A tastemaker and her rediscovered treasures

Laura Beach Living with Antiques

For the insatiable salonniere Mabel Dodge Luhan, life’s must-haves were animate. The doyenne of modernism and social rival to Gertrude Stein called herself “a collector of people who made a difference.” Photographer Ansel Adams—one of dozens of painters, photographers, writers, scholars, and assorted intellectuals drawn into her orbit in Florence, New York, and Taos in the first half of the …

Last but not least.

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

One might be forgiven for thinking that the opening in 2014 of the stunning Tadao Ando–designed Clark Center at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute capped the long-term expansion and renovation of the institution’s bucolic campus in Williamstown, Massachusetts. But the plan actually culminates this spring with the installation of the Clark’s American decorative arts collections on the top floor of the renovated Manton Research Center.

A charmed life

WILLIAM NATHANIEL BANKS Furniture & Decorative Arts, Living with Antiques

English inspiration, American creativity, and a bit of historical luck are joined in the author’s house and gardens Several years ago English friends came for lunch at my house, now called the Gordon-Banks house, in Newnan, Georgia, some forty miles southwest of Atlanta. They walked down a wide hallway onto a porch that overlooks a terrace and what the English …