By PAUL MAGRIEL; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January 1948. Paul Magriel was formerly on the staff of the Museum of Modern Art, where he arranged a number of exhibitions on the history of dancing. His exhibition, The Ring and the Glove, on view at the Museum of the City of New York until April 4, 1948, is the first full-scale retrospective exhibition of …
The hidden face of the Civil War
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | This summer the nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Most historians believe the repulse by George G. Meade of Robert E. Lee’s emboldened Army of Northern Virginia was the turning point of the American Civil War. Fought in and around a small town eighty-five miles north of the …
George IV and the arts of France
By Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Deputy surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art Originally published by The Magazine ANTIQUES in May 1966. From the day that George IV, as Prince of Wales, first took up residence at Carlton House when he came of age in 1782, to his death in 1830, he collected French works of art on a scale previously …
Current & Coming, January-March
For sheer variety of form, color, period, and place of origin it is difficult to match the offerings at the annual New York Ceramics Fair, where thirty-three tightly packed booths represent virtually everything in the world of fired clay-from purely utilitarian objects to those meant solely for aesthetic contemplation. Most of the dealers are from the United States, though there …
Farther Afield, January-March
Before she died in 1983 in her enormous hôtel particulier on the banks of the Seine, Mona Bismarck created a foundation for art and culture in her name, and gave it, in addition to an endowment, her historic mansion on the avenue de New York. It was Bismarck’s means of creating a legacy more enduring than merely that of …
Louis C. Tiffany’s landscapes of devotion
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | Today Louis Comfort Tiffany is widely recognized as America’s leading designer of the decades around 1900, but during his lifetime he was best known primarily as a designer of religious art, particularly memorial windows. They were installed by the thousands-mostly in Protestant churches and cemetery mausoleums-and formed the bulk of his business over four decades. …
Treasured Weavings: The Mae Festa Textile Collection
December 18 is the last day to visit the Treasured Weavings: The Mae Festa Textile Collection exhibition, housed at 1stdibs@NYDC, located on the 10th floor of the New York Design Center at 200 Lexington Avenue. Watch the video below for more information and beautiful images.
The opulent vision of Paolo Veronese
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | An exhibition of the sixteenth-century master reveals an artist uniquely committed to art, wealth, and aristocracy. A visit to the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, feels nothing like a visit to Venice, Italy. Both cities, it is true, are on, in, or beside a large body of water, but beyond …
South America’s epic past unfolds in a New York City town house
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | “Everything is timing,” says Richard Huber, recalling opportunities spotted and seized over a long career that took him and his wife, Roberta, around the world. On a gamble, they invested in vineyards in Chile, an icebreaker in Antarctica, even an emerald mine in Minas Gerais, Brazil. A twenty-five-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the Brazilian outback served …
The coming storm: American landscape painting and the Civil War
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | The role of the Civil War in redefining America is well known. What is less well understood is the profound way in which the conflict changed American Art. Between 1859, when war was imminent, and the war’s end in 1865 writers and artists created their works surrounded by, and sometimes suffocated by, the impact of …