from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | “While my childhood friends were engrossed in Boys’ Life, Mad Magazine, and racier fare, I eagerly anticipated next month’s issue” When my friend Betsy Pochoda invited me to write a brief celebratory essay marking the ninetieth anniversary of The Magazine Antiques, she extracted a promise that I would take a personal approach and …
In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | The small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, home to some 35,301 souls in the most recent census, is about to be transformed beyond recognition. Already it enjoys some modicum of renown as the ancestral abode of the Walton family: its late patriarch, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, opened his first five and dime here …
Color in a Higher Key: John La Farge
John La Farge and Paul Gauguin never met, which is just as well. Had they done so, these two painters, one an American academician, the other a French bohemian, would surely have despised one another. Indeed, even without meeting Gauguin, La Farge was comfortable dismissing him as “wild and stupid…[a man who] went into the wilderness and lived the simple …
Windows on the past: Watercolors of long-vanished houses and gardens
An exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt reminds us that we’ve always fetishized beautiful homes
