In the closing years of the seventeenth century, Cristóbal de Villalpando was, in all likelihood, the best-known painter in the New World—and most of us have never heard of him.
Purple mountains’ majesty in Tacoma
Rain, snow, high winds, and vertiginous mountain peaks—these were not a problem for the prolific landscape artist Abby Williams Hill (1861–1943), one of the most intrepid plein-air painters America has ever produced.
At Vanderbilt: an influential artist and teacher remembered
When modernism dominated art in the United States, from the interwar period onward, Morris Davidson was a prominent and widely exhibited painter—as well as a teacher, a critic, and a leader of arts organizations. And yet, since his death in 1979, his work has fallen into obscurity.
An avant-garde patron and peer at the Jewish Museum
A feminist with a penchant for wit, whimsy, and social satire, the artist and Jazz Age saloniste Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) has often, and unfairly, been misconstrued by critics: her playfulness misread as frivolity, her style and subject matter cast as lacking gravitas.
Glackens and Whistler: A young man’s attraction
When citing the formative influences on the American artist William Glackens, we tend to round up the usual suspects: Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is true that all of these painters, as well as Edgar Degas, Théophile Steinlen, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse, evoked Glackens’s admiration, and he firmly believed that Americans who wished to …
The unfashionable delights of Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy is a conspicuous example of a painter who has fallen almost completely from grace. He has not been the subject of a major American exhibition in over a generation, and his name, it seems, is rarely mentioned any more among the living. Indeed, there is no particular reason to write this article just now, since there is unlikely …
How the West was seen
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2013 | The Last of the Buffalo by Albert Bierstadt, c. 1888. Signed “AB[conjoined]ierstadt” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 60 ¼ by 96 ½ inches. The challenge of Go West!: Art of the American Frontier is to present us with a century (1830-1930) of familiar and unfamiliar images and to help us see them …
West and Copley in Houston
Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), 1778. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund. An adventurous exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston should alter our views on the influence of early American painting and painters. American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World explores the way in which two colonial painters …
Subject and object: The collection of Philip Pearlstein
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 …
The Civil War at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
July 1-3, 2013 marks the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has two exhibitions commemorating the event: “Photography and the American Civil War” and “The Civil War and American Art”; both to September 2. Inspired by and using images from the photography exhibition, the Met’s artist in residence, Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky …