To understand the world of James Donald Didier you should pay attention to his silence
The glitter of Night Hauling: Andrew Wyeth in the 1940s
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | How do we account for the strangeness of Andrew Wyeth’s art of the 1940s? How, that is, beyond discerning the surrealist undertones, finding the magic realist affinities, or seeing that Wyeth followed in a Brandywine tradition whose oddity was firmly established by Howard Pyle-lone pirates on desolate shores; magicians and curly-shoed dwarves; Revolutionary …
Past, Present, and Future at the Huntington
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | Its name, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, pretty well covers what this singular institution in San Marino, California, is all about. But it hardly begins to tell the story. The creation of Henry E. Huntington, a man with forward-looking business sense and retrospective tastes in art and literature, the Huntington today is …
The Kaufman Collection: The pursuit of excellence and a gift to the nation
Photography by Gavin Ashworth | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | In my catalogue of friends, mentors, scholars, and collectors, Linda H. and the late George M. Kaufman fill all the roles. From my earliest acquaintance with them in 1974, I have been in awe of their collection and of their indefatigable focus on beauty and excellence in their Norfolk, …
On Southern Turf
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | For Mary and Hank Brockman the proper preservation of the South’s material culture includes art, architecture, artifacts and the landscape. Fig. 22. The back stairwell is hung with Depression era photographs of the American South. One wall holds elegiac images of southern mansions by surrealist photographer John Clarence Laughlin (1905-1985), whose Ghosts Along …
The Real Story of Sleepy Hollow
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Washington Irving could spin a tale so well that even Charles Dickens was in his thrall. “I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of the seven,” the English novelist said, “without taking Washington Irving under my arm.”* Irving’s success was long in coming, but it enabled him to move to a …
Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | People don’t like hocus-pocus,” Richard Hampton Jenrette tells me. A fit eighty-two, the former lion of Wall Street seems a model of sanity in an insane world. Take his views on finance: “Wall Street has been high-jacked by speculators.” Or industry: “We are foolish to have outsourced our manufacturing.” Fig. 1. Edgewater, as …
Duncan Phyfe: A New York Story
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011| Fig. 1. The Shepherd Boy (also known as Landscape with Shepherd) by Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872), 1852. Signed and dated “R.S. Duncanson/1852” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 32 ½ by 48 ¼ inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Hanson K. Corning by exchange. Fig. 3. The Rainbow by Duncanson, 1859. Signed …
Living with antiques: No velvet ropes–a collection in New Jersey
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | Called the last of the Georgians by the architect Robert A. M. Stern, Mott B. Schmidt dared to be unfashionable, stubbornly designing traditional houses for town and country long after they were in favor.* Schmidt’s houses in the American Georgian manner usually relied on a restrained combination of red brick, dark shutters, and …
The comeback: The National Academy reopens with six new exhibitions
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | The National Academy reopens with six exhibitions designed to reclaim its pivotal role in American art and architecture. Many who stroll along New York’s Museum Mile surely break their stride at the handsome Beaux Arts facade at 1083 Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. They slow down …