How to live life on thin ice

Plus: The Hungarian architect with an eye for the fantastical

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William Theiss on the Czech capacity for skating on thin ice

When Czech players arrived in France in 1909 for the inaugural Coupe de Chamonix, a short-lived international ice hockey tournament, they did not even have their own gear. But by the late 1920s, artificial ice had been installed on an island in the Vltava. Nazi and then Soviet occupation initially crushed the game's ascent in the country, as did the disappearance in the foggy English Channel of the plane carrying half the Czechoslovak team to a couple of exhibition games in London in 1948. But by the 1960s, a new European tradition was on the rise: the sublimation of national rivalries into sports.

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Michael Prodger on the rebirth of the Fondation Bemberg

Georges Bemberg's family knew that he collected art but exactly what and how extensively was a mystery. As one relative recalled, he might simply mention at dinner, 'Ah, I passed an antiques shop just now, I saw a very pretty bronze,' but offer no further details. What he didn't say was that that the statuette might have been Rodin's The Age of Bronze or a 16th-century piece of The Blind Orion Guided by Cedalion by Barthélemy Prieur and that he had taken it home with him. What he never said was, 'Ah, I've bought a Titian or a Cranach,' even though that is exactly what he did.

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Zoe Guttenplan on the private press that turned the page in book design

In 1937, the typographer and printer Will Carter sent a copy of his recently published edition of The Song of Solomon to the American calligrapher Paul Standard. Or rather, he tried to send a copy. US Customs impounded the book for impropriety and it took several months – and several letters – before Standard got his hands on the edition. When he did, it became clear why he'd had to wait. Printed and published by Carter at his own Rampant Lions Press, The Song of Solomon features six linocut illustrations by Cambridge-based artist Harry Hicken. Opposite the opening of chapter one, a full page is dedicated to the thick black outlines of a man and woman, their lips pressed against each other. She tips her head back and arches her spine, parts her legs and grips the sheets; he kneels, straddling her right thigh, pressing his fingertips into her hip. They are both nude.

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Jane O'Sullivan on Julie Rrap's provocative body of work

The Australian artist Julie Rrap has been thinking about representations of women's bodies for more than four decades. Now in her seventies, Rrap has turned to making work about her earlier selves, ageing and the lack of older women's bodies in art and culture. 'Past Continuous' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney offers a tightly curated look at then and now, setting Rrap's latest work alongside her famous early photo installation Disclosures: A Photographic Construct (1982). Disclosures is a key work in Australian feminist art and for good reason. The playful and engaging work documents Rrap in her studio, performing and inverting the roles of subject and object. There are more than 70 photographs. Some show Rrap posing with a mirror or her own self portraits. Others offer her view of the studio. These opposing perspectives are also carried into the installation itself, with works suspended from the ceiling in facing rows. Gaps allow glimpses of the works behind. Right from the very start then, Rrap has been working with mirrors and doubles – and often doing so with a sense of humour.

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Edwin Heathcote on the restless imagination of Imre Makovecz

The Hungarian architect Imre Makovecz (1935–2011) once said to me, during a conversation about a drawing he was working on, that there were two worlds. One was the world we were in. The other, for which he was drawing his building, was a world that might have been. These two worlds co-exist, he said, but we need to work hard to see the second kind. Makovecz was a remarkable architect. His work could shock, move, repel, astonish, provoke and – tricky for his reputation – be easily politicised. He represented a moment in which architecture was supposed to stand for something amid the end days of communism and the collapse of an entire world view. His strange oeuvre resists easy consumption, its influence tethered to his native Hungary. But there it lurks, still capable of provoking intense reactions.

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In the current issue…

Hildegard Bechtler talks to Edward Behrens about her trailblazing stage designs

Hildegard Bechtler talks to Edward Behrens about the art of stage design

In Bechtler's studio, at the top of her house in north London with windows at either end and the soothing sound of wind in the trees, there is no evidence of a computer. Instead, there are all the tools and materials required to make detailed model boxes – themselves becoming quite an old-fashioned way of presenting stage designs. Miniature hospital beds and surgical lights are strewn across the table next to perfectly cast recycling bags in green plastic and models of actors in striking poses, from Kristin Scott Thomas reclining with a pair of blood-red high heels to a semi-naked man squatting down, can of lager held high as he crouches to do god knows what. For Bechtler, the model is essential.

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