Over the past ten years Wade Lege has rescued some of the disappearing landmarks of his native Louisiana
Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper: Looking out, Looking Within
Consider Rockwell Kent’s paintings of land and sea as modern American mindscapes—poetic distillations of remote places that probe the mysteries of life. Kent hoped viewers would lose themselves in contemplation before his haunting visions.1 “Essentials only ought to go into painting,” he insisted. “I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.”2 He perceived the …
A Bronx Tale: Exhibitors from the Winter Antiques Show tour East Side House Settlement, the show’s beneficiary
East Side House Settlement (ESHS) Administrative Building, 337 Alexander Avenue, in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, New York. Photographs by Ahron Foster. “Take the work that you love, whatever it is, and angle it towards justice.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates September 29, 2015: On this beautiful Indian summer day two quite …
End Notes: Happy to be here, our new home near Madison Square Park
Last October The Magazine ANTIQUES and our sister publications MODERN and Art in America joined forces with the venerable ARTnews. In November we moved from SoHo, our longtime home, to new offices just down from Madison Square Park and within sight of the Flatiron Building, built in 1902, the year ARTnews began publication. By Eleanor H. Gustafson The Flatiron Building, …
Getting the blues: Transfer ware translated by three contemporary artists
You can only imagine what the china connoisseur in Edward Lamson Henry’s 1889 A Lover of Old China might think upon encountering a plate made by one of the three contemporary artists shown here. A Lover of Old China by Edward Lamson Henry (1841-1919), 1889. Oil on academy board, 14 by 12 inches. Shelburne Museum, Vermont. We, on the other …
OMG Indeed!
It was quiet in the galleries last September as I took a final walk through the Wadsworth Atheneum before the grand unveiling of our eight-year project to bring back its glories.
What we talk about when we talk about naive art
Late in the 1970s, sailing in the Grenadines, my wife Brigitte and I stopped at the small island of Bequia—an Arawak name meaning “island of the clouds.” It has now become a tourist stop. Port Elizabeth, its principal town, today advertises a “charming waterfront; take a stroll from the vegetable market, follow ‘front street’ with its many shops, boutiques and …
Editor’s Letter, January/February 2016
We occasionally split the run of an issue of ANTIQUES with one cover for subscribers—an interior from Abbeville, Louisiana, in this case—and another for distribution at shows—Louis Lozowick’s 1930 lithograph of the Brooklyn Bridge. If this sounds like a North/South thing it isn’t exactly, but I’ll explain that in a moment. The New York art and antiques season seems a …
New Worlds, New Art
Artistic representation of human interaction with the land has a long history in the Americas. It spans more than thirty thousand years, from the earthworks and pictographs of ancient indigenous cultures to the land art of the 1960s and 1970s to contemporary photographs of the terrible beauty of environmental destruction. It was during the early years of the nineteenth century, …
On Books: New and Noteworthy
Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman by Margaret K. Hofer and Roberta J. M. Olson (New-York Historical Society in association with D. Giles). 376 pp., color and b/w illus. There’s nowt so queer as folk,” according to the venerable English comment on the vagaries of human personality. Indeed, when the Polish-born American sculptor Elie …