Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Opinion”
Call it cultural vandalism: The case against the Museum of Modern Art’s plan to raze the former building of the American Folk Art Museum designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien and completed in 2001. “Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s new American Folk Art Museum…is not only New York’s greatest museum since Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim was completed in 1959, …
We at ANTIQUES mourn the death of Michael K. Brown, a great friend of the magazine and a cherished member of the American decorative arts family. Our November-December issue will include a tribute to him as a man of enormous kindness, scholarship, humor, and loyalty. Michael K. Brown (1953-2013), longtime curator of the Bayou Bend Collection and …
Like most editors I am interested in everything, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions. I have, in fact, far too many of them, so I like it when some of my prejudices get rearranged, as they were early last spring when Eleanor Gustafson and I visited the Philadelphia home of John Whitenight and Frederick LaValley featured here. Ten …
On a recent afternoon at the Brooklyn Flea in Fort Greene, Jake Spetalieri, the proprietor of Catskill Coydog Vintage furniture, was offering a few rainy day specials, including a blue nubby vinyl-covered late 1960s settee for $345 (normally $450) and a sleek, surfboard-shaped white-topped coffee table for $250 ($100 off). The sky was threatening to open any minute, but a …
Is it so surprising that New York has long been a center for folk and outsider art? From Electra Havemeyer Webb, founder of the Shelburne Museum, who started out in the glossy precincts of Park Avenue in the 1940s to Monty Blanchard, current president of the American Folk Art Museum, whose Tribeca loft is a geyser of the self-taught, the …
We at ANTIQUES are saddened by the death of Nina R. Gray, an independent curator of American decorative arts, on May 20, at home, after a brave battle with cancer. Nina’s contributions to our field were legion, ranging from her early meticulous cataloguing talents, which allowed other scholars access to long-overlooked material-and provided Nina with what Margi Hofer, Curator …
Our cover shows an early and uncharacteristically jaunty painting by George Ault, part of the Lunder Collection featured in the article about the Colby College Museum of Art. Elsewhere in the issue an example of Ault’s later, more hard-boiled style can be seen in Marica and Jan Vilcek’s collection of early American modernism. Ault was by most accounts an impossible …
By Katrine Ames Here in this shell of a house, This house that is struggling to be, Hope must have been The first to move in, And waited to welcome me. But hope isn’t easy to see. This lovely tribute to the White House in Leonard Bernstein and Allan Jay Lerner’s 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would make a perfect anthem for …
A few weeks ago the Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney registered dismay at one of the more significant departures from historical fact inSteven Spielberg’s Oscar-bound Lincoln. To dramatize the narrow margin by which the Thirteenth Amendment passed, the film’s screenwriter Tony Kushner shows two members of the Connecticut delegation voting against the abolition of slavery. As it happened, all four voted …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February, 2013 | The editorials that Wendell Garrett wrote for this magazine over forty years radiate a quiet confidence in American democracy. But if you read a great many of them alongside the notebooks of quotations he kept throughout his life you begin to see a man who was actually turning over the topsoil of our …