Though the United States has been predominantly a nation of city dwellers since the 1920s, the farm still figures large in the American consciousness.
Around and about at the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris
Drama and scandal swirled around the opening of the twenty-eighth edition of the Biennale des Antiquaires. Less than a week before the celebrated fair opened, there was a thwarted terrorist attack near Notre Dame that only heightened anxiety about security, which was already tight, at the glorious glass-domed Grand Palais where the fair takes place, and made Parisians even gloomier about the year’s precipitous drop in tourism due to earlier attacks.
Crowning achievements at the Currier
Since the early nineteenth century, Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeastern United States at 6,288 feet, has played muse to some of America’s most famous artists, including Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt. Dramatic views of the “Crown of New England” rendered by painters and photographers helped spur the growth of scenic tourism in New Hamphire’s The White Mountains, …
Rhode Island gets its due
Thanks to an active export market that sent its wares to the southern colonies, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean, furniture makers of Rhode Island enjoyed an influence far greater than their industry’s small size. The region’s superlative, and often misattributed, craftsmanship from the colonial and early Federal periods is the focus of a new exhibition, Art and Industry in …
Dramatic Encounters at the 2016 Biennale des Antiquaires
There was an air of confident renewal at this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires, the grand and sophisticated Paris showcase for art, antiques, jewelry, and antiquities which, despite its name, will become an annual event next year under a new name to be announced in October. A dramatic wood figure from Yimam, circa 1650, at the booth of Galerie Meyer. Photo by Marisa Bartolucci. …
Disruptive influences in Philadelphia
This fall the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents two exhibitions about art and artistry that upended the cultural apple cart—albeit in vastly different times, places, ways, and contexts. September 3 saw the debut of Classical Splendor: Painted Furniture for a Grand Philadelphia House—a showcase for a suite of furnishings designed by the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe and fabricated in …
Meet the Meyers at the Jewish Museum
By Stephanie L. Herdrich, Metropolitan Museum of Art John Singer Sargent’s Mrs. Carl Meyer and Her Children, a dazzling display of fin-desiècle opulence and bravura painting, is the focus of a dossier exhibition this fall at New York’s Jewish Museum. The exhibition explores the sitter’s identity and life as a privileged Jew in late Victorian London and affords visitors a …
The Real American Grotesque
A group of circus posters at the Shelburne Museum illustrates the routine stereotypes and exploitative practices of circus owners as they battled one another for primacy. Fig. 3. History and Medical Description of the Two-Headed Girl, published by Warren, Johnson and Company, Buffalo New York, 1869. Pamphlet with woodcut illustrations, 7 by 5 inches. Shelburne Museum, Vermont, gift of the …
Of Meissen men…and women at the Frick
Vitreous, white, and often delicately translucent, porcelain was invented in China as early as the seventh century, but Western attempts to reproduce the Chinese miracle failed until the dawn of the eighteenth century, when the Saxon ruler Augustus the Strong pressed into his service the young Berlin alchemist Johann Friedrich Böttger and commanded him to enrich the Saxon coffers by …
Local color, global appeal
Three New Orleans museums and two community cultural institutions draw visitors from afar by keeping the focus on indigenous artistry. Detail of the feathers and beadwork on one of the many ornate Mardi Gras Indian suits on display at the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. Photograph courtesy of Meghan Henshaw and the Backstreet Cultural Museum. Visit …