America is so rich in great museums that we have come to take them for granted. We should not.
Making it Two Authors
Despite our best efforts to be accurate, on the rare occasion something slips through the cracks.
Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America by Catherine E. Kelly
Artists and writers in eighteenth-century America, eager to craft a democratic culture distinct from that of Europe, but nonetheless notable for its refinement, elevated the idea of “taste” as an index of character and national virtue. This was not a populist project, but it reached into everyday life through the efforts of the people Catherine Kelly calls “aesthetic entrepreneurs,” who painted portraits, disseminated prints, opened museums, and produced banners and memorabilia to draw the multitudes into a patriotic festival of right-minded taste.
On Books: New and Noteworthy
Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman by Margaret K. Hofer and Roberta J. M. Olson (New-York Historical Society in association with D. Giles). 376 pp., color and b/w illus. There’s nowt so queer as folk,” according to the venerable English comment on the vagaries of human personality. Indeed, when the Polish-born American sculptor Elie …
Black dolls
Dolls are the only toys made in our image, the only human-like creatures children are given dominion over.
About books
Recent noteworthy publications that are a pleasure to read and a delight to behold French Art Deco by Jared Goss (Metropolitan Museum of Art, distr. Yale University Press). 280 pp., color and b/w illus. As an artistic term, art deco is one of the most misunderstood. “Art Deco is commonly referred to as a ‘style,’ a designation that suggests specific shared characteristics,” …
Farther afield: London’s leather alchemist: Gavin Rookledge, Rooks Books
Rooks Books produces books (and other leather-wrapped objects) that have a tactile, physical presence while exuding a sense of otherworldly mystery. One might expect to find such volumes in the hands of Gandalf or on the walls of the library at Hogwarts. Each uniquely created binding, made from a vast variety of leathers and other natural skins, seems to say, …
Current and coming: Books at the Morgan
Whatever my other sins might be, envy is not usually among them. And yet, I recently felt that unwelcome emotion as I leafed through a coffee table book devoted to, of all things, the private library of Carl Gustav Jung. To turn from those rows of solemn volumes to the calamitous misalliance of dust jackets and trade paperbacks that make …
Land of the Upper Hudson
By LOUIS C. JONES; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July 1951. For miles through the silent mountains the trickle flows-a vagrant brook playing at the feet of mountains-from the beginnings to the sea, guarded and shadowed by mountains. Cabins and shabby forms lie beside it-housing men to whom guns and a rod are dearer by far than the ho and the plow. There …
Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue (1931-2013)
© Lucy Dickens / National Portrait Gallery, London The noted authority on eighteenth-century French furniture and Sèvres porcelain, Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Surveyor Emeritus of the Queen’s Works of Art died on January 4, 2013. The pinnacle of Sir Geoffrey’s research and study was the three-volume catalogue, French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, published in 2009. …