High tops and low

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Among the contents of the Allen Ginsberg Papers in Stanford University’s Green Library is a pair of worn and dirty tennis shoes. In the thousand linear feet of correspondence, photographs, manuscripts and notes, reel-to-reel recordings, performance posters, and broadsides, the beat-up sneakers hold their own. Purchased during his 1965 visit to Czechoslovakia, it is reasonable to surmise that Ginsberg wore …

Disturbers of the Peace

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Magazine

Arthur Bispo do Rosário at the Colônia Juliano Moreira, photograph by Walter Firmo, 1985. Private collection; © Walter Firmo, image courtesy Livre Galeria. One sign of an important exhibition may be its ability to move us into unfamiliar territory. By that measure, as by others, the recent show at the American Folk Art Museum, When the Curtain Never Comes Down, …

On stage in the garden: The roots of Frida Kahlo’s art at the New York Botanical Garden

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

After decades of lionization, what more could there be to say about Frida Kahlo? A great deal, as a visit to Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life, the new exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, proves. All it took was a fresh perspective and a unique team of talents. Born in 1907, Kahlo was, along with her husband, fellow painter …

Farther afield: Mannequins at the reopened Musée Bourdelle

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

The Musée Bourdelle reopens after an eight-month renovation with a special exhibition devoted to artists’ mannequins. The show plumbs the “unsettling strangeness” of these objects with a display of rare mannequins from the eighteenth century to the present day as well as paintings, drawings, engravings, and photographs that reveal their relationships with the artists who depicted them. A catalogue has …

Gray matters

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Furniture & Decorative Arts

Recent films, exhibitions, and books re-establish Eileen Gray’s reputation and start to set the record straight   History was made at the Grand Palais in Paris on February 24, 2009, when lot 276 in Christie’s sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé was hammered down. In the midst of an economic recession, Eileen Gray’s Dragons armchair …

Wonder and menace, dreams and nightmares: Visions of Coney Island

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Fig. 1. Steeplechase Funny Face, n.d. Painted metal; diameter 23 inches. Collection of Ken Harck. An extraordinary array of artists have perceived Coney Island as a prism through which to view the American experience. Their visions have imagined the future and recalled the past; they have conveyed shifting ideas about leisure, and explored issues of race, ethnicity, and class. What …

The gold dust twins: Thomas Hart Benton, Walt Disney, and the mining of frontier mythology

Jake Milgram Wien Exhibitions

      Fig. 1. Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), c. 1944. Gelatin silver print, 9 ¼ by 7 ¼ inches. Private collection. Fig. 2. Walt Disney (1901–1966) by George Hurrell (1904–1992). Gelatin silver print, 9 by 7 inches. Courtesy of Laguna Art Museum and Walt Disney Company © Estate of George Hurrell. In March 1946 Thomas Hart Benton (Fig. 1) …

The allure of Leeds House: An unparalleled private collection finds its ideal home in Philadelphia

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Living with Antiques

Last winter, one of America’s great private collections slipped quietly from its urban home of nearly two decades in upper Manhattan to the splendor of a historic estate in Philadelphia. Preparing to move the peerless arts and crafts furniture, metalwork, glass, and ceramics, not to mention the sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, consumed the prior autumn months. Art handlers …

Making friends with fraktur: Some thoughts on the exhibition Drawn with Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

If you are fraktur ignorant, fraktur agnostic, or fraktur allergic, this is an exhibition that should win you over. From its opening moment where a huge curving wall enlarges a small 1834-1835 gem of Adam and Eve attributed to Samuel Gottschall, the visitor is primed for seduction. How cunning of this artist to have depicted Eve being seduced by a …

Current and coming: Rivera and Kahlo in Detroit

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

To celebrate its rebirth as an independent museum after the city’s brush with bankruptcy, the Detroit Institute of Arts is mounting Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit, focusing on what is arguably the quintessential Detroit work of art, Detroit Industry, Rivera’s monumental twenty-seven-panel mural for the museum’s courtyard. Preparatory drawing for Pharmaceutics, part of the Detroit Industry mural by …