End notes: Summer of art

Editorial Staff Art

Do you remember the game License Plates, when vacation travel meant keeping your eyes peeled for car tags from as many states as possible? Well, this summer you can play Art Everywhere, looking for masterpieces of American art scattered across the American landscape. In some fifty thousand outdoor locations across the country starting on August 4–in cities and towns large …

Breaking ground: British folk art at the Tate

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

In 1768, when the British Royal Academy of Arts was established, it emphatically distinguished the fine arts from crafts by exiling the latter, declaring that “no needlework, artificial flowers, cut-paper, shell-work or any such performances should be admitted.” By 1948 artworks from outside the main­stream still had not overcome this prejudice, prompting the designer, writer, and folk art enthusiast Enid …

House of the spirits

Editorial Staff Art

In time, Sylvanus Griswold Morley would be known as the brilliant Mayanist who exca­vated Chichén Itzá and, controversially, as Agent 53, a scientist who used his Central Amer­ican fieldwork as a cover for spying on behalf of the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War I.1 But in 1910 the young Harvard-trained archae­ologist whose interest in the ancient Southwest brought …

Ezra Wood, profile cutter

Editorial Staff Art

By Olive Crittenden Robinson; originally published in August 1942. Among records of the many profile cutters of silhouettists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries flourishing in Massachusetts, no mention appears of Ezra Wood who plied his art along with his trade in Buckland, Franklin County, Massachusetts. Indeed while eastern Massachusetts seems well represented in ‘black portraiture,” my search …

From the archives: “New Mexican tinwork, 1840-1915”

Editorial Staff Art

By Lane Coulter; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 1991 The art of the tinsmith flourished in New Mexico from about 1840 to 1915. During this period Hispanic tinsmiths primarily made devotional objects that reflected the Roman Catholicism of the Spanish Southwest, but they also made a limited number of more secular objects. They used shapes derived from architecture as well as immensely …

Then and Now: A museum’s museum

Editorial Staff Art

One of my earliest memories is from half a century ago and relates to something that I saw, and that astonished me, in the darkened halls of the American Museum of Natural History. I was four and my nanny was taking me-not for the first time, as I clearly recall-to the museum, a few blocks from where I grew up. …

Meet the Altamiras at the Met

Editorial Staff Art

Go to the Metropolitan and meet the Altamiras, one of the richest and most illustrious families of 18th Century Spain. Four of Goya’s portraits of the family are assembled in one place for the first time in a century and a half. So illustrious was the family that the father, Vicente Joaquín Osorio Moscoso y Guzmán, 12th Conde de Altamira, …

Object of devotion at MOBiA

Editorial Staff Art

It was big news in the museum world when the New York Times reported that a rare exhibition of Donatello, considered by some to be the finest sculptor of the Renaissance, was coming to New York City. But the venue for Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces From Florence Cathedral (on view from February 20 through June 14, …

New collector: Botanical prints

Editorial Staff Art

Although the earliest surviving illustrated botanical manuscript dates from AD 512-the Vienna Dioscurides, a copy of the important medical treatise by the first-century Greek physician and herbalist Pedanius Dioscurides-botanical illustration as a distinctive artistic genre developed in the fifteenth century with the rise of illustrated herbals, manuscripts explaining the medicinal and culinary uses of plants and flowers. After all, in …

Crossing borders, ignoring boundaries

Editorial Staff Art

Originally published in March/April 2014 For the past few years, while much of the art world has been gnashing its teeth over the fate of the American Folk Art Museum’s former home in midtown Manhattan, the institution itself has continued to pursue its critical work of shaping the discourse in the field. Since decamping in 2011 from the soon-to-be-demolished Tod …