from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | Twenty-five years ago in these pages, Beatrice B. Garvan wrote about an anonymous collection of Pennsylvania folk art that was already more than a quarter-century in the making. Garvan was struck by the coherence of the assemblage that was ever in flux, by the sense of motion generated by the collectors’ unyielding search …
Loving the Gilded Age and learning how to look
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | John R. Tschirch is accustomed to being recognized. As Director of Museum Affairs for the Preservation Society of Newport County, he is in and out of the organization’s eleven historic houses so frequently that the volunteers and staff who usher nearly eight hundred thousand visitors through the mansions each year straighten when they see him …
South America’s epic past unfolds in a New York City town house
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | “Everything is timing,” says Richard Huber, recalling opportunities spotted and seized over a long career that took him and his wife, Roberta, around the world. On a gamble, they invested in vineyards in Chile, an icebreaker in Antarctica, even an emerald mine in Minas Gerais, Brazil. A twenty-five-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the Brazilian outback served …
Beyond moonlight and magnolias
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2012 | “When I met Frank Horton and saw the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in 1976, I put down the Confederate flag and picked up a chair leg. How much better to see the South through its art, to understand its identity through its achievements rather than through the sacrifice of war. Here …
Folk art rising
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Although the American Folk Art Museum received a great deal of press attention upon the closing of its award-winning building on Fifty-Third Street last year, the really big story was to be found in its immediate resurgence. Beginning with the hugely successful red and white quilt show at the Park Avenue Armory and …
Antiques Week in Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Antiques Show
From its redesigned catalogue to its sleek new stands, the Philadelphia Antiques Show looked younger than its 51 years when it opened on Friday, April 27, for a five-day run. Organized as a benefit for Penn Medicine, the show is one of the oldest and most traditional in the country with a reputation for top-flight American, English, and …
TEFAF, The App
The future of the art fair catalogue has arrived… and it is a TEFAF app for a smart phone. At yesterday’s by invitation only preview for the European Fine Art Fair in Maasstricht, the most coveted accessory was a smart phone loaded with the new device. Interactive maps help visitors navigate their ways through the vast 265 exhibitor display. …
Seen and Heard at the European Fine Art Fair: TEFAF Day One
“The museum doesn’t have a shopping list but I hope our collectors do,” said MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers, who accompanied a group of American collectors through the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) on its opening day, March 15. “I could be tempted to collect Old Master pictures instead of contemporary art,” Whitney Museum of American Art director Adam …
Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | People don’t like hocus-pocus,” Richard Hampton Jenrette tells me. A fit eighty-two, the former lion of Wall Street seems a model of sanity in an insane world. Take his views on finance: “Wall Street has been high-jacked by speculators.” Or industry: “We are foolish to have outsourced our manufacturing.” Fig. 1. Edgewater, as …
In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | The small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, home to some 35,301 souls in the most recent census, is about to be transformed beyond recognition. Already it enjoys some modicum of renown as the ancestral abode of the Walton family: its late patriarch, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, opened his first five and dime here …