Julia Margaret Cameron’s “photography has been a touchstone for generations of photographers. The pictorialists adored her,” writes Phillip Prodger in our article about the British photographer in this issue. And he couldn’t be more right, says Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art and co-curator of the museum’s stunning exhibition Shadows and Dreams: Pictorialist Photography in …
“As seen through the work of women”: The New Hall Art Collection at Cambridge University
Art pilgrims intent on making Cambridge, England, their destination should extend their journey beyond the university’s majestic Fitzwilliam Museum and its old masters and Kettle’s Yard, the fey modernist cenacle of British art between the wars, to include the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, one of three exclusively women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge. Unknown to …
One Off
“There has never been another artist like George Caleb Bingham” Fig. 1. The Jolly Flatboatmen by Bingham, 1846. Oil on canvas, 38 by 48 ½ inches. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., Patrons’ Permanent Fund. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, most American artists were “outsider” artists, in the sense that these denizens of the New World stood …
Current and coming: The Scene
When it opened last fall on Newport’s swank Bellevue Avenue, the Audrain Automobile Museum was immediately up to speed (metaphors drawn from car culture are inexcusable but somehow inevitable with the Audrain), exhibiting a small but head-turning group of rare pre-World War II luxury cars, such as a fire-engine red 1930 Pierce-Arrow Convertible with a custom fitted compartment for your …
Current and coming: Rivera and Kahlo in Detroit
To celebrate its rebirth as an independent museum after the city’s brush with bankruptcy, the Detroit Institute of Arts is mounting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, focusing on what is arguably the quintessential Detroit work of art, Detroit Industry, Rivera’s monumental twenty-seven-panel mural for the museum’s courtyard. Preparatory drawing for Pharmaceutics, part of the Detroit Industry mural by …
Current and coming: Horace Pippin in Chadds Ford
John Brown Going to His Hanging by Horace Pippin, 1942. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, John Lambert Fund. Although his reputation as an artist of consequence has never faltered, Horace Pippin, who was widely exhibited in the 1940s when he was championed by Albert Barnes among other luminaries, has not had a major exhibition in more than two …
Current and coming: Coney Island in Hartford
The Steeplechase, Coney Island by Milton Avery, 1929. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Sally M. Avery. Image © 2013 Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art. There will be four venues in the coming year for the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008. Would that there were forty more so …
Morse at the Huntington Library
It would probably surprise Samuel F. B. Morse, and not pleasantly, that future generations know him for his invention of Morse code and his services to telegraphy, rather than for those paintings, produced over six decades, that were the serious business of his life. Despite a strict Protestant upbringing, Morse (1791-1872) spent three years in Europe under the tutelage of …
Cartier in Denver
In Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century the Denver Art Museum has taken a seventy-five-year slice (1900-1975) from the illustrious firm’s 160-plus-year history and illuminated a central paradox of great jewelry: greatness depends upon designs that capture a keen sense of the zeitgeist but do so with enough sheer awesomeness to stand far above it. And so, the exhibition’s vitrines …
Suida-Manning Collection at the Blanton Museum
For art lovers, the most interesting thing in Austin, Texas, is not the LBJ Presidential Library or the grandiose State House–impressive as both of them are–but the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Texas. A fine example of a university or college museum, it has strong collections of American and Latin American art, …






