BELLAS ARTES

First impressions count, especially in Milano. In this unprecedented photographic journey, editor Karl Kolbitz opens the door to 144 of the city’s most sumptuous entrance halls, captivating in their diversity and splendor. These vibrant Milanese entryways, until now hidden away behind often restrained façades, are revealed as dazzling examples of Italian modernism, mediating public and private space with vivid configurations of color and form, from floors of juxtaposed stones to murals of minimalist geometry. The collection spans buildings from 1920 to 1970 and showcases the work of some of the city’s most illustrious architects and designers, including Giovanni Muzio, Gio Ponti, Piero Portaluppi, and Luigi Caccia Dominioni, as well as non-pedigreed architecture of equal impact and interest. The photographs for the publication were exclusively created by Delfino Sisto Legnani, Paola Pansini, and Matthew Billings, each evoking the entryways with individual sensibility and a stylistic interplay of detail shots―such as stones, door handles, and handrails―with larger architectural views. The images are accompanied by outstanding written contributions from Penny Sparke, Fabrizio Ballabio, Lisa Hockemeyer, Daniel Sherer, Brian Kish, and Grazia Signori, together bringing a wealth of architecture, design, and natural stone expertise to guide the reader through the applied materials and fittings as well as the art-historical and social implications of each of the ingressi. As much an architectural city guide as an aesthetic study, the book provides the exact address and an annotated Milan map for all featured entryways, as well as the architect name and date of construction. In the well-documented realm of 20th-century Italian design, Kolbitz has stepped over the threshold and delivered a brand new area of inquiry in Milanese modernism. With the rigor of its multifaceted research, poised photography, and breadth of its featured hallways, this is an invigorating new reference work and an inside look at the city’s design DNA across high to low architecture.

Adobe residences from the Spanish and Mexican eras were the original California houses. Architects, designers, builders, and homeowners today, as in the past, look to their simple, utilitarian features—such as plain, whitewashed walls, beamed ceilings, and intimate open-air courtyards—and try to emulate their forms to capture the charm of a romanticized past. Leading architects of style movements such as the Spanish Colonial Revival traveled to California and studied its extensive eighteenth and nineteenth century adobes firsthand as the foundation of their education in California architecture. Made of earth and organic matter, such as straw, adobe is among the oldest of building materials and has been used throughout the world. From the 1770s to the present, adobe buildings such as churches, forts (presidios), mills, residences, warehouses, and stores have been a most important and informative part of California’s architectural heritage. Adobe Houses presents twenty-three homes, made from adobe, showing interiors and gardens from these often quiet masterworks, ranging from Casa Boronda of 1817 in Monterey to Casa del Oso, a contemporary manifestation, built in Santa Barbara in 2000 that reveals the intriguing range of possibilities available to us when building in this traditional form today.

Exposición magistral de cómo son las cosas en el mundo del cine, presentadas con multitud de anécdotas. Ofrece a la vez las memorias de un magnífico director y una guía sobre el arte, la técnica y el negocio de la realización.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) no estaba hecho para las finanzas. Tampoco duró mucho en la marina francesa, ni como vendedor de carpas en Copenhaugue porque no sabía hablar danés. Empezó a pintar en su tiempo libro en 1873. y en 1876 participó en el Salón de París. Tres años después, exponia junto a Pissarro, Degas y Monet. Vehemente y gran bebedor, Gauguin solía autoadjetivarse como «salvaje». Su íntima pero agitada amistad con el también temperamental Vincet van Gogh llegó a su clímax con un incidente violento en 1888, cuando Van Gogh se enfrentó supuestamente a Gauguin con una navaja de afeitar y más tarde se cortó la oreja. Poco después, tras completar una de sus obras maestras, La visión tras el sermón (1888), Gauguin se trasladó a Tahití con la intención de escaparse de «todo lo artificial y convencional» del mundo.

Con sus escaleras imposibles o sus mosaicos hechos de pájaros, el artista holandés M.C. Escher (1898-1972) creó un lenguaje gráfico único de rompecabezas, patrones singulares y pautas matemáticas. Denso, complejo y construido sobre principios intrincados, su trabajo, decorativo y lúdico y al mismo tiempo, juego continuamente con las ilusiones ópticas y las limitaciones de la percepción sensorial. Para matemáticas y científicos, Escher fue un genio. Para los hippies, un pionero del arte psicodélico. Este libro introductorio se adentra en la brillante mente de Escher a través de sus obras clave, fruto de su continua investigación acerca de la imagen y la percepción. En el camino esperan peces mutando en pájaros, lagartijas que parecen escaparse de la página, reflexiones magistrales, laberintos infinitos y algunas de las imágenes más alucinantes del arte del siglo XX.

Ocean Soul is a love story. It is a story of discovery. It is a story of hope. The story begins when a boy who loves the sea attends an event with underwater photographers and has an epiphany: "I had always wanted to explore the oceans, but I now understood how I would do this. I would do it with a camera." With sheer deter­mination, hard work, and a little bit of luck the boy, named Brian Skerry, realized his dream with more than 20 awe-inspiring articles for National Geographic magazine. Now, with Ocean Soul, he showcases his stunning photography and describes his adventurous life in a gripping portrait of the ocean as a place of beauty and mystery, a place in trouble, and ultimately, a place of hope that will rebound with the proper attention and care.