Banning ivory: A nuanced approach needed

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

What began as a well-intentioned effort to halt the wanton slaughter of elephants has resulted in sweeping restrictions on the U.S. trade in elephant ivory.  As part of the Obama administration’s broader strategy to combat wildlife trafficking, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on February 11 announced new regulations prohibiting all imports, even antiques made partly or entirely of the …

Early California photographs at the Huntington

Editorial StaffMagazine

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens has made two exciting purchases that enhance its unparalleled ability to tell the story of Southern California as it was transformed from vast rural ranchlands into an international symbol of the good life. The newly acquired Ernest Marquez Collection of photographs, with prints from the 1870s to about 1950, includes rare views …

New exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes at the Frick Collection

Editorial StaffExhibitions

New York City’s Frick Collection recently opened an exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes from the collection of Janine and J. Tomilson Hill. Displayed are thirty-three statuettes, sculptures, and a relief by masters of the Italian, German, Dutch, and French schools of the late fifteenth into the eighteenth century. One highlight is a pair of bronzes titled Sleeping Hermaphrodite and …

Art of the South at Colonial Williamsburg

Editorial StaffArt, Exhibitions, Furniture & Decorative Arts

It’s been more than half a century since the groundbreaking Loan Exhibition of Southern Furniture 1640-1820 held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1952, and much has happened since then, not just in the study of southern furniture but of the decorative arts of the re­gion as a whole.  It is time, indeed, to re­visit the subject on …

Valentine’s Day by the numbers

Editorial StaffMagazine

We have published 92 February covers since 1922, and at least fourteen of them contain allusions to Valentine’s Day.   Some figures 8:  Love birds (four pairs) 1934, 1954, 1956, 1960 7:  Courting couples  1930, 1937, 1953, 1961, 1968, 1994, 2002 6:  The number of times Valentine’s Day graced the cover between 1951 and 1961. (The 1930s had four such …

Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris

Editorial StaffExhibitions

In the mid-nineteenth century Baron Haussmann’s famous transformation of Paris into the city of wide boulevards and parks that we now know erased a me­dieval Paris of narrow streets and congested neighborhoods. This older Paris was captured by the photographer Charles Marville just be­fore its demolition. Marville also photographed the new Paris as well as doing cloud studies and other …

Record-breaking folk art at Sotheby’s

Editorial StaffArt

Sotheby’s set a record on Saturday, January 25, with the sale of the Ralph O. Esmerian Collection of Folk Art. The 228 lots reached a total of $12,955,943 eclipsing the previous record set by Sotheby’s in 1994 with the sale of the Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little Collection. Saturday’s top lot was the 1923 figure of Santa Claus by …

Glackens and Whistler: A young man’s attraction

Editorial StaffArt

When citing the formative influences on the American artist William Glackens, we tend to round up the usual suspects: Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is true that all of these painters, as well as Edgar Degas, Théophile Steinlen, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse, evoked Glackens’s admiration, and he firmly believed that Americans who wished to …

Audubon’s birds, Audubon’s words

Editorial StaffArt

Few books are more famous than John James Audubon’s Birds of America. From the moment his birds began to emerge from the printing press in the 1820s, people marveled at their liveliness, as if the images might literally fly off the page in a ruffle of feathers. That liveliness was the product of Audubon’s genius and his love for the …

The unfashionable delights of Raoul Dufy

Editorial StaffArt

Raoul Dufy is a conspicuous example of a painter who has fallen almost com­pletely from grace. He has not been the subject of a major American exhibi­tion in over a generation, and his name, it seems, is rarely mentioned any more among the living. Indeed, there is no particular reason to write this article just now, since there is unlikely …