Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2019/ No.43 i American Fine Art Magazine

HOWARD L. REHS Director Rehs Galleries, Inc. I would say that in our main area of expertise, which is 19th-century European paintings, I’ve seen a substantial increase in interest this past year. We specialize in works from 1850 to 1950 by academically trained and some post-impressionist artists. Recently, we’ve had a number of paintings that sold almost immediately before we were even able to display or exhibit them. Among these were In Winter, a long-lost Daniel Ridgway Knight that I had been searching for since 1991 (it had been in the same family’s possession since the 19th century), and a major Félix Ziem that was last on the market in 1918. As far as our area of the country, given the fact that we specialize in 19th-century European academic paintings,…

Traveling exhibitions and loans among museums bring art to communities that might otherwise not have the opportunity to see it, offer the opportunity to highlight aspects of a museum’s own collections and bring a new focus to a community’s “own” artists. Interest in the artists also spawns gallery exhibitions and exhibitions at other museums. Charles White: A Retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through January 13, is the first major museum retrospective of the artist’s work in 30 years. It began in Chicago where he was born in 1918 and will travel to Los Angeles where he died in 1979. It will be at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art February 17 through June 9. LACMA will also present Life Model: Charles White and his…

1803-1875 A who’s who lineup of landscape and still life painters is now on view in American Beauty & Bounty: The Judith G. and Steaven K. Jones Collection of Nineteenth-Century Painting at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. “There might be a name missing here and there, but this collection has everything you want from this time period. All of the major players are here,” says Scott Shields, the museum’s chief curator and associate director. “And not just all the major names, but also multiple examples from many of them.” Artists with works on view include Asher B. Durand, John Frederick Kensett, William Trost Richards, Albert Bierstadt, Alfred Thompson Bricher, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, Eastman Johnson and many others. The exhibition will feature 27 works…

The Menil Drawing Institute opened to the public on November 3 and is the fifth art building to open on the Menil’s 30-acre campus in Houston. The Menil Drawing Institute has been a program of the Menil since 2008, organizing major traveling exhibitions and undertaking scholarly projects, including the Jasper Johns Catalogue Raisonné of Drawings, 1954-2014…Theresa Papanikolas is the new Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum. Papanikolas comes from the position of deputy director and curator of American and European art at the Honolulu Museum of Art…The Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Corporation of the Fine Arts Museums have appointed Thomas P. Campbell as the new CEO and director. As head of the Fine Arts Museums…

The sixth annual FOG Design+Art will take place from January 17 to 20, showcasing out-of-the-box art, unique designs and eccentric installation pieces. The fair features 53 distinguished international design and visual art galleries, with 12 participating for the first time this year. Taking on a trailblazing spirit as a hybrid of both art and interior design, FOG Design+Art provides a platform for the Bay Area community as well as collectors and curators across the globe. “FOG features a mixture of modern and contemporary art and design from the 20th and 21st centuries. Visitors will encounter works by major contemporary artists from around the world, local San Francisco artists and some of the best works of modern and contemporary design. In addition, the fair features programming that is included with admission…

One of the most significant collections of Western art in private hands, the L.D. “Brink” Brinkman Collection, will be offered to bidders by Bonhams on February 8 in Los Angeles. Brinkman, an entrepreneur and philanthropist out of Kerrville, Texas, was a larger-than-life Texas figure whose successful ventures included flooring distribution, a chain of pizza restaurants, breeding Brangus cattle and other businesses. He died in 2015. Brinkman’s collection is notable for both the historic works and artwork from contemporary Western painters, including many artists who he bought from directly such as Howard Terpning, Joe Beeler and Olaf Wieghorst, all of whom he counted as friends. “We’re just overwhelmed at the quality and the size of the collection. In total we will likely have roughly 400 items, which makes this a massive…

Cowboys, frontiersmen, Native Americans, wagon trains and vast Western landscapes were some of the subjects that were top sellers at Sotheby’s American art sale November 16 in New York City. The American art sale, which concluded a week of fine art auctions, realized more than $44 million, the highest total for a various-owner sale by Sotheby’s since 2014, when the auction house sold Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 for, coincidentally, $44 million. The November sale, which also had an O’Keeffe in the top 10, saw stellar results across many categories, but none more than Western art, which saw six works in the top 10, including Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Western Emigrant Train Bound for California Across the Plains, Alarmed by Approach of Hostile Indians (Indians Attacking a Wagon Train). The…

American Fine Art Magazine is comprised of many different sections and features, all designed to keep you informed on what’s happening in the market for historic American art. IN ADDITION: COLLECTOR’S FOCUS Find out everything the discerning collector needs to know about important and timely segments of the historic American art market. COLLECTOR HOMES In each issue you will find a behind-the-scenes look into a coveted collector home. MARKET REPORTS Find out what’s happening in galleries from New York to California. EX LIBRIS Read about the best books recently published on topics ranging from Hudson River School to modernism to folk art.…

I am not sure why I remember this rather simple suggestion made so many decades ago but somehow it still resonates, even if observed in the breach. “See something new every day.” That’s what a speaker said at my university orientation. A simple enough directive, but one that carries with it the suggestion that mental flexibility comes with discovery and not through following well-trodden paths of experience. Do I follow this dictum on a daily basis—probably not. But it operates in other ways, especially in thinking strategically and grasping ways of examining situations with fresh eyes. That is what I try to do in these columns and how I distinguish my commentary from what would be conventionally seen as criticism. In writing about an exhibition, for instance, I look more…

“According to Nostradamus the apparition of monsters presages the outbreak of war.”—Salvador Dalí Thus begins Oliver Tostmann’s opening essay in the premonitory exhibition he and Oliver Shell have curated for the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Baltimore Museum of Art: Monsters & Myths: Surrealism and War in the 1930s and 1940s. Monster. Admonition=Warning. Premonition=Foreboding. Monitor=Detecting. From the Latin verb monere. To warn. Surrealism dips into the unconscious, holds its wet phalanges to the wind, twisting bones and history and the human body, blows candle smoke onto canvas. Lays waste. Lays bare. To see. To show. To warn. As the shadow of fascism—of intolerance, oligarchy, of depraved power that takes the stage in the raiment of elegant, beautiful, final solutions—as this shadow lengthens and falls, first over Spain, then over Austria, Czechoslovakia,…

1963-2000 History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence travels to the Crocker Art Museum January 27 and remains on view through April 7. Originally shown at the SCAD Museum of Art, the exhibition came as the result of a collaboration between the museum and the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation. Storm Janse van Rensburg, head curator at the Savannah College of Art and Design and curator of History, Labor, Life, notes, “Lawrence’s graphic oeuvre offers a distilled, but breathtaking overview of his formal and conceptual concerns and dexterity as an artist, and three major themes emerged.” In the gallery space, works are grouped thematically by the subjects named in the exhibition title. Christie Hajela, assistant curator at Crocker Art Museum, says, “Rather than a chronological layout tracing the…

1903-1972 Illustrators had an oversized role in the dissemination of American culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. This was well before TV, film, radio and even high-quality photographic reproduction in books and magazines. If you lived in 1900 and you saw an image on a book, in a magazine or on a billboard, more than likely it was created by an illustrator. Frank Schoonover was one of the artists of the Golden Age of Illustration who played a role in weaving the fabric of American culture, and he is featured in a new exhibition now open at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Frank E. Schoonover: American Visions, which opened in November, will feature more than 80 works, including original paintings that ended up in adventure magazines and books…

There are many new bright lights on the horizon when it comes to the field of American art, but one of those shining the brightest at the moment is Graham Boettcher, the R. Hugh Daniel Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. Before becoming the director of the entire museum, Boettcher served as the Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Fellow in American art at Birmingham where he reignited interest in the institution’s support group, the Friends of American Art. While museum support groups are nothing new—in fact the group Boettcher revived at Birmingham was started in the 1970s—how they operate and the stewardship they give to their respective museum departments has changed drastically over the years. This was evident at The American Art Fair this past November as fair participants entertained…

Gene Kloss was the first woman printmaker to be elected to full membership in the National Academy of Design. Her unique contributions to printmaking and her interpretation of the multiple cultures of the southwest are celebrated in the exhibition Gene Kloss: New Mexico Etched in Time through January 1 at LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For nearly 20 years, Gene and Phillips Kloss traveled between Berkeley, California, and Taos, New Mexico, lugging her 60-pound portable press in the back of their vehicle. When they finally settled in Taos in 1945, the press had a permanent home. Alice Geneva Glaiser Kloss (1903-1996) changed her name to Gene after marrying her poet/composer husband because she believed the less feminine name would make her work more accepted in the art world.…

The fall iteration of Just Off Madison, which took place on November 14, culminated in an enjoyable evening of browsing fine art from some of the premier galleries in Manhattan, as well as mingling with respected gallery owners and dealers. Among the 13 exhibitors that participated this past fall included Vose Galleries, Debra Force Fine Art, GRAHAM SHAY 1857, Meredith Ward Fine Art and David Tunick, Inc. “This year we welcomed a smaller but intrepid group of American art enthusiasts. So many competitive events with the contemporary art sales as well as the American art sales vied for people’s time,” says Betty Krulik of Betty Krulik Fine Art, who both participates in and organizes Just Off Madison. “Those that came were dedicated, knowledgeable and committed. We love seeing our colleagues,…

On February 27, Sotheby’s will host its midseason American art sale in New York City. The auction will feature a large assortment of works across many categories and genres, all from multiple collectors and consignors. One of the lots available will be J.C. Leyendecker’s 1925 illustration Thanksgiving, featuring a pilgrim mother, or possibly grandmother, peeling apples from a bowl on her lap. The work, estimated at $50,000 to $70,000, represents one of Leyendecker’s most famous subject matters. The famous Saturday Evening Post cover artist painted multiple Thanksgiving images almost every year he was active as an illustrator. Elsewhere in the sale is Lilla Cabot Perry’s oil painting Reading, showing a young woman reading a large book. The Boston-born Perry, who helped bring French Impressionism to an American audience with Mary…

D. Wigmore Fine Art presents images of Florida by 17 artists who visited the state between 1920 and 1970. The exhibition grew out of the gallery’s effort to assist Jennifer Hardin in her exhibition Imagining Florida: History and Myth in the Sunshine State, through March 24 at Boca Raton Museum of Art. In searching for art created by established artists who visited the state, I was fascinated by the history of the places the artists painted. St. Augustine, Ormond Beach, Palm Beach, Miami, Key West, Naples, Sarasota, Bradenton, Clearwater and Orlando all are represented in paintings in D. Wigmore Fine Art’s Terra Florida exhibition. After the acquisition of Florida from Spain in 1821, the state’s cultural progress was held in check by the Seminole Indian Wars ending in 1858 and…

1890-1950 John Sloan (1871-1951) had been an illustrator in Philadelphia before moving to Manhattan in 1904. He was with The Philadelphia Enquirer in 1892 and later began taking art classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His teacher was Thomas Anshutz and one his classmates was an old friend, William Glackens. He recalled arriving in New York: “As I walked the streets with my portfolio of samples, going from one publisher to another, I saw the life of the city really for the first time. All those years on the newspapers I had worked most of the day and evening. I had neither time nor reason to see the neighborhood life of the city. Coming to New York and finding a place to live where I could observe…

When Ira and Jane Carlin began collecting “we lacked a specific direction,” Ira explains. “A friend introduced us to American impressionism, which we had known nothing about and we began collecting second- or third-tier paintings because we couldn’t afford the best. “We went to New York and popped into Deedee Wigmore’s gallery and asked her what she had in American impressionism. She said, ‘Let me show you what I’m interested in right now—the art of the ’30s and ’40s.’” “We were totally unfamiliar with the period,” Jane explains. “We were fascinated by Paul Sample’s Tobacco Auction,” Ira continues, “but it was more than we ever considered paying for a painting. We did buy it and shortly thereafter one of our art magazines arrived with an article on the 25 most…

As mid-November rolls around, New York City becomes a hotbed for patrons of historic American fine art. There are numerous events and auctions taking place that are all part of what has become known as American Art Week. Kicking off the festivities is The American Art Fair, which hosted its 11th edition November 10 to 13 at the Bohemian National Hall. The fair is recognized for its emphasis on 19th- and 20th-century American fine art, and featured 17 of the most notable dealers in the field exhibiting more than 400 paintings and sculpture. The 2018 show was among the best yet, with a record of more than 750 attendees at the preview. “We were thrilled to be invited this year to show with the most prestigious American art galleries in…

BOSTON, MA SKINNER INC. JANUARY 25 American & European Works of Art January 25 Skinner Inc. will offer a number of important American paintings and sculpture during its American & European Works of Art sale. Hudson River School artists are important within the auction, with a woodland interior, The Trout Brook, by Worthington Whittredge, depicting a shallow stream with the skies and trees reflecting along its waterway, being among the items. It is expected to sell between $15,000 and $25,000. Two pieces by Willard Metcalf are also standouts of the sale: Harvesting is a tonalist scene estimated at $15,000 to $25,000, while an early work from 1877 of a seaside cliff overlooking a waterway carries a presale estimate of $40,000 to $60,000. Several botanical-themed pieces by John La Farge will…

Christie’s celebrated American Art Week with a $323 million bang on November 13 and 14 with the sale of the Barney A. Ebsworth Collection in New York City. The auction—titled An American Place, and broken up into two sessions, an evening sale and an afternoon sale the following day—not only set an auction record for a private collection of American art, it also set 24 artist records, including one for Edward Hopper, whose colorful interior scene Chop Suey sold for a record-shattering $91.8 million, more than double the previous record for a Hopper set in 2013 for $40 million. The Hopper sold during the blockbuster evening sale, which generated $317 million across 37 works. Another record breaker, just five lots before the Hopper, was Willem de Kooning’s Woman as Landscape…

On November 10, 2018, collectors of both historic and contemporary Western art descended on New Mexico for the annual Santa Fe Art Auction. The sale, which offered more than 250 lots, realized more than $2.2 million in sales with a sell-through rate of 84 percent. Organizers were happy with the results and drew special attention to some of the lots from the early 20th century. “While there is some resistance at the high end of the classic historic Western market, we have noticed an uptrend in smaller but sophisticated ‘jewels’ from the early 20th-century masters of the Southwest,” according to a joint statement by auction directors Gillian Blitch and Jenna Kloeppel. “Additionally we are seeing robust interest in, until recently, overlooked women artists who were living, working, visiting and observing…