See what’s going on this week in the art and antiques world
Checking in with Edward Hopper
The American artist Edward Hopper had a deep personal and professional interest in hotels, motels, tourist homes, and the wide scope of hospitality services—including the vast infrastructure of restaurants, entertainments, and staff servicing these institutions.
Openings & Closings: Exhibitions, Shows, Fairs 10/23/19–10/29/19
See what’s going on this week in the art and antiques world
Intelligent design
A look at the evolution of the decorative arts collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as it provides the loan exhibition for the 2018 edition of the Winter Antiques Show.
Strange bedfellows: Munch and Johns at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Asked to name two artists least likely to be paired in a museum exhibition, you could do worse than to suggest Edvard Munch and Jasper Johns. The former is the father of expressionism, maker of The Scream and other paintings filled with anxiety and existential dread; the latter is best known for his cool and detached depictions of commonplace objects such as flags and targets—works that laid the foundation for pop art and other contemporary art movements.
Clare Leighton in Virginia
The Bird Cage (for Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree) by Leighton, 1940. Wood engraving on paper. On view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Leighton was raised in England, where she was well known for her illustrations of classic books by authors such as Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy and for her impressive writings and wood engravings about …
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts reopens
With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, …
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond recently announced the acquisition of the Ludwig and Rosy Fischer collection of German Expressionist art—widely considered one of the finest groupings of material in the world. Assembled by the couple between 1905 and 1925 while living in Frankfurt, Germany, the Fisher collection comprises over 200 works that includes oil paintings, sculptures, …
The Worsham-Rockefeller rooms
In New York in the 1880s—the gilded age when the likes of the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and the Goulds were building their mansions along and near Fifth Avenue—the new aesthetic style often reigned supreme as the choice for their grand interiors. Herter Brothers, Kimbel and Cabus, Pottier and Stymus, Leon Marcotte are just a few of the firms that catered …