Hilary Swank’s portrayal of pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart in the new film Amelia has been turning heads—but the real star of Mira Nair’s biopic might just be the gorgeous vintage planes. As the film’s visual consultant, Toronto-based Paul Austerberry spent months researching classic aircraft. He talked to The Magazine ANTIQUES about that process, and explained why flying a late-1930s eight-seater …
Sometimes you have to move every object in a collection to fully appreciate it. In January the curatorial team at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts did just that. We moved virtually every exhibited object in the museum’s galleries and opened our new 45-minute guided tour, called Southernisms: People and Places, in one week’s time. Exhausted, and with sore …
Moctezuma The British Museum inaugurates a fall blockbuster season with a sweeping exhibition on the last Aztec ruler. Anticipating the 2010 bicentennial of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, the British Museum completes its four-part series on great rulers with the first major show devoted to the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II. That the museum has chosen to …
One of the country’s finest collections of American color woodcuts is now being featured in the exhibition Blocks of Color: American Woodcuts from the 1890s to the Present at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, through January 3, 2010. The Zimmerli has one of the largest university print collections in the country …
One of the surprises of the huge Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sale this past February was the splendid selection of objets de vertu the two men had gathered for their twentieth-century Kunstkammer. The way in which this assemblage contravened recent trends in collecting was on my mind as I waited to see the London dealer David Lavender, whose …
This Canada goose clearly lost its bearings, migrating all the way to South America in the twentieth century before returning to the United States this past August. A routine e-mail inquiry to Christie’s in New York resulted in the exciting realization that it was only the fourth decoy of its type to come to light. What makes it so special …
* Christie’s London/October 27, 20th Century Decorative Art & Design The sale total was £778,625. The top lot was a set of six art nouveau chairs by Emile Gallé that sold for £79,250 (estimate £30,000-50,000). Other top lots were a vitrine by Koloman Moser for J & J Kohn that sold for £51,650 (estimate £15,000-20,000), and a prototype Odalisque bench …
Selecting a single object from the myriad works on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art‘s current exhibition Art of the Samurai (through January 10, 2010) presents a challenge. The exhibit, which Roberta Smith of the New York Times has called a “once-in-lifetime event for children, war buffs and connoisseurs of all ages, even garden-variety art lovers,” includes more than …
In her manners manual Etiquette (1955), Emily Post suggests throwing a cocktail party in an effort to maximize socialization using minimal space. She advises that serving cocktails at home—unlike throwing a dinner party—frees one up for time better spent mingling with guests. Still today, with space at a premium, this gesture remains a popular alternative that undoubtedly can be done …
Wrapping up the 21st annual International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show, which closed on Thursday, organizers Brian and Anna Haughton, who recently announced they will host a major new fair—Art Antiques London—in June 2010, reported healthy sales and attendance significantly up from last year. In the Haughtons’ own words, the fair was a display of “objects of drop-dead beauty, …