A new sporadical email newsletter about the arts of the past as they live in the present day by Elizabeth Pochoda, Advisory Editor, The Magazine ANTIQUES.
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Double Exposure by Pieter Estersohn with Mario De Castro From the bullfighting ring to the atelier, Portuguese photographic pioneer Carlos Relvas constructed an early studio every bit as eccentric as his life. Weaving a New Dawn by Paula Deitz Jeremy Frey, master Passamaquoddy basket maker, has taken traditional Indigenous forms to new heights. Possessed by Pablo Bronstein, as told to …
A divine passion
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun was the most sought-after portraitist of the ancien régime.
Editor’s Letter
The American Revolution has a hit on its hands with Hamilton, the hip-hop musical currently lighting up Broadway. “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story,” the cast sings in its sly retooling of our republic as the story of Alexander Hamilton’s rise through the imperial city of New York (“History is happening in Manhattan and we just happen/to be in …
Editor’s letter, September/October 2015
One afternoon not long after I began working here I opened a letter that asked me a challenging question: how, the writer wanted to know, “did a Polack [sic] like you get your position?” After a few jolly moments in the office I called our longtime editor Wendell Garrett, who enjoyed odd news from the passing scene. Wendell was amused, …
Editor’s letter, January/February 2015
When he was designing the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth the great American architect Louis Kahn said that he wanted it to resemble “a friendly home.” That might surprise anyone familiar with Kahn’s museums—the Kimbell, the Yale Center for British Art, or the Yale University Art Gallery—but I think he was simply saying that he wanted his building to wall …
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 …
City Barnes
Architecture, by Greg Cerio | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Let’s set aside any recap of the Sturm und Drang that accompanied the move of the Barnes Foundation from its home in suburban Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, to central Philadelphia, as well as the uproar over the legal legerdemain that erased many of the strictly defined codicils in the …
Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
We are certainly entitled to call Eugene Von Bruenchenhein an outsider artist, but he himself would not have seen it that way. Yes, he was self-taught and impoverished and surely he felt deeply alienated from the society that surrounded him. But you could say as much for many another artist who achieved success over the past century. As for Von …
Alice Neel and Carlos Enriques: Starting out in the twenties
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, Summer 2010 | Fig. 2. Carlos Enríquez by Alice Neel (1900–1984), 1926. Oil on canvas, 30 ¼ by 24 inches. Estate ofAlice Neel; photograph by Malcolm Varon © Estate of Alice Neel. Fig. 3. Alice Neel by Carlos Enríquez (1900–1957), 1927. Inscribed “La Habana/1927” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 23 ⅝ by 19 ⅝ inches. …