The term “Ashcan school” is applied to artists as varied as Robert Henri, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn, and yet it was most likely coined in response to one particular member of their circle and his work: John Sloan, with his warm and sympathetic depictions of the life of the common man in New York in the decades after the turn of the twentieth century.
Ring Master: Tolkien at the Morgan Library
Before writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien had been hired by Oxford and Leeds Universities to teach philology, the study of languages. The attention he paid to words was at the heart of his creative process, which goes under the microscope this winter at the Morgan Library and Museum in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth.
Starting a Conversation
A new exhibition of artworks from the National Academy of Design creates a dialogue between artists across the centuries
Get thee to Williamsburg
If there’s bright spot in the heart of late winter, it’s the Colonial Williamsburg Antiques Forum. This year’s edition, the seventy-first, opens on February 22nd and runs through the 26th, with the theme “Hidden Treasures: New Findings and Rediscoveries.”
Moviemaker at the Museum
Scholars be warned: Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures, a current exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, is not for you. If, on the other hand, you’re a fan of such films as The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Royal Tenenbaums, you just might love the show.
Painting the New Parisians
An exhibition at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery includes a study of the black figure in the art of the French impressionists
Artful Craft at the High Museum
The exhibition only has sixteen works on view, yet it seems much larger. Each object has such vitality and presence: from a North Carolina quilt across which five stylized coral snakes wriggle, to a mid-nineteenth-century walnut framed pie safe from Tennessee with ebulliently painted and perforated doors, to an 1858 alkaline-glazed stoneware jar made, signed, inscribed, and dated by David Drake, the famed potter of the Edgefield District of South Carolina.
Canon Fodder at Hirschl & Adler
The rise of the neoclassical style in American decorative arts in the early decades of the nineteenth century coincided with a collective national sigh of relief.
Treasure Island
A Q+A with Nantucket Historical Association curator Michael Harrison
Ralston Crawford’s visions of man and machine at the Nelson-Atkins
A pioneer of precisionist painting and geometric abstraction as well as a celebrated photographer, Ralston Crawford (1906–1978) was equally fascinated by mankind and the man-made. Both subjects—and a link between Crawford’s artistic practices—are explored in the exhibition Structured Visions: The Photographs of Ralston Crawford at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.