Rediscovering an art star

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | In recent decades, few provinces of human creativity have fallen into swifter or more thorough disrepute than the society portrait. So steeply have its fortunes declined that the latest generation might be surprised to learn that this genre once held a position of signal honor among the varied forms of painting. Indeed, a …

Past, Present, and Future at the Huntington

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | Its name, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, pretty well covers what this singular institution in San Marino, California, is all about. But it hardly begins to tell the story. The creation of Henry E. Huntington, a man with forward-looking business sense and retrospective tastes in art and literature, the Huntington today is …

In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges

Editorial StaffArt

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 …

The comeback: The National Academy reopens with six new exhibitions

Editorial StaffExhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | The National Academy reopens with six exhibitions designed to reclaim its pivotal role in American art and architecture. Many who stroll along New York’s Museum Mile surely break their stride at the handsome Beaux Arts facade at 1083 Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. They slow down …

Charles Melville Dewey: A forgotten master of classic tonalism

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November 2009 | Of all the great disappearing acts in American art history, the tonalist artist Charles Melville Dewey’s is one of the most complete and inexplicable. Few artists of the period received more glowing notices from critics or were more widely admired in elite art circles, only to have left so little in the way of a footprint. Like …

American artists as they saw themselves

Editorial StaffArt

November 2009 | In The American School (Fig. 1) Matthew Pratt portrays himself seated at his easel, the sharp profile of his head silhouetted against the canvas, which bears his signature at bottom left. Holding a palette and maulstick to steady his hand, Pratt presents himself as a painter—an astonishing act of bravado as he had just arrived in England …

A guide to fall symposiums

Editorial StaffArt, Furniture & Decorative Arts

To celebrate the fall season we’ve compiled an extensive—though not exhaustive—list of several upcoming symposiums that present an exciting and diverse roster of talks related to art history, decorative arts, design, and visual culture. We hope that you will have a chance to attend some. October 1-2, 2009“A Long and Tumultuous Relationship”: East-West Interchanges in American Art Smithsonian American Art …