Folk art rising

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Although the American Folk Art Museum received a great deal of press attention upon the closing of its award-winning building on Fifty-Third Street last year, the really big story was to be found in its immediate resurgence. Beginning with the hugely successful red and white quilt show at the Park Avenue Armory and …

Past, Present, and Future at the Huntington

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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 …

On Southern Turf

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

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 …

Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the furniture of John and Hugh Finlay

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

December 2009 | On the evening of Wednesday, August 24, 1814, British troops brazenly torched much of the small capital city of Washington, including the large Virginia sand­­­stone house built as the residence for the president of the United States between 1792 and 1800 (see Fig. 1).1 Among the losses smoldering in the rubble was an extraordinary set of painted …

My MESDA

Editorial StaffExhibitions, Furniture & Decorative Arts

Sometimes you have to move every object in a collection to fully appreciate it.  In January the curatorial team at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts did just that.  We moved virtually every exhibited object in the museum’s galleries and opened our new 45-minute guided tour, called Southernisms: People and Places, in one week’s time.  Exhausted, and with sore …

This Week’s Top Lots: September 26 – October 2

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* Skinner Boston/September 26, American Indian & Ethnographic ArtThe top lot was a tie between a 19th century carved Maori figure of a man (estimate $30,000-50,000) and a 19th century carved wood triple-blade gunstock club (estimate $25,000-35,000) that each sold for $35,500. Another top lot was a pre-Columbian carved limestone figure that sold for $29,625 (estimate $6,000-8,000). * Christie’s New …