Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “James Gardner”
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 …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2013. The arcane logic that unites the naked human form with a metal fan, a duck decoy, and an inflatable King Tut effigy may not seem self-evident to the average art lover: but for the past generation, these two subsets of creation have come together in the paintings of Philip Pearlstein. An avid collector of …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | At some point during the 1800s, when nobody was looking, an institution passed away that for centuries had been a fixture of the visual arts: the artistic dynasty, the family of painters who, across several generations, maintained a consistent aesthetic profile. One is put in mind of this institution, and of its demise, …
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 …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | One hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the act of monumental commemoration was a relatively simple affair. A victory in battle or the founding of an institution was seen, at least as regarded the monument in question, to be completely good. A massacre or natural catastrophe was assumed to be completely bad. Anyone deserving …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | An exhibition of the sixteenth-century master reveals an artist uniquely committed to art, wealth, and aristocracy. A visit to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, feels nothing like a visit to Venice, Italy. Both cities, it is true, are on, in, or beside a large body of water, but beyond …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | It is one of the platitudes of recent culture, certainly since the 1960s, that the function of art is to challenge and provoke the public and the powers that be. For the record, art does not need to be challenging: it needs to be good, although it occasionally attains both goals and more …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | A traveling retrospective of George Bellows offers a fresh perspective on an artist whose work transcended time, place, and the accomplishments of his contemporaries. To say that George Bellows was quintessentially American is to state nothing less than the outstanding fact about the man. Though he moved in 1904 to New …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Color, rather than composition, subject matter, or form, is the true life force of photography. Color is the fluid essence of the quotidian, of life as it is lived in its ceaseless flux and reflux. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the early twentieth-century autochromes of Heinrich Kühn, who is …
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 …