from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2013 | The Last of the Buffalo by Albert Bierstadt, c. 1888. Signed “AB[conjoined]ierstadt” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 60 ¼ by 96 ½ inches. The challenge of Go West!: Art of the American Frontier is to present us with a century (1830-1930) of familiar and unfamiliar images and to help us see them …
Wendell D. Garrett Award
We at ANTIQUES are pleased that Gerald W. R. Ward has been named the first recipient of the Wendell D. Garrett Award by the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, which established the prize as a testament to the accomplishments of one of its most illustrious alumni—and the indelible voice of our magazine for more than forty years. Like Wendell, Gerry …
Clare Leighton in Virginia
The Bird Cage (for Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree) by Leighton, 1940. Wood engraving on paper. On view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Leighton was raised in England, where she was well known for her illustrations of classic books by authors such as Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy and for her impressive writings and wood engravings about …
All About Eats: Art and the American Imagination in Chicago
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2013 | Fig. 7. Melons and Morning Glories by Peale, 1813. Inscribed “Raphaelle Peale Painted/Philadelphia Septr. 3d. 1813” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 20 ¾ by 25 ¾ inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of Paul Mellon. Not so long ago you could learn how to cook an opossum by consulting The Joy of Cooking. …
Editor’s letter, November/December 2013
Are New Yorkers the most parochial people on the planet? I sometimes think so, especially when it comes to art, where we have an absolute genius for overlooking the important in busy pursuit of The Important. We are a city of zeitgeist sniffers, way too hungry for whatever fad diet the art market is currently dishing out. Luckily our plat …
Saint-Gaudens in Washington, D.C.
Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), 1900. Patinated plaster. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art. On July 18, 1863, one of the first Union Army units of African-American soldiers stormed Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor. Led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the …
Upcoming auctions
October 22 Prints & Multiples at Bonhams, San Francisco, CA bonhams.com October 24 Fine American and European Painting, Drawings, and Sculpture at Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers, Milford, CT shannons.com October 25 Works of Art, Rarities, and Collectibles, online auctionata.com October 28 Fine European Furniture and Decorative Arts at Bonhams, San Francisco, CA bonhams.com October 30 Old Master through Modern Prints …
New Light on the Old Masters
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2013. In its ceremony and its symbolism, the staircase that leads up to the Metropolitan Museum’s galleries of Old Master paintings is one of the grandest theatrical experiences that New York has to offer. There are elevators, of course, and an escalator has been discreetly tucked away on the left. But to use them is …
Life Studies: Edward Hopper’s drawings
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2013. The hope of the artist is to resist interpretation. Emerson said that “to be great is to be misunderstood” and, pressed to explain his troubles, Hamlet cried to his interlocutors, “You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.” Among contemporary artists, Jasper Johns has made a creed of reticence, and Edward Hopper was …
For the love of architecture
Call it cultural vandalism: The case against the Museum of Modern Art’s plan to raze the former building of the American Folk Art Museum designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and completed in 2001. “Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s new American Folk Art Museum…is not only New York’s greatest museum since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim was completed in 1959, …
