Innholdsfortegnelse for July-August 2020/ No. 52 i American Fine Art Magazine

Artful Stories Historic New England presents Artful Stories, a series of online exhibitions capturing the heart of New England—its architecture, landscapes, townscapes and people, all contributing to the region’s unique sense of place. Works in the show were created between the 1730s and today and are arranged by theme: Land & Sea highlights the region’s geography, At Home in New England looks at where and how people lived, New England’s People features an array of intriguing men and women, and The Wide World demonstrates the ways in which New Englanders have experienced places and cultures elsewhere. An in-person exhibition featuring 46 of Historic New England’s artworks will open at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, this fall. Tour historic artists’ homes Relax into the comfiest chair in your home and…

The Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia has recently acquired two important paintings—the rarest of their kind by each respective artist—that relate to the history of art in the Mountain State. The first is an oil by noted landscape painter Thomas Doughty, Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The piece, which has a warm, glowing quality to it, portrays the intersection of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. Dated 1825, the painting was likely started one year prior when the famous ferry that gave Harpers Ferry its name was discontinued and replaced with a covered wooden bridge. “This work was an amazing acquisition for our museum as it has now become one of the earliest dated landscapes depicting West Virginia to be housed in the collection of any museum in the state,” says…

Maine. Even the word rings with the sound of the outdoors, the scent of a wood fire, L.L. Bean plaid, lobster-themed everything. Maine rings with wind in mountains, ripples on lakes, the rush of rivers, the deep green of forests. And the sea. Turn a corner and you bear witness to a painting that hasn’t been painted yet. Unless it has. Look at what I’ve just written. What artist wouldn’t be drawn to that? Drawn to draw and paint and sculpt there, where light, shapes and colors alternate between assailing your eyes and brooding as if harboring some deep secret. And artists have been drawn there. Many. Some who were born there, some who summered there; some who visited and just never found a good enough reason to go anywhere…

Going into the fifth year of the Nantucket Summer Antiques Show, put on by the Antiques Council, there is still excitement over many unique items for sale. Each year, visitors look forward to browsing one-of-a-kind pieces while also enjoying the traditional Preview Party and Sunday Morning Sip and Shop. However, this year brings change, and collectors can expect a virtual experience due to COVID-19 restrictions. The Sip and Shop has been canceled, but the Preview Party, held on July 30, will be on view through the website. “Normally there’s a band and there’s a ticketed price to get into the party, but this year’s challenges have us offering a virtual preview instead,” says David Bernard, liaison for the Antiques Council. “Although we still have to iron out details, we’re just…

Joseph Cornell was always fascinated with gift giving. For an artist born on Christmas Eve, these sentiments carried on throughout his life—even until now through the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation. Many of his early pieces were made as gifts or games for his brother Robert, born seven years after Joseph, who suffered from cerebral palsy. The Phoenix Art Museum has recently opened an exhibition of “12 two-sided collages, two unlidded boxes filled with rolled paper and spools of thread, and one shadow box.” The work comes to the museum as a gift from the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation in 2019. “Joseph Cornell: Things Unseen enables viewers to discover how Cornell used progressive art forms to explore surrealist concepts of memories, fantasies and dreams, all while examining…

As the summer months are in full swing, Eldred’s will host its annual Summer Americana Sale at its salesroom located in East Dennis, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The auction is timely for its collectors as not only is the art season at its prime, but many of the artworks and antiques reflect the region. This year’s sale will take place July 30 and 31 starting at 10 a.m. daily and will bring to market hundreds of items including a standout collection of furniture from New Hampshire. In the paintings segment of the sale, collectors will find maritime scenes and works by artists associated with Cape Cod hitting the market. One such artist was Ralph E. Cahoon Jr., who was born in Chatham, Massachusetts, and spent much of his childhood along the…

HINGHAM, MA COPLEY FINE ART AUCTIONS JULY 23 Sporting Sale On July 23, Copley Fine Art Auctions will host its annual Sporting Sale in a virtual format due to COVID-19 restrictions. The sale, led by auctioneer Peter Cocculuto, will be live streamed and will utilize phone, absentee and internet bids, beginning at 10 a.m. In the sporting paintings segment of the auction there will be a number of American works among the standouts. Included are a quail hunting scene by Ogden M. Pleissner that has an estimate of $40,000 to $60,000 and Aiden Lassell Ripley’s watercolors A Pair of Pheasants (est. $14/18,000) and Pheasants Near the Old Farm (est. $12/18,000). Three pieces by Thomas Aquinas Daly will also hit the block, with Electric Mountain (est. $8/12,000) leading the group. The…

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why? I am writing this from my house—all MFA staff, and much of the art world is working from home due to COVID-19. So what I am looking forward to is a return to normalcy—to the rhythms of the workday, and the day-to-day interactions with colleagues and collections that make museum work so special. I have been thinking a lot about the grand hallways and galleries of the MFA and replaying the paintings that hang in these spaces in my mind. The museum’s halls are so inspiring, and I have been trying to travel through them imaginatively, playing a bit of memory palace. At this point, I just want to be back…

Dr. Regina Palm is the new curator of American painting at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, Florida. This new post was created to further the museum’s mission to advance the community’s knowledge and appreciation of the Morse collection. Palm comes to the Morse Museum from San Diego, California, where she had been the associate curator of American art at the San Diego Museum of Art… The Baltimore Museum of Art recently announced the launching of three new initiatives that will provide direct support to Baltimore-based artists, galleries and communities: BMA Salon, BMA Screening Room and BMA Studio. The initiatives will provide financial relief to local artists and businesses as well as develop new platforms of visibility to bolster the success of Baltimore’s arts ecology.…

“The towers were jammed together so tightly, [you] could feel the mass and stupendous weight,” Tom Wolfe wrote of Manhattan. “Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, in those narrow streets! There it was, the Rome, the Paris, the London of the twentieth century, the city of ambition, the dense magnetic rock, the irresistible destination of all those who insist on being where things are happening…” F. Scott Fitzgerald called the city the “first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” Truman Capote could not claim ownership over any part of New York City “because I belong to it.” Authors, poets, musicians and thinkers—most of the great minds of the 20th century—have…

A number of superb new works have recently come to Debra Force Fine Art in New York City. The pieces come from noteworthy late-18th- to early-19th-century artists including oils by William James Glackens and John Steuart Curry, as well as a pen and ink scene by Thomas Hart Benton, and others. Curry’s Kansas Wheat Field is a pastoral landscape; fields of soft, subdued greens and yellows stretch across the bottom half of the composition, while a winding dirt path leads the eye toward a house and work shed with various farming equipment nearby. “During Curry’s lifetime, American regionalism was characterized by depictions of the rural areas of the Midwestern United States,” says Debra Force Fine Art. “Kansas Wheat Field is a classic depiction from the American regionalist movement, showing a…

The idea of interior spaces—of contemplative quarters and windows into private lives—is explored at length during an exhibition at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Private Life: Domestic and Interior Spaces in Twentieth-Century Art guides viewers through the works of nine artists, the earliest a 1906 John Sloan piece and the latest a 1996 Julie Heffernan, with other artists in the show including Milton Avery, Richard Artschwager, Charles Demuth, Betye Saar, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Alice Neel and Robert Burkert. The exhibition invites viewers to imagine themselves in these spaces, some utterly mundane, others fantastical, and consider the historic periods in which they were created, from world wars to race and gender conflicts of the 20th century. While the paintings themselves are all evocative of some aspect of…

When it comes to online sales at Christie’s, the American art department has made headway with consigners and bidders, which has come in handy as spring and summer sales have shifted away from live, in-person events to online-only sales due to the ongoing health crisis. “We have a well-established online sale platform and American art has always led the way on that front, including over the last five years,” says Christie’s American art specialist Paige Kestenman. “So not only is the department established with an online presence, but so are our clients.” Christie’s next American art auction will take place online starting July 23 and run through August 7. It was originally scheduled for May. “Expect more than 50 works from the category of American art, including some great examples…

RICHARD ROSSELLO Principal Avery Galleries Up until the COVID-19 quarantine, we were seeing significant strengthening in the market. Demand was strong for good examples of marquis artists across a broad time spectrum. We were particularly pleased to see a resurgence of interest in late-19th-century works and American impressionism. Since the quarantine, things have slowed, but we are still hearing from people via our website and social media platforms. We have increased our outreach in these areas, and the response has been better than we had hoped. So far this year we have placed works by Winslow Homer, members of the Ten and well-known American modernists. The modernist market has been strong for some time now, and we are working to reintroduce the important Philadelphia area artists who were so influential…

Howard Godel is a collector. Working as a towerman for the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad from 1972 to 1978, he began to collect and sell antique cast iron toys and trains. In 1976 he published the authoritative Antique Toy Trains: The Hobby Of Collecting Old Toy Trains. “I worked for the railroad when I was 18 to 25,” he says. “I only went to college for one year and I knew I wasn’t going to be hired for a great job, so I had to create one. I was introduced to Hudson River School paintings by my friend, the dealer, Alexander Acevedo. When I looked at a little gem of a Hudson River painting that celebrated America as an unspoiled landscape with a sense of optimism and its romantic and religious nature,…

Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960) grew up in New York surround by her parents’ collection of French Impressionism in their Park Avenue apartment. She however, took a different turn and, in a modest farmhouse on her in-laws’ sprawling estate in Vermont, installed her collection of New England furniture and crafts. In 1947, she established the Shelburne Museum to house her collection of folk art in historic buildings moved from other locations in New England and New York. She had been a pioneer, collecting folk art decades before “Americana” became fashionable. Shortly before the museum’s opening she wrote, “It will be an educational project, varied and alive.” With its buildings closed to the public, the museum’s staff have put together online exhibitions highlighting aspects of Mrs. Webb’s collecting and a narrative of…

Western art returns to Reno, Nevada, on July 25 when the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction kicks off once again as it offers nearly 300 lots of art in many categories. The popular annual event will mark the return of art for many collectors after a lengthy quarantine from March to May. “I think people are excited to return to events, including sales like ours,” says auction partner Mike Overby. “We are monitoring the health situation very carefully and we will adhere to all of the regulations that are in place, but we’re ready for bidders. People enjoy the live audience aspect of a sale, so we want to make them feel safe and comfortable.” To complement the in-person bidding, as well as absentee and telephone bidding, the auction will once…

NEW YORK, NY LARK MASON ASSOCIATES APRIL 28-MAY 21 Paul Cadmus and His Circle: Property from the Estate of Jon F. Anderson $1.16 million Lark Mason Associates’ recent sale, Paul Cadmus and His Circle: Property from the Estate of Jon F. Anderson, through iGavel Auctions, was a standout success with a 98 percent sell-through rate for the 402 lots and a total of $1,163,055. The single-owner auction came from cabaret singer and actor Jon F. Anderson, who was the muse and lover of Paul Cadmus for 36 years and the subject of many of his paintings. Included in the collection were three artists’ estates—Cadmus, Jared French and Margaret French—as well as works by their friends and fellow artists. Highlights included Cadmus’ Male Nude #NM5, which sold for $41,250, and Male…