ARTES

¿Cuántas veces has dicho «esto da para una serie»? ¿Y si la mejor serie fuera la vida misma? ¡Ahora tienes el libro que lo demuestra! Más de 900 títulos, cientos de emociones compartidas y una certeza: esto da para una serie. Desde aventuras adolescentes sobre bicis llenas de barro hasta culebrones sentimentales dignos de telenovela, pasando por momentos laborales tan surrealistas como los de The Office o reuniones de vecinos más tensas que un capítulo de Aquí no hay quien viva. La vida —la tuya y la de todos— está hecha de escenas que parecen sacadas de una ficción. Porque a veces lo cotidiano se convierte en comedia, en drama, en thriller o en romance... y todo cabe en el mismo capítulo.

A flâneur and photographer at once, Eugène Atget (1857–1927) was obsessed with walking the streets. After trying his hand at painting and acting, the native of Libourne turned to photography and moved to Paris. He supplied studies for painters, architects, and stage designers, but became enraptured by what he called “documents” of the city and its environs. His scenes rarely included people, but rather the architecture, landscape, and artifacts that made up the societal and cultural stage.

Sharp angles, strange forms, lurid colors, and distorted perspectives are classic hallmarks of Expressionism, the twentieth century movement that prioritized emotion over objective reality. Though particularly present in Germany and Austria, the movement’s approach flourished internationally and is today hailed as one of the most influential shifts in art history. With leading groups Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), and key players such as Wassily Kandinsky, Egon Schiele, and Emil Nolde, the Expressionists disowned Impressionism, which they regarded as “man lowered to the position of a gramophone record of the outer world”, to depict instead a raw and visceral experience of life as it was felt, rather than seen on the surface. Their paintings brim with emotive force, conveyed in particular through intense and non-naturalistic color palettes, loose brushwork, and thick textures.

Cuando se tiene la oprtunidad de asumir un proyecto de larga duración, se puede hurgar en lo mas...

A building by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) is at once unmistakably individual and evocative of an entire era. Notable for their exceptional harmony with their environment, as well as for their use of steel and glass to revolutionize the interface of indoor and outdoor, Wright’s designs helped announce the age of modernity, as much as they secured his place in the annals of architectural genius.

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.