For the love of architecture

Editorial StaffOpinion

Call it cultural vandalism: The case against the Museum of Modern Art’s plan to raze the former building of the American Folk Art Museum designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and completed in 2001. “Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s new American Folk Art Museum…is not only New York’s greatest museum since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim was completed in 1959, …

Saving the Ark: Chicago’s grand synagogue Agudas Achim

Editorial StaffMagazine

Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood is tucked between the high-end shops of Michigan Avenue and the outskirts of suburban Evanston. In the early twentieth century large numbers of Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants settled there, until new roads and growing incomes pulled them away from the city in the years after World War II. They left behind the apartments, stores, and synagogues their parents …

Clare Leighton’s

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2011 | In 1948 Josiah Wedgwood and Sons commissioned printmaker and author Clare Leighton to make wood engravings for a set of twelve plates depicting New England industries. Leighton was in many ways a perfect choice with strong appeal to audiences in both England and the United States. She had established her reputation in Britain …

Monticello: Original colors and a broader historical context

Editorial StaffMagazine

  We picture Monticello when we think of Thomas Jefferson. What does it mean to us today, and how has its meaning shifted over time? As Jefferson-statesman, farmer, scientist, bibliophile, politician, and architect-helped to forge a new country based on new ideals, his plantation in Virginia’s gentle piedmont became his architectural crucible. The Palladio-inspired Monticello has long occupied a monumental …

Parisian jewelry and American patrons, real and fictional

Editorial StaffArt

By SHIRLEY BURY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 1992. The formidable skill of Parisian jewelers in interpreting the work of innovative designers was the prime cause of their international popularity. Although craftsmen elsewhere practiced the late eighteenth-century technique of open-backed, or à jour, setting, which allowed light to refract and reflect through the stones, greatly enhancing their brilliance, the contrast …

The jewelry of René Lalique

Editorial StaffArt

By GEOFFREY C. MUNN; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, June 1987. Even if the word genius was used as sparingly as it should be, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century jeweler René Lalique would always be so described. Rather than a craftsman with a leaning toward the artistic, he was an accomplished artist who chose to express himself primarily in …

John Trumbull’s portrait of Alexander Hamilton

Editorial StaffArt

A full-length portrait by the celebrated Revolutionary-era painter John Trumbull of Alexander Hamilton, then secretary of the treasury under President George Washington, has joined the permanent collections of both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, thanks to a gift from the painting’s former owner, the global wealth manager and investment bank Credit Suisse. Each …

Pictures within pictures: Photographs of American folk paintings, 1840-1880

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2013. Early photographs of Ameri­can folk paintings constitute a unique archive of works by both recognized and unknown artists,1 frequently even preserving a visual record of otherwise unknown paintings. A large number of early daguerreotypists practiced this lucra­tive work at a time when photography afforded Americans their first opportunity to have accurate copies of works …

Eminent Victorians

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

Photography by Alan Kolc | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2013. The brick house, handsomely trimmed in brownstone, dates from 1866, one of six iden­tical buildings in the heart of Philadelphia’s historic district. Situated a few streets away from Inde­pendence Hall, it was once the home of Brevet General Henry Harrison Bingham (1841-1912), a Congres­sional Medal of Honor laureate for …