Dolls are the only toys made in our image, the only human-like creatures children are given dominion over.
Editor’s letter, July/August 2015
What has been lost… The only thing more American than sentimentalizing the past is our habit of discarding it. And so when it comes to the dolls shown in this issue, stunning examples of an African-American folk art, questions abound: who were their makers and for whom were they made? How can they be dated and where did they originate? …
Farther afield: A Lost Paradise: The Clandon Park Fire
Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni created a magnificent Palladian residence for Thomas, the 2nd Baron Onslow, in the 1720s on the estate outside of Guildford, in Surrey, south of London, that the baron’s great-grandfather Richard Onslow, the MP for Surrey, had purchased in 1641. The dignified restraint of Leoni’s exterior hid a luxuriant interior oozing with Georgian glamour. Its most …
Farther afield: The Magna Carta turns 800
A dedicated website (magnacarta 800th.com) showcases the exhibitions, tours, and special events across the U.K. this season in celebration of the eight hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. The British Library’s exhibition provides the most penetrating inquiry into this historic document and displays the two manuscript copies of 1215 conserved there. The show places them into context …
Farther afield: Mannequins at the reopened Musée Bourdelle
The Musée Bourdelle reopens after an eight-month renovation with a special exhibition devoted to artists’ mannequins. The show plumbs the “unsettling strangeness” of these objects with a display of rare mannequins from the eighteenth century to the present day as well as paintings, drawings, engravings, and photographs that reveal their relationships with the artists who depicted them. A catalogue has …
Gray matters
Recent films, exhibitions, and books re-establish Eileen Gray’s reputation and start to set the record straight History was made at the Grand Palais in Paris on February 24, 2009, when lot 276 in Christie’s sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé was hammered down. In the midst of an economic recession, Eileen Gray’s Dragons armchair …
A charmed life
English inspiration, American creativity, and a bit of historical luck are joined in the author’s house and gardens Several years ago English friends came for lunch at my house, now called the Gordon-Banks house, in Newnan, Georgia, some forty miles southwest of Atlanta. They walked down a wide hallway onto a porch that overlooks a terrace and what the English …
Editor’s letter, May/June 2015
We missed something this spring, and at this point all I can do is urge you not to miss it too. I refer to When the Curtain Never Comes Down at the American Folk Art Museum, closing July 5. There is much to say, even much to debate, about what is happening with outsider art in the museum’s galleries, and …
Wonder and menace, dreams and nightmares: Visions of Coney Island
Fig. 1. Steeplechase Funny Face, n.d. Painted metal; diameter 23 inches. Collection of Ken Harck. An extraordinary array of artists have perceived Coney Island as a prism through which to view the American experience. Their visions have imagined the future and recalled the past; they have conveyed shifting ideas about leisure, and explored issues of race, ethnicity, and class. What …
The gold dust twins: Thomas Hart Benton, Walt Disney, and the mining of frontier mythology
Fig. 1. Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), c. 1944. Gelatin silver print, 9 ¼ by 7 ¼ inches. Private collection. Fig. 2. Walt Disney (1901–1966) by George Hurrell (1904–1992). Gelatin silver print, 9 by 7 inches. Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum and Walt Disney Company © Estate of George Hurrell. In March 1946 Thomas Hart Benton (Fig. 1) …