Last Chance: Shows Closing this Weekend Connecticut New Britain New Britain Museum of American Art: “Courier & Ives: Impressions of America”; to April 15 Florida West Palm Beach Norton Museum of Art: “Cocktail culture”; to April 15 Georgia Athens Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia: “To Make a world: George Ault and 1940s America”; to April …
Upscale Downsized
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Downsizing-a midlife rite of passage common to those whose offspring have grown up and moved out-is not a contingency that his friends would have ever dreamed possible of the abundance-loving Paul F. Walter, the New York connoisseur renowned for the scale and quality of his pathbreaking collections, which have run the gamut …
Early Color
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Color, rather than composition, subject matter, or form, is the true life force of photography. Color is the fluid essence of the quotidian, of life as it is lived in its ceaseless flux and reflux. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the early twentieth-century autochromes of Heinrich Kühn, who is …
Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | In 1851 Albert, prince consort of Queen Victoria, and the architect Henry Cole realized their grand vision of an international exhibition where the traditions, aspirations, and accomplishments of many nations were showcased.1 Hardware at the Great Exhibition by Joseph Nash (1809-1878), from Dickenson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London 1852). Color lithograph. Victoria and Albert Museum, …
On Southern Turf
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | For Mary and Hank Brockman the proper preservation of the South’s material culture includes art, architecture, artifacts and the landscape. Fig. 22. The back stairwell is hung with Depression era photographs of the American South. One wall holds elegiac images of southern mansions by surrealist photographer John Clarence Laughlin (1905-1985), whose Ghosts Along …
Rose Fever: The paintings of George Cochran Lambdin
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | After his death in 1896 George Cochran Lambdin was remembered by friends and memorialists alike for his paintings of roses. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mr. Lambdin is known wherever there is anything known of American art as the facile princeps in this specialty.”1 At the height of the tea rose craze during …
In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | The small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, home to some 35,301 souls in the most recent census, is about to be transformed beyond recognition. Already it enjoys some modicum of renown as the ancestral abode of the Walton family: its late patriarch, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, opened his first five and dime here …
Living with antiques: Elective affinities- the Ashcan school in Birmingham, Alabama
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Our grandparents all came from Eastern Europe,” Nan Skier says, “and they came with no money or language skills. By their strength they made a good life and were successful, but they were pushcart peddlers when they got here. That’s one of the reasons the Ashcan school appeals to us. It’s our roots, …
Rodin and America: The artist’s influence in the United States
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Fig. 1. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) by Edward Steichen (1879-1973), 1907. Photogravure (from Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, April-July 1911); 9 ½ by 6 ½ inches. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, gift of the William R. Rubin Foundation. By 1900 it was common to liken Auguste …
Master of delight: William J. Glackens at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Fig.1. Cape Cod Pier byWilliam J. Glackens (1870-1938), 1908. Signed “W. Glackens” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 26 by 32 inches. The works illustrated are inthe Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Gift of an anonymous donor. Behind the facade of a modern white monolith shimmering in the light of the Florida sun lies …