A man of many talents, Robert Hicks has a unique sense of what collecting can mean in the South.
Dennis Miller, Helen Keller, Bunker
The solemn nothings that fill our everyday life blossom suddenly into bright possibilities —Helen Keller Life is such an actual thing —Dennis Miller Bunker Is it just me or is Dennis Miller Bunker’s painting Wild Asters more than beautiful (Fig. 1)? The blue stream rushes under us, grasses bending in the current, and the streamside bushes spray on either bank. …
Local color, global appeal
Three New Orleans museums and two community cultural institutions draw visitors from afar by keeping the focus on indigenous artistry. Detail of the feathers and beadwork on one of the many ornate Mardi Gras Indian suits on display at the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. Photograph courtesy of Meghan Henshaw and the Backstreet Cultural Museum. Visit …
Bringing back Olana
The fiftieth anniversary of the rescue of Church’s exotic masterpiece finds it and its spectacular landscape more popular than ever with lovers of art, architecture, and ecology. View looking south to the Hudson River from the bell tower of the main house at Olana. Andy Wainwright 2004. Just south of Hudson, New York, a signpost on Route 9G marks the …
It was never about the food
Drawn to restaurants as settings for his stylish avatars of American anomie, Edward Hopper deliberately avoided giving them anything to eat. Chop Suey by Edward Hopper (1882–1967), 1929. Oil on canvas, 32 by 38 inches. Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth; photograph courtesy of the Seattle Art Museum. The painter Edward Hopper seemed to care a great deal about what he put …
Walker Evans: early and late
The man who, more than any other, gave visual expression to American life during the Great Depression was not a painter, but a photographer who originally wanted to be a writer. As surely as Aubrey Beardsley’s graphic mastery defined London in the mauve nineties, Walker Evans’s stark photographs remain the most powerful and enduring images of America in its time …
The Victoria and Albert’s new look at “Europe 1600–1815”
By Joan DeJean Neptune and Triton by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 1622– 1623, as installed in the newly reopened Europe 1600–1815 galleries at the V&A. Except as noted, all images © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In December 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum’s European galleries were opened to the public for the first time in nearly …
Undersea Adventures
A summer day on a Cape Cod beach. Blue skies. Warm weather. A slight breeze. Strolling with my wife and four young children. A moment to relax, a time to unwind. Could it get any better? STOP! NOW! DON’T TOUCH THAT! Model of Ommastrephes sagittatus (Blaschka Nr. 578) by Leopold (1822–1895) and Rudolf Blaschka (1857–1939), 1885. Overall height, approximately 7 …
Editor’s Letter, May/June 2016
Glenn Adamson joins us this month as editor at large with an interesting mandate you can read about below. Glenn was most recently director of the Museum of Arts and Design. Before that he was head of research at the V&A, and curator of the Chipstone Foundation. The Magazine ANTIQUES: In your column you will think through difficult matters that …
The Yale Center for British Art Reopens
The Library Court of the Yale Center for British Art, following its recent reinstallation. Photograph by Richard Caspole. Traditional architecture can age gracefully but nothing is more dispiriting than modernism gone to seed. That may be especially true of Louis Kahn’s work because Kahn hid nothing; it was part of his bravery, and his ethics, to put every …