“We’ve done something that hasn’t been done before,” Stuart P. Feld told me, raising an eyebrow ever so slightly above the rim of his glasses, after the opening earlier this year of Hirschl and Adler’s exciting new gallery in the Crown Building, on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street in midtown Manhattan. And indeed, decorative and fine …
The comeback: The National Academy reopens with six new exhibitions
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | The National Academy reopens with six exhibitions designed to reclaim its pivotal role in American art and architecture. Many who stroll along New York’s Museum Mile surely break their stride at the handsome Beaux Arts facade at 1083 Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. They slow down …
Fortunate Son: Reading the memoirs of Albert Sack
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2011 | “I was a good student up through 6th grade but then my priorities became play, friends, and girls. Mother kept a beautiful home. Dad was prosperous in carving out his career which interested me not at all.” Card table, John and Thomas Seymour. Boston, c. 1794. Courtesy of the Brant Foundation, Inc. Sideboard, …
The life and jewelry of Gustav Manz
Fig. 1. Collage of drawings from a scrapbook of jewelry designs by Gustav Manz, c. 1910–1920. The scrapbook remains in Manz’s family. Collection of the Mathews family. Fig. 2. Gustav Manz (1865-1946) in his studio in a photograph of c. 1935. Collection of Robert Gustav Eastman. Fig. 3. Bracelet attributed to Manz, c. 1925. Yellow gold with colored sapphires …
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
We are certainly entitled to call Eugene Von Bruenchenhein an outsider artist, but he himself would not have seen it that way. Yes, he was self-taught and impoverished and surely he felt deeply alienated from the society that surrounded him. But you could say as much for many another artist who achieved success over the past century. As for Von …
Venetian glass
Fazzoletto (handkerchief) vase designed by Fulvio Bianconi (1915–1996) for Venini and Company, Murano, c. 1950. Glass, height 11 inches. Photograph by courtesy of Glass Past, New York. Right: Fazzoletto vase designed by Bianconi for Venini and Company, Murano, c. 1950. Glass, height 7 ¼ inches. Gardner and Barr photograph. Pair of footed vases made by Salviati Dott. Antonio, Murano, c. …
Chantilly: The Musée Condé remembers Henri IV
Chantilly: The Musée Condé remembers Henri IV. The Musée Condé at the Château de Chantilly, less than an hour north of Paris and accessible by the RER train line, commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of the assassination of the French king Henri IV with an exhibition devoted to this perennially popular monarch. Rich in paintings of the family, lovers, enemies, …
Los Angeles Folk
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, Summer 2010 | Fig. 1. Frame decorated with the ceremonial symbols of the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), American, c. 1870. Wood, paint, and gilding; height 27 ¾, width 22 ½ inches. Fig. 2. Hand-carved and painted heart-in-hand IOOF staffs, American, 1880–1930. Fig. 3. Mounted above a grain-painted Pennsylvania stand of c. 1830 is a …
Netherlands Old world collectors and collecting
Paintings of collectors’ cabinets orrooms of art celebrate collecting.The form emerged in the early seventeenthcentury in the rich merchant cityof Antwerp, where this exhibition, ajoint venture of the Rubenshuis thereand the Mauritshuis in The Hague, wasrecently on view. For the first time, theexhibition brings together the threeextraordinary works by the early masterof the genre, Willem van Haecht II,whose father, Tobias …
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reopens
With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, …