We look forward to the merger of The Magazine ANTIQUES and MODERN Magazine with ARTNEWS S.A. as we expand our digital presence, reach new readers, and bring the best in scholarship and criticism on the fine and decorative arts to a global audience.
Disturbers of the Peace
Arthur Bispo do Rosário at the Colônia Juliano Moreira, photograph by Walter Firmo, 1985. Private collection; © Walter Firmo, image courtesy Livre Galeria. One sign of an important exhibition may be its ability to move us into unfamiliar territory. By that measure, as by others, the recent show at the American Folk Art Museum, When the Curtain Never Comes Down, …
Black dolls
Dolls are the only toys made in our image, the only human-like creatures children are given dominion over.
A charmed life
English inspiration, American creativity, and a bit of historical luck are joined in the author’s house and gardens Several years ago English friends came for lunch at my house, now called the Gordon-Banks house, in Newnan, Georgia, some forty miles southwest of Atlanta. They walked down a wide hallway onto a porch that overlooks a terrace and what the English …
The gold dust twins: Thomas Hart Benton, Walt Disney, and the mining of frontier mythology
Fig. 1. Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), c. 1944. Gelatin silver print, 9 ¼ by 7 ¼ inches. Private collection. Fig. 2. Walt Disney (1901–1966) by George Hurrell (1904–1992). Gelatin silver print, 9 by 7 inches. Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum and Walt Disney Company © Estate of George Hurrell. In March 1946 Thomas Hart Benton (Fig. 1) …
Catesby: Man of Many Talents
A full century before John James Audubon published his Birds of America, an Englishman, Mark Catesby, brought out two folio volumes of what he grandly named Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands….This is probably the first history of any importance ever done of American flora and fauna; certainly it is the foremost on American birds, which comprise …
Editor’s letter, March/April 2015
The divide between “pure” art (painting and sculpture mostly) and functional art (lighting, ceramics, furniture, and so much else) comes and goes in history depending on who has the power to enforce its shaky distinctions. Just now the contemporary art market tilts toward the healthy side of the issue: a table by Urs Fischer, for instance, is a work of …
End notes: Sylvia L. Yount takes charge of the Met’s American Wing
Based as we are in New York, the staff of The Magazine ANTIQUES has a fond if not proprietary tendency to look upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially its American Wing, as our “local” museum. So when we heard the news that the redoubtable Morrison H. Heckscher was retiring after forty-eight years, thirteen of them as head of the …
Museum accessions
This short list of notable acquisitions began with a request to decorative arts curators in major American museums to choose and discuss a favorite recent gift or purchase. Raphaelle Peale’s Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup has come to the Seattle Art Museum from the estate of Ruth J. Nutt, well known to collectors of American silver for the …
Living with Thomas Jayne
The most surprising interior in London is Sir John Soane’s Museum. The sheer density of paintings, sculpture, furniture, architectural fragments and models, Greco-Roman marbles, and much more appears largely as it did when the renowned early nineteenth-century architect lived there, arranging and rearranging his art, artifacts, and antiquities. What elevates the profusion from an eccentric jumble to a splendid, startlingly …