This article was originally published in the 1987 October issue of ANTIQUES. Pl. XIII. At the end of the beech allée at Chatsworth in Derbyshire is a colossal marble bust of William George Spencer Cavendish (1790 – 1858), sixth duke of Devonshire, on a marble column from the Temple of Minerva Sunias in Greece. No English country-house garden would be …
Last winter, one of America’s great private collections slipped quietly from its urban home of nearly two decades in upper Manhattan to the splendor of a historic estate in Philadelphia. Preparing to move the peerless arts and crafts furniture, metalwork, glass, and ceramics, not to mention the sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, consumed the prior autumn months. Art handlers …
If you are fraktur ignorant, fraktur agnostic, or fraktur allergic, this is an exhibition that should win you over. From its opening moment where a huge curving wall enlarges a small 1834-1835 gem of Adam and Eve attributed to Samuel Gottschall, the visitor is primed for seduction. How cunning of this artist to have depicted Eve being seduced by a …
To celebrate its rebirth as an independent museum after the city’s brush with bankruptcy, the Detroit Institute of Arts is mounting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, focusing on what is arguably the quintessential Detroit work of art, Detroit Industry, Rivera’s monumental twenty-seven-panel mural for the museum’s courtyard. Preparatory drawing for Pharmaceutics, part of the Detroit Industry mural by …
John Brown Going to His Hanging by Horace Pippin, 1942. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, John Lambert Fund. Although his reputation as an artist of consequence has never faltered, Horace Pippin, who was widely exhibited in the 1940s when he was championed by Albert Barnes among other luminaries, has not had a major exhibition in more than two …
The Steeplechase, Coney Island by Milton Avery, 1929. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Sally M. Avery. Image © 2013 Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art. There will be four venues in the coming year for the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008. Would that there were forty more so …
When The Magazine ANTIQUES started publication in January 1922, it coincided with the end of the War of Independence between Ireland and Great Britain and the beginning of a self-inflicted and even more brutal Civil War among opposing factions of the Irish Republican Army that would last until 1923.1 Although ANTIQUES ’s mandate was to whet its readership’s appetite for the …
A full century before John James Audubon published his Birds of America, an Englishman, Mark Catesby, brought out two folio volumes of what he grandly named Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands….This is probably the first history of any importance ever done of American flora and fauna; certainly it is the foremost on American birds, which comprise …
More than just a display of handsome pictures, Rescued, Restored, Reimagined: New York’s Landmark Interiors, an exhibition at the New York School of Interior Design (to April 24), tells the stories behind a variety of landmark interiors that have been preserved throughout the city. It includes familiar sites such as Radio City Music Hall, but focuses primarily on the more …
The divide between “pure” art (painting and sculpture mostly) and functional art (lighting, ceramics, furniture, and so much else) comes and goes in history depending on who has the power to enforce its shaky distinctions. Just now the contemporary art market tilts toward the healthy side of the issue: a table by Urs Fischer, for instance, is a work of …