The fourth installment of our web-only column on ceramics and glass.
“Pleasure in the beautiful ‘thing as such’ “
Fashion and the Wiener Werkstätte
The Met snares a splendid piece of southern stoneware
Face jugs crafted in the mid-nineteenth century by slaves and freedmen working in the Edgefield District of South Carolina are among the rarest and most historically significant of American folk art ceramics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently acquired a superb one.
Bravura bamboo at the Met
As a symbol of fortitude and flexibility, bamboo often appears in Japanese art depicting rough weather—bearing up under high winds or the burden of snow, bending yet refusing to break.
Polished Performances
Classic and contemporary silver in dialogue at the Museum of the City of New York
A second-generation star of the Hudson River School
Sanford R. Gifford in the Catskills is the name of an intimate, beautifully curated exhibition on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. But the show could also have been subtitled Local Boy Makes Good.
Arts and letters
A new exhibition explores the affinities between the work of Henry James and the American painting of his time.
Charmed circle
A new exhibition at the Guggenheim examines the supernatural symbolist artists of late nineteenth-century France.
The City of Hudson, New York
In September 1609, in search of a northwest passage to Asia, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed their ship the Half Moon up a course of water that the locals then called Mohicanituk (“River That Flows Both Ways”).
A tastemaker and her rediscovered treasures
For the insatiable salonniere Mabel Dodge Luhan, life’s must-haves were animate. The doyenne of modernism and social rival to Gertrude Stein called herself “a collector of people who made a difference.” Photographer Ansel Adams—one of dozens of painters, photographers, writers, scholars, and assorted intellectuals drawn into her orbit in Florence, New York, and Taos in the first half of the …