Despite cold temperatures and snow on the ground this mid-April morning, it is spring, one of loveliest harbingers of which is the annual Antique Garden Furniture Fair held at the New York Botanical Garden. Scheduled this year for Friday April 25 through Sunday April 27, with its always delightful preview party and private plant sale on Thursday, April 24 from …
Current and coming: A Philadelphia sampler
THE PHILADELPHIA ANTIQUES SHOW‘s hardworking committee, on the job since 1962, this year welcomes the show’s new director Catherine Sweeney Singer. From this pairing expect a fresh take on tradition, the best of the past proffered with invigorated ideas for the present. The gala preview is April 25, and the show runs through April 29. Limning a portrait of a …
Visions and revisions of Paris
Amid the colorless rubble that rises up all around them, amid shattered brick and sheered off walls that once were homes, men gaze, as though shell-shocked, into the camera’s eye. This is hell on earth. It is also Paris, France. The photograph, taken in 1876, depicts the construction of the avenue de l’Opéra (see p. 122, top). It is now …
Seen and Heard
TRANSITIONS London-based Asian art specialist Ben Janssens, who was injured in a cycling accident last August, has resigned as chairman of the European Fine Art Fair after seven years. He will continue serving on TEFAF’s board of trustees and as chairman of its Antiquairs section. Willem van Roijen succeeds Janssens, replacing acting TEFAF chairman Robert Aronson. Joshua W. Lane (left) …
At the Met: Carpets of the East in paintings from the West
The cross-disciplinary exhibition opened on March 11 at the Metropolitan Museum explores the way carpets moved and were used around the globe by pairing three seventeenth–century Islamic rugs with Dutch paintings of the same period. The Magazine ANTIQUES spoke to exhibition curator Deniz Beyazit, the assistant curator in the Department of Islamic Art, to understand the origins of the project, …
BADA Antiques and Fine Art Fair
Founded in 1918, the British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA) has long been the gold standard for such organizations and may be the most difficult to gain entrance to. It has, however, recently struggled with how best to refresh itself without compromising its strict requirements for quality and ethics. On the heels of the election of Michael D. Cohen of Cohen …
Exhibitions: Now on view
Yale University Art Gallery: “Byobu: The Grandeur of Japanese Screens”; to July 6 (New Haven, Connecticut) Delaware Art Museum: “‘Bessed are thePeacemakers’: Violet Oakley’s The Angel of Victory (1941)”; to May 25 (Wilmington, Delaware) Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art: “William Glackens”; to June 1 (Fort Lauderdale, Florida) Ballet Dancer Seated on a Stool by Henri Matisse, French (1869-1954), 1927. Oil on canvas, 32 …
New exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes at the Frick Collection
New York City’s Frick Collection recently opened an exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes from the collection of Janine and J. Tomilson Hill. Displayed are thirty-three statuettes, sculptures, and a relief by masters of the Italian, German, Dutch, and French schools of the late fifteenth into the eighteenth century. One highlight is a pair of bronzes titled Sleeping Hermaphrodite and …
Art of the South at Colonial Williamsburg
It’s been more than half a century since the groundbreaking Loan Exhibition of Southern Furniture 1640-1820 held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1952, and much has happened since then, not just in the study of southern furniture but of the decorative arts of the region as a whole. It is time, indeed, to revisit the subject on …
Charles Marville, Photographer of Paris
In the mid-nineteenth century Baron Haussmann’s famous transformation of Paris into the city of wide boulevards and parks that we now know erased a medieval Paris of narrow streets and congested neighborhoods. This older Paris was captured by the photographer Charles Marville just before its demolition. Marville also photographed the new Paris as well as doing cloud studies and other …