Innholdsfortegnelse for July-August 2023/No. 70 i American Fine Art Magazine

RAPHAËL CHATROUX Head of Department, American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Freeman’s Auctions Freeman’s specializes in selling works by Pennsylvania impressionists. It is also the only house in the country to host sales dedicated to the movement twice a year. At the moment, the market is robust, and in a way, healthier than it was at its historic peak in 2004 to 2005. Then, the market relied on a few forces, whereas the appeal for the New Hope School now reaches far more collectors. While most collectors remain close to Philadelphia and live in the tristate area in general, we have noticed more interest coming from elsewhere in the country, especially out West, as well as Florida. A younger crowd has also proved to be impactful in the successes associated with…

In his collection of essays, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, James Abbott McNeil Whistler (1834-1903), wrote, “Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’ “Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black.’ Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my mother; but what can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” The painting is now universally…

MERVIN JULES (1912-1994) The Tailor Mervin Jules was a painter and prolific printmaker best known for works of social commentary and satire. After earning a degree from the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts in 1934, he went to New York City and studied with Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League. His preoccupation with the plight of the poor and social injustices is reflected throughout his often moody work. The Tailor, executed circa 1940, is a classic example of Jules’ expression of his empathy for the laborer, in this case a feeble man held “captive” by a sewing machine in a dark, windowless room. One of the most striking elements of the painting is the perspective. Looking through the sewing machine with the working tailor, oblivious of…

July 1-August 15, 2023 A.J. Kollar Fine Paintings, LLC Seattle, WA 98112 By appointment only t: (206) 323-2156 www.ajkollar.com Beginning July 1, Sydney Laurence’s unique approach to capturing the Alaskan wilderness will be on view at A.J. Kollar Fine Paintings, LLC, in Seattle. Laurence’s lush depictions of Alaska’s forests, northern lights, Mt. Denali, and riverside caches painted the landscape in luminescent color. In developing his artistic vocabulary for the region, Laurence (1865-1940) was a documentarian of the natural terrain, while simultaneously contributing to the burgeoning concept of Alaska as the “Last Frontier,” collaborating with railroad and steamboat companies to promote tourism to the area. Laurence recorded the landscape not only as it appeared in his sweeping depictions of Mt. Denali and the surrounding area, but also how it was used…

Through August 27, 2023 Muskegon Museum of Art 296 W. Webster Avenue Muskegon, MI 49440 t: (231) 720-2570 www.muskegonartmuseum.org The first half of the 20th century was an era of sweeping political, economic and social change in the United States. The country had become the world’s leading economic and military power, industrialization and urbanization was happening exponentially and immigration was surging. The fabric of the country was transforming at a rapid rate and it affected every aspect of life—and those changes are reflected in the art created during that time. An exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art looks back upon this pivotal moment in our nation’s history through the eyes of some of the most significant American artists of the day. Drawing from the collections of the Muskegon Museum…

Through October 15, 2023 Museum of Fine Arts Boston 465 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 t: (617) 267‑9300 www.mfa.org The Wampanoag people lived on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for thousands of years before European settlers arrived. It was named Cape Cod because of the abundance of cod fish in its surrounding waters. Its life as an art colony began in the summer of 1899 when Charles Webster Hawthorne opened his Cape Cod School of Art. In 1916, an article in the Boston Globe declared the tiny fishing village as “the biggest art colony in the world…one of Nature’s laboratories in which creative minds and artistic souls can work.” At the time, the Cape had six schools of art. Over the next century it hosted many of the country’s great artists,…

THOMASTON, ME THOMASTON PLACE AUCTION GALLERIES JULY 7-9 Splendor 2023 AUGUST 25-27 Grandeur 2023 Thomaston Place Auction Galleries hosts two major exhibitions this summer: the three-day Splendor 2023 from July 7 to 9, and the three-day Grandeur 2023 from August 25 to 27. Each sale will include important American artwork and rarities. Highlights of historic art across both sales include a circa 1920 oil on canvas by Robert Spencer; a drawing by outsider artist Bill Traylor; an impasto knifework oil painting of mountains under a sunlit sky by Etel Adnan; and a study of pirates for “Treasure Island” by N.C. Wyeth. The sales will also present original works by other major American artists like Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, Thomas Hart Benton and more. The auctions will begin at 11:00…

Iconic subjects from throughout the American West were present at the Scottsdale Art Auction’s annual spring sale April 14 and 15 in art-filled Scottsdale, Arizona. Subjects included cowboys and cattle, early American adventurers and explorers, sportsman and hunters, Native Americans from numerous tribes and many works that included horses. These important works from the growing Western art segment of American art dazzled bidders, including many in the room who were bidding enthusiastically, often against other bidders in the room. “We had a very active room with consistent bidding throughout the sale,” says Scottsdale Art Auction partner Brad Richardson. “We set out 450 chairs and they were almost all full, with people even standing in the back. We are very pleased to see people there in the room as they participate…

FRANCESCA WILMOTT Associate Curator CROCKER ART MUSEUM 216 O Street, Sacramento, CA 95814 • www.crockerart.org What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why? I can’t wait to see Sadie Barnette: Family Business, jointly organized by the San Jose Museum of Art and Institute of the Arts and Sciences at University of California, Santa Cruz. I had the privilege of working with Sadie on a 2017 exhibition and have enjoyed following her impressive career since then. Sadie’s unexpected combination of powdered graphite, spray paint, glitter and rhinestones disrupt the history of state-sanctioned racism. In this exhibition, she presents the living room as a space of activism and liberation. The SJMA presentation includes a recent acquisition from the Crocker’s collection. What…

Arthur Dove: Miniature Laboratories, the new exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art is a perfect parallel, in a way, to MOMA’s Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, also on view. Both exhibitions feature small paintings, experiments in form and media. Looking at the works in each exhibition, the word “essay”—in the sense of “attempt” or “try”—percolates to the surface. The works are graspings, strivings, alternately tentative and assured. “In a way” however, in the above sentence, is a giveaway phrase. For while the reams of small drawings and paintings O’Keeffe produced in the period covered in the first part of the MOMA exhibition arise from her search for a personal style at the outset of her career, 1915 to 1918, the small paintings in Miniature Laboratories emerge from…

June 23-August 31, 2023 Lincoln Glenn Art Gallery 126 Larchmont Avenue Larchmont, NY 10538 t: (914) 727-3861 www.lincolnglenn.com New research and theories continue to animate the discussion of who came to the Americas first, from where and how. An ancient land bridge between Russia and Alaska may have brought the first peoples as the last ice age receded—or people may have arrived by sea from as yet undetermined locations. In recorded history, the vast waterways within the North American continent and its long coasts on two oceans have contributed to its development, physically, economically and artistically. An exhibition, Jump Right In: Waterways in American Art, 1850-1980, at Lincoln Glenn Gallery in Larchmont, New York, explores the idea that “American waterways have been utilized for trade, leisure, sport and human migration. From…

July 1-August 10, 2023 Hawthorne Fine Art New York, NY By appointment only t: (212) 731-0550 www.hawthornefineart.com Keeping true to their commitment to historic women artists, Hawthorne Fine Art presents another fitting exhibition and sale, this one comprised of works that depict scenes of women engaged in activities of everyday life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Women’s Work, which will be on view online from July 1 to August 10 consists of roughly 12 historic paintings in oil, watercolor, pastel and pencil. While the pieces are predominantly by women artists—among them Emma Lampert Cooper, Mary Lane McMillan, Anna E. Klumpke, Mary Cummings Browne, Rhoda Holmes Nicholls, Pauline Palmer and Martha J. Shaw—there are two notable exceptions. The centerpiece of the exhibition is George Inness’ Sunset Milking Time, Montclair, 1889,…

The first-ever, stand-alone modern American art sales produced strong results at Christie’s Rockefeller Center on April 21. In total, the two sales achieved $26,490,132, with auction records established by artists John Marin, Virginia Berresford, Harry Lane, Charles Goeller and August Mosca. The day began with a single-owner sale, Modern American Masterworks from the Ted Shen Collection, which totaled $12,124,930 in a white glove affair. Charles Sheeler’s Precisionist watercolor, Home Sweet Home, was acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the LeighYawkey Woodson Art Museum added Ashcan School artist John Sloan’s Cornelia Street to its permanent collection. John Marin’s Lobster Boat, Cape Split, Maine led the Shen Collection sale, realizing $1,925,500. Other highlights of the sale include Arthur G. Dove’s Through a Frosty Moon, which topped out at $1,744,000,…

MILFORD, CT SHANNON’S FINE ART AUCTIONEERS APRIL 27 Spring Sale $2.6 million American paintings drove strong results at Shannon’s April 27 Spring Sale. The 139-lot sale sold nearly 90 percent and grossed $2.6 million. Most of the lots offered came from private collections. The top lot in the auction was a colorful, dynamic composition by Maurice Prendergast depicting a beach scene in Boston. The piece sold for $162,500, topping its high estimate of $150,000. Other classic examples of American art that achieved stellar results include a John Fulton Folinsbee titled Canal Lane, which soared past its high estimate when it achieved $81,250; and a classic snowy Guy C. Wiggins scene called 5th Ave at 42nd Street that brought in $62,500. LOS ANGELES, CA JOHN MORAN AUCTIONEERS MAY 9 Spring California & American…

ONGOING Provincetown Printmakers Museum of Fine Arts Boston • Boston, MA Highlighted is a group of primarily women artists that gathered in 1915 to experiment with color woodblock printmaking. www.mfa.org ONGOING American Highlights and Recent Acquisitions Brigham Young University Museum of Art • Provo, UT The BYU Museum of Art continues its “From the Vault” series, an exhibition that unearths works from the museum’s collection. www.moa.byu.edu ONGOING Indefinitely Wild: Preserving California’s Natural Resources UCI Jack and Shanaz Langson Intitute and Museum of California Art • Irvine, CA The exhibition explores how the early history of environmental conservation in California might have influenced the state’s impressionist painters. www.imca.uci.edu JULY 8-NOVEMBER 26 Constellations: Forming the Collection, 1973-2023 Colby College Museum of Art • Waterville, ME This summer, the museum presents an exhibition…

When we gaze at the paintings of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, we are present before images of the greatest spectacles of our continent’s vast landscape. We know we are in the presence of primordial power, and mere words are not enough to describe the immensity and might of nature—they are paintings of a sublime new world. In 1757, Edmund Burke published a little book with a grand title—A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas about the Sublime and Beautiful—which shaped the ideas of the Romantic movement that emerged among bohemian artists during the social upheavals of the new era of industrialization. Although sensibly conservative Burke was far from being an irresponsible libertine for whom sensation trumped responsibility, he introduced the alarming idea that humans took pleasure…

The prolific artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988), is often referred to as “one of the most important visual artists of the 20th-century,” having completed more than 2,000 artworks in his era. Known for incorporating a modern style influenced by the Western masters and creating in a variety of different medias, Bearden is well represented at many institutions around the country. His powerful oil painting The Manger was recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Bearden was widely known for his fascination with African art “(particularly sculpture, masks, and textiles), along with Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints and Chinese paintings,” reads the National Gallery press release. However, The Manger, 1945, includes Christian subject matter that Bearden relied on heavily in a particular series of work. “After serving in the…

July 15, 2023 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction Grand Sierra Resort 2500 E. Second Street Reno, NV 89595 t: (208) 772-9009 www.cdaartauction.com On July 15, Coeur d’Alene Art Auction will return to Reno, Nevada, to bring Western art from around the country to bidders during a marathon sale filled with stunning examples by top artists. “We had probably the best spring we could imagine,” Mike Overby, a partner with the sale, says. “We were seeing great piece after great piece come out to us. Just one after another. From top artists, and then masterpieces on top of that. We knew this year’s sale would be special early on as the quality proved to be very high across the board.” The historic lineup of material will be available to bidders on July…

Over the course of 10 cross-category live and online sales that began on April 19, Sotheby’s brought 1,000-plus lots to auction that comprised the Wolf Family Collection, lauded as one of the greatest collections of American art and objects of its kind. The historic auction series brought a remarkable breadth of exceptional American-focused works of fine and decorative arts to market, with extraordinary examples of paintings and watercolors, sculpture, furniture, silver, design, jewelry and Chinese export porcelain spanning the 18th through 20th centuries. While nine out of the 10 auctions met or exceeded their high estimates, the crown jewel was undeniably The Spirit of America, the evening sale that launched the series and brought in more than half of the $68 million the Wolf Collection garnered in total, with all…

Hindman held the spring edition of its American art auction on May 19, with stellar results. In total, the sale achieved just over $1 million, with a 90 percent sell-through rate. Among the highlights of the May sale were works by such esteemed names in American art as Gertrude Abercrombie, Milton Avery and Fern Isabel Coppedge. Abercrombie’s 1956 oil on Masoniate Giraffe and Moon demolished its $70,000 high estimate when it sold for an astounding $182,700. An important piece in Abercrombie’s oeuvre, the painting demonstrates her skills in depicting real life in “evocative and mysterious ways,” according to the auction house. “We were delighted by the results throughout the sale, which highlighted that the market for American artists ranging from impressionists to regionalists and modernists is strong,” says Pauline Archambault,…

July 29-30, 2023 The Newport Show St. George’s School Ice Rink 375 Purgatory Road Middletown, RI 02842 t: (401) 846-2669 www.thenewportshow.com July marks the peak of the summer season on the East Coast and it’s Jespecially festive in the picturesque towns that populate the seaboard from New England to Virginia. It’s a beloved time of boating, barbecues, fresh seafood and long days at the beach. It’s also the high season for fine art and antique shows in the region. One of the most anticipated events is The Newport Show, which returns to charming Aquidneck Island in Middletown, Rhode Island, July 29 and 30 with a gala preview party on the evening of July 28. The Newport Show brings approximately 40 English and American dealers of vintage and antique fine art,…

One of the leading art and design fairs in the country, The Philadelphia Show saw another fantastic run this year, bringing more than 600 visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on opening night alone. The annual show, which closed April 30, featured some of the finest antiques, Americana, fine art and design in the world from 42 esteemed galleries, reporting a robust number of sales and enthusiastic interest from visitors. “We were thrilled to return to the East Terrace of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for this year’s edition of the show. Despite the persistent rain, there was palpable energy throughout the duration of the show, which translated into impressive sales for the dealers,” reflects Huntley Platt, manager of The Philadelphia Show. “The dealers did a fantastic job of…