ARTES

En este extraordinario ensayo publicado originalmente en 1963, Donald Mitchell examina con gran perspicacia y sensibilidad los valores filosóficos y estéticos que determinaron el lenguaje de la música del siglo xx. Para ello se centra en las figuras de Schoenberg y Stravinski, representantes de dos estilos genuinamente modernos y de una nueva sensibilidad. Mediante la rigurosa aplicación de técnica y construcción formal, ambos compositores dotaron a la música de nuevos vocabularios y transformaron las convenciones de escucha y composición para siempre. Dado el carácter multidisciplinar de este ensayo, los años lo han elevado al estatus de clásico no sólo en el campo de la musicología, sino también de los estudios culturales.

Este libro es una guía para la construcción de personajes épicos según sus misiones, perfiles y viajes interiores. ¿Qué tienen en común Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Clarice Starling, Ripley, Matilda, Batman, Pippi Langstrumpf, Guido Orefice, Buzz Lightyear...? Todos son héroes o heroínas que siguen la divisa «proteger y servir», pero ¿cuál es la estructura que subyace en el imaginario heroico al que pertenecen? Este libro es una guía para la construcción de personajes épicos según sus misiones, perfiles y viajes interiores. Una obra que no solo examina los recursos creativos empleados en las tramas de aventura, sino que replantea el desarrollo de los guiones de forja heroica a través de varias películas que coinciden con la estructura que J. R. R. Tolkien creó en El señor de los anillos.

The arresting pictures of Frida Kahlo (1907–54) were in many ways expressions of trauma. Through a near-fatal road accident at the age of 18, failing health, a turbulent marriage, miscarriage and childlessness, she transformed the afflictions into revolutionary art. In literal or metaphorical self-portraiture, Kahlo looks out at the viewer with an audacious glare, rejecting her destiny as a passive victim and rather intertwining expressions of her experience into a hybrid real-surreal language of living: hair, roots, veins, vines, tendrils and fallopian tubes. Many of her works also explore the Communist political ideals which Kahlo shared with her husband Diego Rivera. The artist described her paintings as “the most sincere and real thing that I could do in order to express what I felt inside and outside of myself.” This book introduces the rich body of Kahlo’s work to explore her unremitting determination as an artist, and her significance as a painter, feminist icon, and a pioneer of Latin American culture.

Hailed as the first American-born art movement to have a worldwide influence, Abstract Expressionism denotes the non-representational use of paint as a means of personal expression. It emerged in America in the 1940s, with lead protagonists including Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning. Abstract Expressionism spawned many different stylistic tendencies but two particularly prominent sub-categories: action painting, exemplified by de Kooning and Pollock, and color field painting, made most famous by Rothko. Throughout, Abstract Expressionists strove to convey emotions and ideas through the making of marks, through forms, textures, shades, and the particular quality of brushstrokes. The movement favored large-scale canvases, and embraced the role of accident or chance. With featured works from 20 key Abstract Expressionist artists, this book introduces the movement which shifted the center of art gravity from Paris to New York and remains for many the golden moment of American art.