The Magazine Antiques

Current & Coming | By Staff

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reopens

April 15, 2010  |  

With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, is connected to the various other parts of the museum with a series of walkways and surrounds a new sculpture garden designed by the veteran landscape firm Olin Partnership.

In the new wing, the McGlothlin Galleries of American Art will open with an exhibition of promised works from the collection of James W. and Frances G. McGlothlin, including a roll call of American greats—George Bellows, Robert Henri, Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent, among others.

Known for its collections of art nouveau and art deco donated by Sydney and Frances Lewis as well as the P…» More

Current & Coming | By Staff

Women and folk art and imperial silver in New York

So many exhibitions open in New York in any given month that it is hard to choose which ones to feature. Two that have great appeal are Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands, at the American Folk Art Museum, and Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 13 to November 7. The former, drawn from the Folk Art Museum’s own collection by curator Stacy C. Hollander, includes paintings, drawings, samplers, quilts, rugs, and other works, most of which were made during the years that young women spent cultivating the skills they would need as wives and mothers, but others demonstrate that women continued to nourish their creative selves by plying those skills throughout their lives.

The show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reunites many pieces from a magnificent silver service made between about 1779 and 1782 for Duke Albert Casimir of Sachsen-Teschen and his consort, Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria. This …» More

Current & Coming | By Staff

Eames House tour contest

February 22, 2010  |  
The Delaware-based type foundry and design firm House Industries is offering three lucky individuals a chance to win an exclusive tour of the Eames House (Case Study House #8) in Pacific Palisades, California, where the dynamic design duo lived from 1949. Although the grounds of the Eames House are open to the public, tours of the interior are usually only available to Eames Foundation members once a year. Winners will be announced tomorrow, February 23. Don't miss your chance—enter here!

For a peek inside, check out this vintage photographs from the Library of Congress:

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Current & Coming | By Carolyn Kelly

Celebrating the 'Decodence' of the SS Normandie

February 18, 2010  |  Unlike other major exhibitions of the art deco period, DecoDence: Legendary Interiors and Illustrious Travelers Aboard the SS Normandie, which opens today at the South Street Seaport Museum, isn't an over-the-top display. Instead, it's a balanced, and entirely engrossing, collection of furnishings, ephemera, and architectural elements that graced the legendary ocean liner.

Among the show's highlights: photographs that document the daily activities aboard the ship and capture the atmosphere of the Grand Salon and other deluxe compartments, and promotional accessories, such as a black leather clutch, presumed to be by Hermès, that mimics the Normandie's famous silhouette. Wooden French sailor figures used for window displays; and architectural fragments from the well-known églomisé mural panels by Jean Dupas to a pair of bronze doors used in one of the ship's private dining rooms. Other standouts are the modernist designs in silver by Luc Lanel for Christofle created for first class tea sets, table crumbers, and serving pieces whose geometric forms look as if they were plucked from MoMA's recent Bauhaus exhibition. Arguably the masterpiece of the exhibit is the one-of-a-kind ash veneer baby grand piano designed by Louis Sue for the Deauville Suite (each of the Normandie's four Grand Luxe suites had included a piano by its respective interior designer) that can also be seen in its heyday in a photograph with Marlene Dietrich seated at it.
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