BELLAS ARTES

This is the most comprehensive volume probing the life and work of the modern art icon Giorgio de Chirico. Giorgio de Chirico was one of the most controversial and consequential artists of the twentieth century—a key member of the Paris avant-garde, he was a major influence on other artists, especially the nascent surrealists. His repertoire of motifs—empty arcades, elongated shadows, mannequins, trains—created images of forlorn emptiness that became iconic. Artists inspired by de Chirico’s early work include Yves Tanguy, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte. His influence also extended beyond painting and included writers and poets Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, John Ashbery, and Sylvia Plath, filmmakers Jacques Prévert and Michelangelo Antonioni, and even David Bowie, who admired de Chirico’s genderless tailors’ dummies that inspired his music videos. After the Great War, he turned toward neoclassicism and bitterly fell out with the surrealists and the mainstream modernist movement—in the process, becoming an outspoken outsider of the art world. This in-depth examination of the artist’s life and work by the world’s foremost de Chirico authority is based on new archival research and offers a fresh view of de Chirico’s relationship with surrealism, fascism, forgery, and the European avant-gardes.

A fresh look at one of America’s best-known and beloved artists at a pivotal but little-known moment in his life that profoundly shaped both his art and career. Edward Hopper & Cape Ann tells the largely ignored but significant origin story of Edward Hopper’s years in and around Gloucester, Massachusetts—a period and place that imbued Hopper’s paintings with a clarity and purpose that had eluded his earlier work. This volume focuses on summers Hopper spent there in the 1920s, starting in 1923, when he first embraced watercolor during outdoor painting excursions on Cape Ann and discovered one of his favorite subjects: houses and vernacular architecture. The success of Hopper’s Gloucester watercolors transformed his work in all media and set the stage for his monumental career. Accompanying a major retrospective at the Cape Ann Museum, including an unprecedented loan of twenty-eight works from the Whitney Museum of American Art, this highly readable and beautifully illustrated volume reveals in great depth the lesser-known story about the influence of a young painter, Josephine Nivison, who became not only Hopper’s wife but also the most trusted force underlying his artistic confidence. Here she is recast as principal producer of Hopper’s distinctive style and his “brand” visionary from the time of their courtship until his death in 1967.

Entre las décadas de los años veinte y cincuenta de la pasada centuria, las películas, que comenzaron siendo curiosidades de gabinete en ferias, lograron convertirse en el mayor espectáculo del mundo. Los protagonistas de aquellos shows de celuloide que encandilaban al público desde la gran pantalla, pronto fueron erigidos como reyes dominantes del imaginario colectivo del siglo XX. Pero aquel panteón cada vez más poblado de rutilantes deidades, albergaba asimismo siniestros y decadentes bastidores, plagados de sombras sin fin: espectros, maldiciones, muertes extrañas, crímenes sin resolver, adicciones, magia sexual, satanismo… Hechos misteriosos, sucesos estremecedores y, en ocasiones, atroces ocurrían entre el lujo y la fatalidad, entre el oropel y la decadencia. Crueles destinos inexorables, tanto de numerosas estrellas, como de aspirantes a serlo.