As a symbol of fortitude and flexibility, bamboo often appears in Japanese art depicting rough weather—bearing up under high winds or the burden of snow, bending yet refusing to break.
Polished Performances
Classic and contemporary silver in dialogue at the Museum of the City of New York
Burchfield’s meteorological art in Montclair
Everyone talks about the weather. Charles Burchfield turned it into art. He rendered its shifts, subtle or severe, in watercolors and sketches, giving visual expression to the humidity on a summer evening, or the faint warmth of the sun on a spring afternoon.
A second-generation star of the Hudson River School
Sanford R. Gifford in the Catskills is the name of an intimate, beautifully curated exhibition on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. But the show could also have been subtitled Local Boy Makes Good.
Dispatch 14: Long Island City, Queens…
The fourteenth edition of Dispatches, a new sporadical email newsletter about the arts of the past as they live in the present day by Elizabeth Pochoda, Advisory Editor, The Magazine ANTIQUES.
A painter of big skies at the Michener
Pennsylvania impressionist George Sotter (1879–1953) excelled as a stained-glass artist before he turned his talents to landscape painting, and his facility with that first medium perhaps gave him a special understanding of the effects of light and color.
The sybaritic 1700s at the Kimbell
Courtier, boudoir aficionado, jailbird, and escape artist, Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) was the perpetual motion libertine of Enlightenment Europe. He wrote what is probably history’s most salacious tell-all, Histoire de ma vie (Story of My Life), recounting all he did, and, to the delight of art lovers, some of what he saw.
A New World Old Master
In the closing years of the seventeenth century, Cristóbal de Villalpando was, in all likelihood, the best-known painter in the New World—and most of us have never heard of him.
India and the arts and crafts movement at the Bard Graduate Center
The name Kipling is synonymous with British India in the nineteenth century, but a new exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York hopes to foster associations beyond Gunga Din, Kim, and Peachey Carnehan.
The ICA in Los Angeles opens with a bang
Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) was an itinerant Mexican laborer who, homeless in California in the 1930s and arrested for vagrancy, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life confined to state psychiatric institutions. Ramírez was also, by many lights, one of the more brilliant artists of the twentieth century.