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 …
Mastering the old masters: Paul Cadmus
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 …
Genius is always above its age
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 …
Early Color
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 …
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 …
Color in a Higher Key: John La Farge
John La Farge and Paul Gauguin never met, which is just as well. Had they done so, these two painters, one an American academician, the other a French bohemian, would surely have despised one another. Indeed, even without meeting Gauguin, La Farge was comfortable dismissing him as “wild and stupid…[a man who] went into the wilderness and lived the simple …
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, …