Innholdsfortegnelse for September-October 2022/ No. 65 i American Fine Art Magazine

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why? I am looking forward to the September rotation of At the Dawn of a New Age, the exhibition I organized at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Starting in September, the works that are currently in the show will be replaced by others. The rotation will provide a further opportunity to reframe the understanding of early 20th-century modernism by introducing more artists who were well known in their time but have been largely forgotten. What are you reading? I am reading about the Transcendental Painting Group, a band of artists in Santa Fe and Taos in the late 1930s and early 1940s who were committed to creating and promoting hard-edged, geometric…

Donated by Shelley and Felice Bergman to the Hudson River Museum of Yonkers, NewYork, is the important work of mid-19th century marine artist Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865), Gloucester, Stage Fort Beach, 1849. This extraordinary piece, alongside the donation of a Severin Roesen (1815-c. 1872) still life, highlight the museum’s vast collection of American paintings, sculptures and decorative arts, among other mediums. Lane spent the majority of his life in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and dedicated his career to depicting scenes of the region, especially of Cape Ann, the site where English settlers first landed in the 1600s, and what is also featured in Gloucester, Stage Fort Beach. The contribution of Lane’s awe-inspiring landscape and water scene, is a perfect example of what the museum notes was the development of the Hudson River…

October 19-March 5, 2023 Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 t: (212) 570-3600 www.whitney.org At some point between January and May 1930, Edward Hopper finished a painting depicting a row of two-story buildings along 7th avenue nearWashington Square Park in NewYork City, not far from his studio. By May 1930, the piece, titled Early Sunday Morning, would be acquired by GertrudeVanderbiltWhitney and within a year it would become a star in the inaugural 1931 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. So would begin a long and prosperous relationship between a great American museum and one of the greatest American painters. “The career and work of Edward Hopper has been a touchstone for the Whitney since before it was founded as a museum. In…

October 7-January 8, 2023 Chrysler Museum of Art One Memorial Place Norfolk, VA 23510 t: (757) 664-6200 www.chrysler.org Opening this October at the Chrysler Museum of Art is Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club, a traveling exhibition that marks the 60th anniversary of celebrated social realist Jacob Lawrence’s first exhibition and visit to Nigeria. It also provides the first in-depth look at members of the MbariArtists andWriters Clubs, an organization of Nigerian-based artists, writers and dramatists promoting modernAfrican and international artisticpractice. In addition, the forthcoming exhibition honors the 65th anniversary of Black Orpheus, a radical arts and culture publication featuring the work of modernistAfrican andAfrican Diasporic writers and visual artists. “The exhibition is an investigation [into] a little known period of Lawrence’s life—the eight months he spent in…

September 15-18 24th Annual Arts & Crafts Conference Multiple venues in Cleveland, OH www.artinitiatives.com Each year, the Initiatives in Art and Culture’s Arts & Crafts Conference travels to a different American city to get the distinct flavor of a region through their unique style of decorative arts and architecture. IAC has crisscrossed the nation since 2005 to explore—and revel in—the diverse geographic manifestations of the arts and crafts movement. If one had to summarize the underpinnings of the American arts and craft movement, an extension of a style that emerged out of-Victorian-era England, it could be said that proponents of the trend believed that the connection between artists and their handicraft and the beautiful, functional items they created were essential to human fulfillment. These values are what sets this form of…

September 28 Hindman Auctions 1338 W. Lake Street Chicago, IL 60607 t: (312) 280-1212 www.hindmanauctions.com Gertrude Abercrombie (1909-1977) was an important figure among the Midwestern surrealist artists of the mid-20th century. She was renowned for her stark self-portraits, eerie still lifes and moonlit landscapes—paintings suffused with mystery and fantasy. Like the European surrealist artists that influenced her, Abercrombie was interested in the contents of the unconscious and dreams, symbols of which reappear in many of her paintings. Casting Spells: The Gertrude Abercrombie Collection of Laura and Gary Maurer will come onto the market in a single-owner auction on September 28. As the preeminent collectors of Abercrombie’s work, the Maurers’ collection of 21 pieces span the career of the enchanting, eccentric artist and comprise the broadest and some of the physically…

ONGOING We the People: The Radical Notion of Democracy Crystal Bridges of Museum of American Art • Bentonville, AR Crystal Bridges will place a rare, original print of the U.S. Constitution in conversation with works by historical and contemporary artists that provide diverse perspectives on the nation’s founding principles. www.crystalbridges.org ONGOING Transgressions and Amplifications: Mixed Media Photography of the 1960s and 1970s New Mexico Museum of Art • Santa Fe, NM The exhibition examines inventive work as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s and reinvigorated the vocabulary of photography. www.nmartmuseum.org ONGOING An American Place: The Art Colony at Old Lyme Florence Griswold Museum • Old Lyme, CT The exhibition explores iconic works made by artists who were a part one of the largest and most significant art colonies in…

Order/Reorder: Experiments with Collections, the exhibition now on view at the Hudson River Museum inYonkers, NewYork, is a study in deliberately unlikely juxtapositions. Co-curated by Laura Vookles, chair of the curatorial department at the Hudson River Museum, and Bentley Brown, adjunct professor of art history at Fordham University and PhD fellow at NewYork University Institute of Fine Arts, the works—paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, and decorative arts—are organized into familiar categories: portraiture, figural studies, still life, landscape and abstraction. These categories are then grouped into genres and themes: labor and leisure; friendship, family and intimacy; the body and the gaze; finding home and community; and the production of meaning in portraiture, still life and landscape. The overarching idea is one of exploring “new approaches to looking at American art that reconsider…

October 15-January 22, 2023 Brigham Young University Museum of Art Campus Drive Provo, UT 84602 t: (801) 422-8287 moa.byu.edu On April 8, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave what is called his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. He said, “Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be. We have an opportunityto make America a better nation…. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that…

September 9-11 The Armory Show Javits Center Main Entrance Crystal Palace 429 11th Avenue New York, NY 10001 t: (212) 645-6440 www.thearmoryshow.com Amajor facet of NewYork’s art scene since its founding in 1994, The Armory Show’s influence and reach is massive. From September 9 to 11, the fair returns to the Javits Center for three days of thought-provoking programming, top curatorial leadership and engaging art presentations. This year, the show will include more than 240 galleries across over 30 countries. The major NewYork art fair initiates conversations in multiple avenues across the art world, from its Curatorial Leadership Summit, to Armory Live (a year-round program of conversations highlighting influential members of the international art community—hosted at the fair, online and throughout New York City). Among the historic arts programming at…

Works by women artists once again yielded strong results in Freeman’s June 6 American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists auction. Garnering a total of $2.64 million, the auction’s top sale was Winter Decoration—a large-scale view of Lambertville, New Jersey, by Pennsylvania Impressionist Fern Isabel Coppedge (1883-1951)—which went for $252,800, more than double its estimated value of $100,000. New world auction records were set for Philadelphia illustrators Sarah S. StilwellWeber (1878-1939) and Emma Fordyce MacRae (1887-1974). Weber’s Three of Us (Saturday Evening Post Cover) saw lively competitive bidding to reach $119,700 with an opening estimate of $30,000 to $50,000. MacRae’s portrait Melina in Green engendered a lengthy bidding war that culminated in a $63,000 sale, far above its $8,000 to $12,000 estimate. Other auction highlights from the Pennsylvania Impressionist category include Still…

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was the preeminent society portrait painter of his time. I was brought up with easy access to the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. His portraits became favorite old friends to revisit. At the Gardner Museum, one of the first paintings visitors encounter is his monumental (91 5/16 x 137 in.) painting of a flamenco dancer, El Jaleo, one of his submissions to the Paris Salon of 1882. Mrs. Gardner created a dramatic setting for the painting in her newly-built Spanish cloister and lit it from below echoing the floodlights in the painting. It was easy to imagine hearing the music, castanets and snapping figures as I gazed at the impressive painting that provides a rather large clue to another…

Featuring materials as diverse as pueblo carvings, turquoise jewelry, woodblock prints and oil paintings, Santa Fe Art Auction’s Signature Summer Sale saw exceptional sales results amid high bidding in the June 24 and 25 sale. The sale featured a number of quintessential examples by modernist painter Emil Bisttram, whose 1961 oil piece Man the Unknown (est. $100/200,000) sold for $91,500. The work is a fascinating example of the artist’s work as a member of the Transcendental Painting Group, which valued pure abstracted form above all else. The Santa Fe Art Auction has had a number of stunning Gustave Baumann works available at auctions from throughout the last year, and the June sale was no different with several really strong Baumann woodblock prints. The top Baumann was the 1930 print Bound…

PLYMOUTH, MA COPLEY FINE ART AUCTIONS JULY 14-15 Sporting Sale 2022 $3.05 million The 17th annual Sporting Sale at Copley Fine Art Auctions brought in more $3 million in total sales, including buyer’s premium. The 675-lot sale was one of the company’s largest to date and had a 95 percent sell-through rate. It also set several new world records, with every category from antique and contemporary decoys to paintings, prints, folk art and Americana seeing lively bidding. The top lot of the 2022 Sporting Sale was the Harmon Hollow Nantucket Curlew (est. $150/250,000), which sold for $228,000, nearly doubling the previous world record for a Nantucket decoy. Exceptional canine art led the paintings category. Both major Edmund Henry Osthaus dog paintings broke well past their high estimates, with the artist’s…