BELLAS ARTES

A thorough exploration of Salvatore Ferragamo’s life and work: an inescapable opportunity to analyze the importance of his creativity and entrepreneurial instinct. One hundred years have passed since Salvatore Ferragamo opened his first store, the Hollywood Boot Shop, opposite the recently built Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. This set the seal on the success he achieved in America, where he had emigrated in 1915. He was perfectly integrated in the film world of those years, as important directors entrusted him with the design and creation of shoes for the film stars. His customers were movie actresses and actors, producers, and directors, who could no longer do without the elegant and comfortable footwear of the “shoemaker to the stars,” as the young man from Irpinia was nicknamed. Furthermore, his persona had a certain standing in Hollywood: he sat on the city’s executive committees and lived on the same street as Charlie Chaplin. On May 4, 1923, Holly Leaves magazine pointed out just how much Ferragamo was doing for the city and its residents.

En vida, la fama de Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) apenas sobrepasó las fronteras de su ciudad natal, Delft, y el reducido círculo de sus mecenas. Despues de su muerte, su nombre cayó largo tiempo en el olvido y fuera de Holanda sus pinturas llegaron a atribuirse erróneamente a otros artistas. No fue hasta mediados del siglo XIX cuando Vermeer llamó la atención del mundo del arte internacional que, de pronto, supo admirar su precisión narrativa, la meticulosidad de los detalles de sus texturas y los majestuosos planos lumínicos. Habían descubierto a un genio.

Designing private residences has its own very special challenges and nuances for the architect. The scale may be more modest than public projects, the technical fittings less complex than an industrial site, but the preferences, requirements, and vision of particular personalities becomes priority. The delicate task is to translate all the emotive associations and practical requirements of “home” into a workable, constructed reality. This publication rounds up 100 of the world’s most interesting and pioneering homes designed in the past two decades, featuring a host of talents both new and established, including John Pawson,Shigeru Ban, Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Herzog & de Meuron, Daniel Libeskind, Alvaro Siza, and Peter Zumthor. Accommodating daily routines of eating, sleeping, and shelter, as well as offering the space for personal experience and relationships, this is architecture at its most elementary and its most intimate.

In this unprecedented new book, writer Zoë Lescaze and artist Walton Ford present the astonishing history of paleoart from 1830 to 1990. These are not cave paintings produced thousands of years ago, but modern visions of prehistory: stunning paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, mosaics, and murals that mingle scientific fact with unbridled fantasy. The collection provides an in-depth look at this neglected niche of art history and shows how the artists charged with imagining extinct creatures often projected their own aesthetic whims onto prehistory, rendering the primordial past with dashes of Romanticism, Impressionism, Japonisme, Fauvism, and Art Nouveau, among other influences.

A giant of modern fashion photography, Bourdin lent his surrealist eye to the shoes and fashions of Charles Jourdan. Creating compositions full of movement, color, and sensuality, this pioneering collaboration between designer and photographer still exerts a profound influence on modern fashion photography. The late 1960s saw some of the most dynamic periods in French fashion. And the union between Bourdin and Jourdan captured the spirit of the moment unlike any other creative partnership of the era. Jourdan, a polymath who occupied the office of both couturier and shoe designer, tapped Bourdin, a true surrealist among the fashion photographers of the age, and engaged in a creative dialogue through to Jourdan’s passing in 1976.