The Whitney After All

Editorial Staff Art

Some things just aren’t meant to fit in. The Whitney Museum of American Art certainly sounds like an august institution. But it was born on a scruffy back street in Greenwich Village at a time when “bohemian” meant “disreputable,” and during its six decades uptown—most of them at Madison Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street, in the moneyed precincts of the Upper …

The Seductions of Budapest

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

It is easy to succumb to the beauty of Budapest, Hungary’s capital city, which straddles the legendary Danube River flowing down from Germany out to the Black Sea. High on a hill on the Buda side stands the Buda Castle, erected on the ruins of former royal palaces going back to the thirteenth century. It is answered across the river …

“As seen through the work of women”: The New Hall Art Collection at Cambridge University

Editorial Staff Art

Art pilgrims intent on making Cambridge, England, their destination should extend their journey beyond the university’s majestic Fitzwilliam Museum and its old masters and Kettle’s Yard, the fey modernist cenacle of British art between the wars, to include the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, one of three exclusively women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge. Unknown to …

End notes: John Singer Sargent’s portraits at the MET

Editorial Staff Art

“Scintillating…addictive” applauded The Guardian; “outstanding…one of the best I’ve ever seen,” acclaimed The Telegraph; “mesmerising” said The Spectator. All were describing the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at London’s National Portrait Gallery earlier this year. But for anyone in New York this summer, it gets even better. An expanded version of the show of John Singer Sargent’s portraits …

Disturbers of the Peace

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Magazine

Arthur Bispo do Rosário at the Colônia Juliano Moreira, photograph by Walter Firmo, 1985. Private collection; © Walter Firmo, image courtesy Livre Galeria. One sign of an important exhibition may be its ability to move us into unfamiliar territory. By that measure, as by others, the recent show at the American Folk Art Museum, When the Curtain Never Comes Down, …

A charmed life

WILLIAM NATHANIEL BANKS Furniture & Decorative Arts, Living with Antiques

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 …

Wonder and menace, dreams and nightmares: Visions of Coney Island

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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 allure of Leeds House: An unparalleled private collection finds its ideal home in Philadelphia

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Living with Antiques

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 …

Editor’s letter, March/April 2015

Editorial Staff Opinion

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 …