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. …
Gauguin rising
October 2009 | That anyone even remembers the so-called Volpini exhibition of 1889—which has just been artfully re-created at the Cleveland Museum of Art—is a minor miracle. At the time, this modest Paris show, organized by Paul Gauguin and destined to introduce a new kind of art to the larger world, had to compete for attention with Thomas Edison’s phonograph, …
Venice on the Gulf Coast
John and Mabel Ringling’s fantasy palazzo in Sarasota is a testament to the romantic power of architecture.
Object lesson: Lights from the Dark Ages: The Lüsterweibchen
All about the world’s weirdest chandeliers.
“Gracious and artful devices for the adornment of life”
An excerpt from the new book English Needlework, 1600–1740, The Percival D. Griffiths Collection charts the origins of the twentieth-century reappraisal of the embroiderer’s art.
“To Wield the Needle with Advantage”
American schoolgirl academy embroidery, 1790 to 1830
ANTIQUES in the Beginning
Part II: The enterprising editor Alice Winchester