Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

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 …

In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges

Editorial Staff Art

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 …

American genre painting and the rise of ‘average taste’

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Nearly a century and a half after its publication in 1867, Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists is valued today mainly for its wealth of biographical data. But Tuckerman’s pronouncements summarizing the development of American art culture also deserve closer examination. Of particular interest is his reference to “average taste,” a descriptive …

Hirschl and Adler

Editorial Staff Art

“We’ve done something that hasn’t been done before,” Stuart P. Feld told me, rais­ing an eyebrow ever so slightly above the rim of his glasses, after the opening earlier this year of Hirschl and Adler’s exciting new gallery in the Crown Building, on the southwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh Street in midtown Manhattan. And indeed, decorative and fine …

After Grosvenor

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

On the heels of its seventy-fifth anniversary last June, the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair announced that it would close. Only time will tell how its absence will shift the balance of European fairs in 2010. In the meantime, Europe’s organizers unveil their plans for the coming year. BRUSSELS Held at the same time as the Winter Antiques Show …

Chicago and the arts and crafts movement

Editorial Staff Art

October 2009 | “Chicago is the only American city I have seen where something absolutely distinctive in aesthetic handling of material has been evolved out of the industrial system” – C. R. Ashbee During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Chicago stood at the crossroads of the handcrafted and the machine-made, aspects that came to define the American arts …