It’s good to stand in a new civic building like the V&A Dundee and feel the well-earned pride of people who’ve done something grand. Not just the curators, the rest of the staff, the local officials, and the building team. The new museum enlisted the entire city. For them, it’s a measure of Dundee’s future.
The Cartier fern-spray brooches
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | The beauty of the diamond contains within it the awesomeness of geological time. But for sheer scale and lavishness, diamond jewelry reached its climax during the relatively brief reign of Britain’s Edward VII from 1901 to 1910. The conventions of evening court attire made it imperative that those in possession of a fortune …
Many paths to modernity
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | A 1947 newsreel shows throngs of men filling Delhi’s open spaces and government compounds while a voiceover in a clipped British cadence reports that “everyone ran wild with joy.”1 After almost ninety years of colonial rule, the Indian subcontinent was free-albeit split. Twenty-four hours earlier, Pakistan had been carved out as an independent …
Rediscovering an art star
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 …
1735-1790: Painters, Paintings, & the American South
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | The history of the paintings and painters associated with the American South begins in the sixteenth century with maps and natural-history drawings created by the first artist-explorers to arrive in the region. By the mid-seventeenth century the southern colonies also boasted portraiture and other types of paintings, all of which increased in number …
Monumental confidence: restored Roosevelt murals
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 …
Yeshiva University Museum Appoints Wisse as New Director
Following the retirement of Sylvia A. Herskowitz, who served in the post for 33 years, Dr. Jacob Wisse has been appointed director of the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City, whose permanent collection includes more than 9,000 objects spanning over 3,000 years of Jewish history. A Montreal native, Wisse earned his B.A. from McGill University before going on to …