BELLAS ARTES

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), was a legend even in his own lifetime. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: Violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. This work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio’s entire œuvre with a catalogue raisonné of his works. Each painting is reproduced in large format, with recent, high production photography allowing for dramatic close-ups with Caravaggio's ingenious details of looks and gestures. Five introductory chapters analyze Caravaggio's artistic career from his early struggle to make a living, through his first public commissions in Rome, and his growing celebrity status. They look at his increasing daring with lighting and with a boundary-breaking naturalism which allowed even biblical events to unfold with an unprecedented immediacy before the viewer.

The sophistication and modern femininity of the American luxury fashion house Carolina Herrera is captured in this evocative and vividly hued volume photographed by Elizaveta Porodina. A collaborative series of images, the first chapter of which was created in 2020 over Zoom, feature Porodina’s signature timeless, painterly style—an effect achieved through complex lighting techniques and equipment— capture the brand’s evolving collections designed by Creative Director Wes Gordon in a dreamy, otherworldly light. Inspired by dance, movement and the Herrera signature of bold color, this mesmerizing tome is flooded with photography of models and dancers in motion to reflect the vibrant energy and optimism of the clothing, arranged according to the chroma wheel instead of chronologically. Ethereal beauties, including singer and actress Dove Cameron, dancers Wendy Wheelan and Misa Kuranaga, and models Maggie Maurer and Mao Xing Xing, wear sweeping ballgowns, bold, saturated colors and dramatic silhouettes across ten collections designed by Wes Gordon over the past four years, capturing the fantastical universe of Beauty that is Carolina Herrera.

This is the first major book on Zegers, who practices an intensely artistic and ecological form of architecture based on landscapes in which she builds. Working frequently in timber, Zegers reaches unique, sustainable, and recyclable solutions that combine and rescue the traditional work of Chilean carpenters with modern techniques. In an almost metaphysical journey, in which organic forms, curves, diagonals, and verticals are combined, Zegers affirms her rising presence as a force in ecologically minded architecture.

In the latter half of the 19th century, in the verdant countryside near Aix-en-Provence, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), busily plied his brush to landscapes and still lifes that would become anchors of modern art. With compact, intense dabs of paint and bold new approaches to light and space, he mediated the way from Impressionism to the defining movements of the early 20th century and became, in the words of both Matisse and Picasso, “father of us all.” This fresh artist introduction selects key works from Cézanne’s oeuvre to understand his development, innovation, and crucial influence on modern art. From compositions of fruits and pears to scenes of outdoor bathers, we trace his experimentation with color, perspective, and texture to evoke “a harmony parallel to Nature,” as well as the very process of seeing and recording. Along the way, we discover Cézanne’s celebrated Card Players, his layering of warm and cool hues to build up form and surface, and the geometric rigor of his landscapes from the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence, as bright with the light of southern France as they are bold with a radical new rendering of dimensions and depth.

Christian Bérard worked freely in many artistic circles and fields as a painter, designer of theater and film sets and costumes, fashion designer, interior designer, masterful draftsman, and colorist. His iconic drawings epitomized the Paris fashion world and graced the covers of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Women’s Wear Daily in the 1920s and 1930s. Tracing his eccentric and colorful life of encounters and artistic partnerships with the greatest creatives of his time—Jean-Michel Frank, Christian Dior, Gabrielle Chanel, Jean Cocteau, Boris Kochno—this book includes more than two hundred of his paintings, drawings, photographs, intimate correspondences, and interior decorations, along with portraits of Bérard by Cartier-Bresson, Horst, and Schall.