The Magazine Antiques

For those in our magazine's community of interests, the new year got off to a pleasant start. Early in January, word came that the Historic Charleston Foundation had walked back from its plans to sell the landmark Nathaniel Russell House. That decision had provoked a sustained outcry from arts professionals and aficionados of American history, architecture, and historic preservation—a response so vigorous, yet articulate, that it may have taken the foundation by surprise. Let's hear it for reasoned dissent. Spirits thus buoyed, the antiques season in New York opened in style, with auctions at the major houses and the Winter Show fair presented at the Park Avenue Armory. As ever, the Winter Show featured exceptional offerings in art and antiques, elegantly and engagingly exhibited, in the always-entertaining environment of the…

This is an American story. It begins at 109 Liberty Street in Newburgh, New York, just down the block from the headquarters George Washington occupied from 1782 to 1783—the historic site where he declared an end to fighting in the Revolutionary War, refused the suggestion that he become the young nation's monarch, and outlined the principles he thought essential to its governance. Yes, Newburgh, the once-handsome city on the Hudson midway between New York City and Albany, where river and rail traffic brought prosperity in the nineteenth century, and notable figures like Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) established an American aesthetic in landscape and domestic design that lingers here and there on its streets. From the Gilded Age to the middle of the last century, Newburgh was also a vigorous working-class…

On the bumpy road to the modern world, the impressionists, their post-impressionist descendants, and those artists who came to prominence in the first decade of the twentieth century oversaw the final break with artistic tradition, and the invention of new concerns and methods that persist to this day. Telling that story is a wide-ranging exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, The Impressionist Revolution from Monet to Matisse, which includes some ninety canvases and sculptures drawn almost entirely from the museum's holdings. The nature of the impressionists’ innovations—seen here in conversation not only with the post-impressionists, but with the Parisian group Les Nabis, the best-known fauvists André Derain and Henri Matisse, and symbolists like Odilon Redon—was fourfold. Painters elevated the fleeting over the eternal, as is most evident in the…

The term Harlem Renaissance, as it is used in a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a metaphor. Obviously, the show has much to do with the area of Manhattan just north of Central Park, where many of its some 160 objects—paintings and sculptures, as well as film, photography, and ephemera—were produced. But it ranges far beyond that designated geographical boundary all the way to Paris, Berlin, and Cuba, among other destinations. Harlem, of course, was the great cultural Mecca to which African Americans were drawn in the course of the so-called Great Migration, when, beginning in the early years of the twentieth century, they moved north from the southern United States to such cities as Chicago, Detroit, and, most of all, New York. Ezra Pound once…

Of all the Scandinavian countries, Norway is the least known for excellence and innovation in design. Denmark, Sweden, and Finland have rich and much-celebrated histories for producing superlative pieces in furniture, ceramics, glass, and many other categories—even Iceland is lately getting attention from design aficionados. But Norway, in fact, has a deep design tradition that dates at least to the sixteenth century, as examined through the lens of making silver in the current exhibition Crowning the North: Silver Treasures from Bergen, Norway at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Bergen became a vital European commercial port, starting in the late Middle Ages. From there, Norwegians sent out lumber and stocks of fish in return for commodities such as salt and grain. Along with them would come piles of silver,…

This April, for the first time in nearly twenty-four years, the Brooklyn Museum will display one of its greatest treasures to the public: the complete set of 118 ukiyo-e woodblock prints from Utagawa Hiroshige's 100 Famous Views of Edo. The prints are collectively one of the most important works of Japanese art history. In order to protect the prints, which were first published between 1856 and 1858 and depict scenes from the city of Edo—now known as Tokyo—across all four seasons, they rarely go on view. In a notable contrast to the Brooklyn Museum's last exhibition of the series in 2000, the collection will be displayed alongside rarely seen folk art and household objects. Furniture, advertising signs, cooking utensils, and costumes will bring to life a time of rapid socioeconomic…