Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2019/ No.46 i American Fine Art Magazine

We may remember a family Thanksgiving or Christmas although they do all seem to merge into a collective experience, memorable but somewhat indistinct. But the summer holiday is different. An entire, and seemingly endless season, it is something we remember better than most other memories of childhood. Summer was away. And for me, away was Maine, starting when I was 7 years old—at a camp welcoming to kids who were, in fact, not quite typical, not always suited for the exhilaration of athletic competition or the onus of regimented activities. Our parents’ household mantra, “I can’t wait till you go to camp,” became, in fact, a promise of escape from the controlling parental hand. For two whole months. And it was far away. Nearly 500 miles from Wilmington, Delaware, to…

In 1869, Winslow Homer exhibited his very first ocean view—Rocky Coast and Gulls. The next 11 years would define his career as he gained a reputation as a masterful marine painter. Now, 150 years later, this prolific period is being brought to the foreground in Homer at the Beach: A Marine Painter’s Journey, 1869-1880 at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It’s a fitting venue, as Cape Ann was where Homer created many of his marine paintings. Before he turned his eye to the sea, Homer was making his living as an illustrator. He had a great reputation in the field, but he wanted more. He wanted to be known as a fine artist. The trouble was, he hadn’t created much art. On a trip to France in 1867,…

Hawthorne Fine Art’s annual summer show is back again to welcome the exuberance of the summer months with a myriad of seascapes and beach scenes, aptly titled Summer Reading: Sand and Beaches. The exhibition, which is on display through the end of August, evokes summer sentiments through the marine and coastal works of artists like Francis Augustus Silva, Jane Peterson, Hobart Nichols Jr., Fidelia Bridges, Addison Thomas Millar, George Washington Nicholson, Frederick W. Smith and Clark Greenwood Voorhees, among others. The gallery cites a passage from Environment and Tourism by Andrew Holden as part of the theme connecting the works curated for the show: “The rise of the American beach resort town as a tourist destination coincided with rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century. While visits to the coast were…

Among a bustling summer soirée schedule for Newport, Rhode Island, one weekend event distinguishes itself from the rest, offering visitors a chance to shop for a wide array of rare fine art and antique furniture, jewelry, clothing and more under one roof. The 2019 rendition of The Newport Show, formerly known as The Newport Antiques Show, will return to the indoor ice skating rink at St. George’s School from July 27 through July 28—bringing with it over 40 dealers of antiques, art and “exquisite objects.” “Visitors will recognize that the event is about representing beauty, design and utility,” Ruth Taylor, executive director at Newport Historical Society, says. “Because great design is timeless. Whether you’re a fine art aficionado, a new collector of midcentury furniture or are always hunting for one-of-a-kind…

Western art in all its varieties—cowboys and cavalry, Native Americans, wildlife and expansive landscapes of the West—returns July 27 for the annual Coeur d’Alene Art Auction at the Grand Sierra Resort & Casino in Reno, Nevada. The auction house, which has produced more than $300 million in sales over the last 15 years, is bringing collectors a stunning variety of major Western works at a high point for the market. “The market seems very solid this year based on everything we’ve seen in the spring sales. Right now there’s nothing on the horizon that has given us any pause, which is a great place to be in before our sale,” says auction partner Mike Overby. “And the works are really something else. This is the best sale we’ve put together…

NEW YORK, NY SWANN AUCTION GALLERIES APRIL 4 African-American Art Auction $3.82 million Twelve auction records were set during Swann Auction Galleries’ April 4 African-American Art Auction, which saw 155 of the 175 lots available find new buyers. The sale was the second-highest grossing for the department at $3,820,080, a number that surpassed its presale estimate for the auction as a whole. Topping the noteworthy sale was Norman Lewis’ Block Island, a 1973 to 1975 painting inspired by the artist’s summers on the island. The work, which was estimated to sell between $200,000 and $300,000, brought a robust $389,000. Works on paper also were of note with buyers, with Charles White’s circa 1950 charcoal drawing Caliban becoming the No. 2 lot at $221,000. Tying that price was Faith Ringgold’s Sleeping:…

Several recent articles discussing the Sotheby’s and Christie’s American art sales last month expressed concern about the Hudson River School market. As both a leading buyer and seller of these paintings, I believe that the results have been misinterpreted. The idea that anyone could definitively determine the state of any market by the performance of a specific sale is clearly flawed. There were about 40 significant Hudson River School painters who produced anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 paintings each in their lifetimes. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that at least 60,000 works comprise the genre. One particularly outspoken assessment of the entire market was based upon the sale of just a few paintings. How credible can a conclusion be that is based solely upon the performance of less than…

Thomas Cole’s arrival in Catskill, New York, was perhaps the most pivotal moment in the young artist’s life. Only 24 years old, the English-born Cole likely did not know it at the time, but the rural town would become his life’s work and solidify his name within American art history as the founder of the Hudson River School. As the story goes, in the autumn of 1825, Cole took a steamship up the Hudson River with one of the stops being the Catskill landing. He hiked into the Catskill Mountains and for the first time sketched his muse. On his return to New York City, he turned the sketches into paintings that are thought to be the first of the mountainous area that was also chronicled in Washington Irving’s novel…

Charles Biederman (1906-2004) admired Cézanne who wrote, “We must not be content to memorize the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors. Let us go out and study beautiful nature.” Biederman had lived briefly in the artistically fertile circles of Paris which included Mondrian, Pevsner, Brancusi, Arp, Miro and Léger. In 1942, he settled in Red Wing, Wisconsin, where he would live the rest of his life. His early landscapes showed his admiration of Cézanne and the cubists. Later, immersed in the rural landscape, he sought the structure of nature. Menconi + Schoelkopf in New York presents an exhibition of Biederman’s paintings from the 1930s as well as examples of his sculptures, through July 3. The gallery notes, “Charles Biederman’s meteoric career as an abstract painter in the 1930s saw him…

James Daugherty (1889-1974) studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with William Merritt Chase, absorbed the ideas of European modernism at the 1913 Armory Show, had a studio next to Arthur B. Frost Jr. who had formed the synchromist movement with Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, painted murals for the WPA and was an award-winning children’s book writer and illustrator. Helicline Fine Art in New York City focused on one of the aspects of Daugherty’s varied career in the exhibition James Daugherty: Abstract Color Paintings & Pastels from the 1950s & 1960s. The gallery notes, “In 1953, Daugherty once again began to create abstract paintings. The first of these works, small images with relatively stable compositions and subdued palettes, suggest the influence of the work of Piet Mondrian.…

This spring’s Just Off Madison art walk of private dealer spaces on New York’s Upper East Side saw some of the biggest crowds in recent memory, with collectors, dealers, scholars and museum curators making the trek up and down Madison Avenue to enjoy the offerings from 14 of the top galleries in the American art field. From a new space on 80th Street across from The Met that now houses both Menconi + Schoelkopf and Driscoll Babcock, to Jonathan Boos on 64th Street, and GRAHAM SHAY 1857 and Taylor|Graham on 67th Street, this year’s walk saw many new works of art from modernism to 19th-century classics. “We were mobbed on the evening of Just Off Madison,” says Betty Krulik, one of the organizers of the event. “It was a confluence…

On July 13, Eldred’s will host its inaugural auction on Nantucket Island featuring 200 lots of paintings, jewelry, fine furniture and other decorative arts. The sale, which is highlighted by maritime pieces, will take place at the Nantucket Boys & Girls Club and see a percentage of proceeds going to the Nantucket Preservation Trust. Eldred’s is located in East Dennis, Massachusetts, just across from the island on Cape Cod, so they believe this sale is a natural fit for their firm. “It’s a local expansion for us, both geographically and in terms of the material we handle,” says Joshua Eldred, president of the company. “Nantucket was once the whaling capital of the world and is still very connected to its maritime history, and Eldred’s is the nation’s leading maritime art…

On May 21 Sotheby’s held its annual spring American art sale in New York City, a sale that generated $19 million and saw the setting of numerous new auction records. The top lot was A Lake Twilight from Hudson River School painter Sanford Robinson Gifford. The dramatic luminist work, with subtle reflections on a lake’s surface and a figure with a boat in the foreground, had a high estimate set at $1.8 million, an estimate that was easily smashed as the piece soared to $2.9 million, breaking a 14-year auction record for the 19th-century painter. Noman Rockwell had two works within the top 10 sales: Little Boy Writing Letter (est. $1/1.5 million) that sold for $1.7 million, and Christmas Homecoming (est. $400/600,000) that sold for $800,000, which set a record…

Director Debra Force Fine Art While there are usually ups and downs in the market depending on the season, the first half of 2019 has been strong for our gallery with activity across multiple periods and genres within 18th-, 19th-and 20th-century American art. Museums have been especially active over the past several months and have expressed interest in a wide variety of quality works. A focus on big names in the postwar and contemporary world, both in terms of blockbuster shows and record-breaking auction prices in the marketplace, has created opportunities for institutions to acquire works that may not be receiving as much attention and are more affordable. In the past several months, we have placed a Benjamin West portrait from the 1760s and a Robert S. Duncanson landscape from…

The Penn State Board of Trustees recently approved the selection of Allied Works as the architect for the construction of the University Art Museum, which will replace the Palmer Art Museum at Penn State. Plans for the new museum involve an expanded gallery and exhibition space for its 9,300-object collection, as well as additional space for events, community gatherings and educational opportunities…The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia is currently in the process of acquiring an acre of land in West Midtown at The Goat Farm Arts Center. The relocation to The Goat Farm is in the center of Atlanta’s growing cultural scene, allowing MOCA GA to strengthen its resources to the arts community while also being more accessible to the public…Pamela Edmonds has been appointed senior curator at the…

Strange how ideas strike you. How one thing you’re doing fits, by design, by accident, by an accident of design or the design of accident, neatly into another. Just as I pitched the essay you are about to read on From the Schuylkill to the Hudson: Landscapes of the Early American Republic, the new exhibition opening at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a very old friend from my year of teaching in Wales—a land of landscapes if ever there was one—whom I had not seen in years came to visit and among the myriad of things we discussed, he mentioned a book called The Old Ways, by an author named Robert Macfarlane, a book about walking, walking as a journey through landscape that, when you really pay attention,…

Now open at Graham Shay 1857 in New York City is American Modernism: 1915-1985, a new exhibition that will examine paintings and sculpture from a rich period in American modern art history. Gallery owner Cameron Shay has chosen works that challenge the definitions of modern art, and also reinforce it. “Broadly speaking, the works in this exhibition can be divided into two groups: representational and abstract. Works that disparate in style, however, can offer surprising similarities. A traditional scene of a house on a hillside by Bertram Hartman is dramatically different than Sewell Sillman’s pared-down minimalist canvas, whose title, The Palace (Version 2), merely suggests an edifice,” Shay writes in the show’s catalog. “Similarly, Benedict Tatti’s roughly hewn marble Head of 1960 is far more literal than Kimber Smith’s abstract…

Nantucket, a small island located off of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, is a charming whaling village with cobblestone streets and cedar-shingled buildings. The island is awash in the history of the whaling industry paved by 17th-century settlers, an industry still thriving today, as well as centuries of art, antiques and artifacts that shape the town. And the annual Nantucket Summer Antiques Show is part of what makes Nantucket a prime summer destination year after year. From Friday, August 2, through Sunday, August 5, 32 of the foremost dealers in the country and several from the United Kingdom will exhibit the finest art and antiques across a range of categories, including antique and mid-century furniture, marine antiques, paintings, photographs, prints and botanicals, antique flags, silver, vintage rugs and garden antiquities. A special…

More than 60 dealers from around the United States set up booths with furniture, antiques and fine art as part of the 57th annual Philadelphia Antiques and Art Show at The Navy Yard. The event, which kicked off with a Preview Party on April 25, boasted strong attendance for the weekend despite a little bit of rain. The opening, which benefited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Division of Education and Public Programs, had 700 people in attendance, while 2,500 people visited the fair throughout its run. “Positive comments included nods to the Museum for reinvigorating the show with a balance of decorative arts and fine art,” says Huntley Platt, manager of the show. Also notable were the sales throughout the weekend, with decorative arts and paintings included among the highlights.…

EAST DENNIS, MA ELDRED’S JULY 25 Marine Sale Eldred’s hosts its fourth consecutive Marine Art sale on July 25 with antique scrimshaw, paintings, navigational instruments, ship models and maritime art hitting the block. Leading the day will be the scrimshaw category with 250 pieces arriving at auction, including two lots of whale teeth engraved by Edward M. Burdett that carry estimates of $320,000 to $380,000 and $150,000 to $250,000. In the paintings category of the auction, there will be important works by James Edward Buttersworth, Montague Dawson and John Mecray. Buttersworth is represented by three small ship portraits that measure around 7 by 12 inches each, while Mecray’s Flying Cloud (est. $30/50,000) is being sold to benefit IYRS School of Technology and Trades in Newport, Rhode Island. Dawson’s The Storm…

The American art sale at Bonhams this past May reached nearly $2 million in total sales at $1,946,845, with a number of lots achieving numbers well past their high estimates. “I think the success is mostly due in part to the fact that we have a lot of fantastic items that were fresh to the market, many of which appeared at auction for the first time,” says Jennifer Jacobsen, director of American art at Bonhams. Four world auction records were set during the sale. The top lot was Charles E. Prendergast’s Fantasy (est. $200/300,000), a detailed and complex composition created with tempera, gold leaf and pencil, which more than doubled its high estimate when it sold for $704,075. “The Prendergast was such a superb work—the complexity, color, retaining the artist’s…