BELLAS ARTES

French artist, designer, and talented antique hunter Marin Montagut celebrates the joy of collecting everything from textiles to barware to architectural details, taking readers inside a dozen private homes, flea markets, and unusual ateliers to discover the most whimsical treasure troves in France. From a film prop house’s array of leather sporting goods and playing cards to a travel buff’s vintage maps and globes, and from a sculpture studio’s Grecian plaster casts to an amateur designer’s spiral staircase models, and from Montagut’s own wonder wall assemblages to a cook’s haven filled with porcelain dessert molds and copper pots—objects, when presented together as a series, create unforgettable interiors that radiate charm. Inspiration comes in repetition: wooden zigzag rulers with engraved numbers aligned on a wall in a herringbone pattern create an artful space. The spare wooden forms of capipotes—devotional statues used in religious processions, their eyes turned heavenward in ecstasy—and silver ex-votos can be the point of departure for the theme of an entire room. Montagut’s mood boards for each chapter provide endless ideas for the home.

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

The arrival, in 2021, of Australian global pop star Troye Sivan’s richly layered Melbourne home introduced the world to Flack Studio, a wildly creative, multidisciplinary practice of designers and architects well established in Australia. Launched in 2014, the studio is driven by an adventurous sensibility that embraces historical research and contemporary innovation. Furniture, lighting, textiles, fittings, and vivid colour coalesce into a holistic yet idiosyncratic experience. A deep sense of materiality, a passion for contemporary art, and an embrace of local community and makers are hallmarks of Flack’s projects, which include homes and restaurants throughout Australia, Los Angeles, Seoul and the Ace Hotel in Sydney.

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.

La belleza de la naturaleza y la soledad del hombre son temas dominantes en la obra de Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). El artista con frecuencia dispone una pequeña figura humana en un amplio paisaje, como en sus famosos lienzos Monje a la orilla del mar y El caminante sobre el mar de nubes. Durante mucho tiempo, la importancia y la influencia de este gran pintor romántico fueron subestimadas. Cuando murió, Friedrich había sido olvidado ya por sus coetáneos y no fue redescubierto hasta principios del siglo xx. Actualmente, se le considera el pintor alemán más importante de su generación y un precursor del expresionismo.