How the West was seen

Editorial StaffArt, Exhibitions

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

Editorial StaffMagazine, Opinion

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

Editorial StaffExhibitions

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

Editorial StaffArt

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. …

Saint-Gaudens in Washington, D.C.

Editorial StaffExhibitions

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

Editorial StaffArt, Calendar

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

Editorial StaffArt

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

Editorial StaffArt

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

Editorial StaffOpinion

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, …