How a tsunami-tossed pair of sacred Japanese artifacts found their way across the Pacific and back home again. Surrounded by seagulls, the first kasagi discovered on the beach in Oceanside, Oregon, in March 2013. Photograph by Judson Randall. A wooden plaque mortised into the second kasagi to wash up in Oregon bore the name of the donor, Toshimi Takahashi, and …
Sculpting Joy: Experiencing the artist and his art at the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation
In the entranceway to the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation, located in a town house in historic Greenwich Village, two sculptures by Chaim Gross welcome visitors to the place where he worked and lived. Together, they announce the hallmarks of his art. The first is Family of Five Acrobats (1955), a bronze sculpture with a black patina that stands …
Women’s work
For the first time a woman has been nominated by a major party for the presidency of the United States. This summer’s U.S. Olympic team included more women than men. And American art museums are increasingly giving women their due. The Norton Museum of Art in Florida is a good example, as evidenced by its acquisitions of works by American …
Rhode Island gets its due
Thanks to an active export market that sent its wares to the southern colonies, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean, furniture makers of Rhode Island enjoyed an influence far greater than their industry’s small size. The region’s superlative, and often misattributed, craftsmanship from the colonial and early Federal periods is the focus of a new exhibition, Art and Industry in …
That was another country
Notes on Photographs by Larry Silver, 1949–1955 at the New-York Historical Society. Precisely because photography is thought to be the most objective of all mediums, it acquires over the course of years, and seemingly in spite of itself, a haunted quality that no other product of visual culture can claim to the same degree. Fig. 9. Leaving Penn Station, 1952. …
Dramatic Encounters at the 2016 Biennale des Antiquaires
There was an air of confident renewal at this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires, the grand and sophisticated Paris showcase for art, antiques, jewelry, and antiquities which, despite its name, will become an annual event next year under a new name to be announced in October. A dramatic wood figure from Yimam, circa 1650, at the booth of Galerie Meyer. Photo by Marisa Bartolucci. …
Disruptive influences in Philadelphia
This fall the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents two exhibitions about art and artistry that upended the cultural apple cart—albeit in vastly different times, places, ways, and contexts. September 3 saw the debut of Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House—a showcase for a suite of furnishings designed by the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and fabricated in …
Meet the Meyers at the Jewish Museum
By Stephanie L. Herdrich, Metropolitan Museum of Art John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children, a dazzling display of fin-desiècle opulence and bravura painting, is the focus of a dossier exhibition this fall at New York’s Jewish Museum. The exhibition explores the sitter’s identity and life as a privileged Jew in late Victorian London and affords visitors a …
The Magazine ANTIQUES spotted in Soho
The Magazine ANTIQUES really covers a lot of ground. Hat tip to Crozier Fine Arts, Inc.
Treasury Notes
With a boost from Broadway, the caretakers of Hamilton Grange cast new light on the charms of Alexander Hamilton’s once bucolic home. The Broadway musical Hamilton has created something of a second American Revolution, reviving American promise in the person of a penniless bastard orphan who washed up on these shores and be came…Alexander Hamilton! It is this reprise of …










