A royal residence gets a dazzling touch-up.
Dispatch 9: The LA Scene
The ninth edition of Dispatches, a new sporadical email newsletter about the arts of the past as they live in the present day by Elizabeth Pochoda, Advisory Editor, The Magazine ANTIQUES.
Setting the stage
The refurbishment of an 1855 theater and arts center is the latest milestone in the renaissance of Hudson, New York.
Matters of Taste
David Remnick, in a post-election piece in the New Yorker, went so far as to describe Trump as “vulgarity unbounded.” Are we about to have a four-year crash course in this topic? Maybe it’s time to take a closer look.
Make Americana great again: The Wunsch family has a plan
Among aficionados of early American decorative arts, the name Wunsch is legendary. The family’s art and antiques collection—started by the canny and ever-curious engineer E. Martin Wunsch (1924–2013), and administered under the aegis of the Wunsch Americana Foundation—is one of the most important in the field.
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 …
The Whitney After All
Some things just aren’t meant to fit in. The Whitney Museum of American Art certainly sounds like an august institution. But it was born on a scruffy back street in Greenwich Village at a time when “bohemian” meant “disreputable,” and during its six decades uptown—most of them at Madison Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street, in the moneyed precincts of the Upper …
The Seductions of Budapest
It is easy to succumb to the beauty of Budapest, Hungary’s capital city, which straddles the legendary Danube River flowing down from Germany out to the Black Sea. High on a hill on the Buda side stands the Buda Castle, erected on the ruins of former royal palaces going back to the thirteenth century. It is answered across the river …
On stage in the garden: The roots of Frida Kahlo’s art at the New York Botanical Garden
After decades of lionization, what more could there be to say about Frida Kahlo? A great deal, as a visit to Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life, the new exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, proves. All it took was a fresh perspective and a unique team of talents. Born in 1907, Kahlo was, along with her husband, fellow painter …
Farther afield: A Lost Paradise: The Clandon Park Fire
Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni created a magnificent Palladian residence for Thomas, the 2nd Baron Onslow, in the 1720s on the estate outside of Guildford, in Surrey, south of London, that the baron’s great-grandfather Richard Onslow, the MP for Surrey, had purchased in 1641. The dignified restraint of Leoni’s exterior hid a luxuriant interior oozing with Georgian glamour. Its most …