Cartier in Denver

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

In Brilliant: Cartier in the 20th Century the Denver Art Museum has taken a seventy-five-year slice (1900-1975) from the illustrious firm’s 160-plus-year history and illuminated a central paradox of great jewelry: greatness depends upon designs that capture a keen sense of the zeitgeist but do so with enough sheer awesomeness to stand far above it. And so, the exhibition’s vitrines …

Schoolgirl needlework at the Morven Museum

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

This year marks the 350th anniversary of NewJersey, a milestone celebrated across the state with events and pro­grams highlighting innova­tion, diversity, and liberty. The Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton is marking the occa­sion with an exhibition that in­troduces all three themes. Hail Specimen of Female Art! New Jersey Schoolgirl Needlework, 1726-1860 brings together 150 examples of needlework made in …

George Caleb Bingham at the Amon Carter Museum

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

When Virginia-born George Caleb Bingham was seven, his father lost most of the family’s fortune, and they moved to Missouri to build a new life, settling first in Franklin, on the banks of the Missouri River, and later on a farm in Saline County. Who knows what would have caught his imagination had Bingham stayed in Virginia, but there is …

Events: Exhibitions, symposiums, and lectures through December

Editorial Staff Calendar, Exhibitions

ALABAMA Montgomery Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts: “Alexander Archipenko: Dreizehn Steinzichnun­gen”; November 29 to January 18, 2015. “The Grand Tour: Prints from Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, and London”; to November 23. “Imprint­ing the West: Manifest Destiny, Real and Imag­ined”; November 8 to January 4, 2015. ARIZONA Tucson Tucson Museum of Art: “La Vida Fantas­tica: Selections from the Latin American Folk …

A Century of Mourning Attire at the Met

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Death Becomes Her, the Costume Institute’s first fall exhibition in eight years, examines American and English bereavement rituals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Period fashions and accessories, including hats, shawls, parasols, and jewelry, along with fashion plates, satirical illustrations, and mourning pictures reveal the formal rituals of bereavement, mostly observed by women. A woman’s selection of mourning clothing …

Egon Schiele at the Neue Galerie

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

What Egon Schiele would have achieved had he lived beyond his twenty-eighth year is a matter to keep art historians up at night. When he died of Spanish influenza in 1918 he had already accomplished an astonishing amount: some three thousand drawings as well as paintings and sculpture of sufficient merit to position him as the heir to the late …

Salon style at the New-York Historical Society

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

There is an excellent reason why we no longer hang paintings as they have now done in an odd but worthy exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. Indeed, even at the N-YHS, that hanging would be inexcusable, were it not for the fact that the whole point of The Works: Salon Style at the New-York Historical Society, (on view through February …

The democratization of glamour

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Every age sets its own standard for beauty and style, but rarely has there been an era when glamour and self-display dominated the spirit of the time as they did in the 1930s and 1940s. In spite, or perhaps because, of the Depression and its aftermath, jewelry and fashion designers were busy creat­ing new styles meant for a new elite–the …

Made in Texas

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Beeville, Texas, is not on everyone’s bucket list, but a visit to the Beeville Art Museum this fall will provide a fascinating look at life in the lone star state in the last half of the nineteenth century. Made in Texas: Art, Life and Culture, 1845-1900 brings together Texas-made art and objects that reflect the lives of Texans from the …

Thomas Hart Benton at the Met

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

To understand the significance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of Thomas Hart Benton’s ten-panel America Today so many decades after it was created for the New School for Social Research in 1930 and 1931, you need to know a little about the school in those heady days. Founded in 1919, by the 1930s the New School had become …