy consciente de su propia genialidad y un provocador empedernido, esto no resultó ser un gran desafío para él. Sus figuras demacradas y estiradas, su representación radical de la sexualidad y sus autorretratos en los que se mostraba con expresiones faciales macilentas que rayaban la genialidad y la locura, no tenían la calidad decorativa de los himnos de amor, sexualidad y anhelante devoción de Klimt. En vez de ello, la obra de Schiele expresaba una franqueza brutal que disgustaría y cambiaría la sociedad vienesa de forma irreversible. Aunque más tarde sus creaciones fueron tildadas de «degeneradas» y durante un tiempo prácticamente cayeron en el olvido, influyeron en varias generaciones de artistas, desde Günter Brus y Francis Bacon hasta Tracey Emin. Hoy día, su obra, entonces incomprendida, sigue alcanzando precios exorbitantes en el mercado internacional del arte. Publicada por primera vez en una edición XL, esta monografía está ahora disponible en una versión más abreviada y compacta para celebrar el 40 aniversario de TASCHEN, y presenta las pinturas y dibujos que rememoran la prolífica última década de la vida de Schiele. Las obras, muchas de ellas expresamente fotografiadas para la edición XL, van acompañadas de ensayos que presentan la vida y la obra del maestro austriaco para situarlo en el contexto del expresionismo europeo y para examinar su extraordinario legado.