The Magazine Antiques

Current & Coming | By Megan Holloway Fort

American paintings at auction

November 30, 2009  |  On the horizon are the fall sales of American paintings, drawings, and sculpture at Christie's and Sotheby's in New York. Among the highlights to be offered at Christie's, on December 2, is Andrew Wyeth's 1960  Above the Narrows, a painting the New York Times art critic Roberta Smith once referred to as "bleak" and "inexplicably barren," featuring a young boy in shorts and shirt in a desolate landscape. While important examples of Wyeth's tempera paintings on panel or paper can bring auction prices in the millions, this picture's estimate of  $3 to $5 million suggests Christie's is banking on a continued boost in interest due to the artist's death earlier this year. On December 3, Sotheby's is offering Wyeth's 1968 watercolor Bikini, depicting his frequent subject Siri Erickson posing seminude at the back door of her shed (the same door that appears in Erickson's Barn and Maine Door). In a 1976 interview with Thomas Hoving then the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Wyeth described his pictures of Siri as representing "an invigorating, zestful, powerful phenomenon." Being sold from the estate of the artist and collector Arthur Byron Phillips, the work has an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000.
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Current & Coming | By Beatrice V. Thornton

Multiple modernisms on exhibit in New York

November 23, 2009  |  Early twentieth—century modernism-particularly that of Austria and Germany—seems to be all over New York this fall, with two exhibitions at the Guggenheim—Kandinsky, and Gabriel Munter and Vasily Kandisnky 1902-14: A life in Photographs—one at the Museum of Modern Art—Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, and yet another at the Neue Galerie: From Klimt to Klee: Masterworks from the Serge Sebarsky Collection, which displays paintings and works on paper by seminal modernists including Kokoschka, Beckmann, and Kirchner. The works on view at the Neue Galerie are taken exclusively from the collection of the museum's founder, Serge Sabarsky, who, Austrian himself, became a leading advocate and collector of Austrian and German art in the United States in the mid-twentieth century-a time when modernism was perceived as a uniquely French phenomenon.

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Current & Coming | By Staff

Elbert Hubbard: An American Original

November 23, 2009  |  Premiering tonight on PBS (check here for local listings), Elbert Hubbard: An American Original offers a sweeping profile of the arts and crafts visionary and founder of East Aurora, New York's Roycroft community. Charting the controversial and often contradictory course of Hubbard's personal and professional lives, this documentary film by Paul Lamont includes wonderful archival footage as well as interviews with Hubbard's great-grandson, author Lauren Belfer, and present day Roycroft craftsmen, among many others. With over 500 craftsmen at its peak, the Roycroft community of artisans was the earliest and most successful of its kind in the United States—making Hubbard one of the most influential figures in the craft revival movement of the twentieth century. Don't miss it!

For more on Roycroft, take a look at  an earlier feature in Inspired by Antiques.» More

Current & Coming | By Shax Riegler

Eye candy

November 19, 2009  |  Having immersed himself in bygone foodways and culinary techniques for decades, author, food historian, and master of antiquated cookery Ivan Day is the man to call when England's great historic house museums look to re-create the grand feasts of earlier centuries. He has whipped up historically accurate food and settings at Chatsworth, Waddesdon Manor, Hardwick Hall, and many others. While Day is an expert in kitchen practices from the medieval period through the nineteenth century, his passion is truly fired in the creation of the lavish settings—characterized by elaborate sugar-work—of eighteenth-century dessert courses. Two of these sumptuous displays are currently on view in U.S. museums.

For Imperial Privilege: Vienna Porcelain of Du Paquier, 1718-44, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through March 21, 2010, Day has recreated the sugar architecture and artificial fruit and flowers that would likely have been found alongside porcelain tableware on a dessert table about 1740. In fact, he drew inspiration from an engraving showing the Hapsburg Archduchess Maria Theresa and her consort Franz Stephen of Lorraine at a feast in Vienna on November 22 of that year. For the display he built a pair of sugar-paste pavilions using eighteenth-century sugar molds and sugar sculpting tools from his extensive collection of culinary antiques.

The idea of creating such a table was devised by the show's co-curators Meredith Chilton and Jeffrey Munger. "We wanted to give visitors another point of access to appreciate the porcelain, especially the figures, which are often a mystery to people," says Munger, curator in the Metropolitan Museum's department of European sculpture and decorative arts. "This table allowed us to show them in the kind of context in which they might have been found in their own time, and that can help people to better relate to them."

For Sèvres Then and Now, at Hillwood Museum and Gardens in Washington, D.C., through May 30, 2010, Day arranged a parterre garden of chenille hedges atop a mirrored surtout to complement a dessert service made for Prince Louis de Rohan in 1770. The classical temple and flowers are made from sugar paste, while the statues dotting the garden are a mix of pieces in Sèvres biscuit porcelain or sugar paste. "Objects in both porcelain and sugar were often mixed together on table tops at the same time," says Day. "You would mix and match pieces in your inventory with new pieces to suit the occasion."

In creating this design, Day drew on the engravings in Le Cannameliste Français by Joseph Gilliers (first published in Nancy in 1751, and reissued in 1768), an important source of designs and instructions for courtly entertainments at the time. For example, Gilliers explains exactly how to make those chenille parterres, and Day followed his directions to the letter.
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