Charles Melville Dewey: A forgotten master of classic tonalism

Editorial Staff Art

November 2009 | Of all the great disappearing acts in American art history, the tonalist artist Charles Melville Dewey’s is one of the most complete and inexplicable. Few artists of the period received more glowing notices from critics or were more widely admired in elite art circles, only to have left so little in the way of a footprint. Like …

American artists as they saw themselves

Editorial Staff Art

November 2009 | In The American School (Fig. 1) Matthew Pratt portrays himself seated at his easel, the sharp profile of his head silhouetted against the canvas, which bears his signature at bottom left. Holding a palette and maulstick to steady his hand, Pratt presents himself as a painter—an astonishing act of bravado as he had just arrived in England …

In conversation with….Clifford Wallach, tramp art expert

Editorial Staff Art, Books

Clifford Wallach is a widely recognized expert in the field of tramp art—a branch of folk art in which objects are constructed from chip carved wood. As an antiques dealer, scholar, and author of two books on the subject, Tramp Art: One Notch at a Time (1998) and most recently Tramp Art: Another Notch, Folk Art From the Heart (2009), …

Behind the Screen: Amelia with Paul Austerberry

Editorial Staff Art

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 …

My MESDA

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Furniture & Decorative Arts

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 …

Blockbuster shows in London and Paris

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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 …

Blocks of color

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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 …

Dealer Profile: David Lavender

Editorial Staff Art

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 …

Endnotes: Duck call

Editorial Staff Art

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 …

The Art of the Samurai at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

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 …