Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2020 i Art & Antiques

MOMENTUM GALLERY in downtown Asheville, N.C., has relocated to a expanded, 15,000-squarefoot space, spread over two light-filled floors in an extensively renovated 100-year-old building. In late December the gallery, which offers paintings, prints, sculpture, furniture, and studio glass, will inaugurate the new space by showing the work of several contemporary artists. Painter Samantha Keely Smith makes dramatic abstract landscapes such as The Sky is Breaking, which sets deep blues against fiery oranges. Smith says that her “landscape paintings examine the psychological impact of the escalating climate crisis, alongside our propensity for hope. Heavily influenced by dreams, the paintings depict imaginary places at the boundary of the things inside us, and the changing world around us.” John L. Cleaveland, Jr., a new addition to Momentum’s stable, is a realist landscape painter.…

GLASS IS naturally blue-green in color (a phenomenon visible in ancient examples), and it took glassmakers centuries to perfect clear, colorless glass. On December 26, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va., opens “Clear as Crystal: Colorless Glass at the Chrysler Museum,” an exhibition devoted to stunning works in colorless glass. Drawing from the institution’s encyclopedic collection, the show features works by glassmakers such as Steuben, Baccarat, Lalique, the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company, and Tiffany. Highlights include Christopher Ries’ sinuous abstract sculpture, Holiday (1988), made of cut, ground, and polished optical crystal (glass) and Mattieu Grodet’s delicate Goblet (2010) in blown and engraved glass. Untitled Vase (African Hut Coupe), a blown and engraved vessel designed by the Swedish sculptor Edvard Held and manufactured by Orrefors Glasbruk in 1930,…

“POSSIBILITIES,” a new conceptual exhibition that opens at Denver’s K Contemporary on December 19, will be mounted with blank, white canvases. Rather than show completed works, the exhibition is designed to encourage collectors to commission original pieces from a roster of leading contemporary artists, like Hunt Slonem, Andrew Jensdotter, Daisy Patton, Jonathan Saiz, and others. “I’m trying to invite people—after what a challenging year it’s been—to create something beautiful together,” says Doug Kacena, the gallery’s owner and curator. “Our artists have created some of their best works through the commission process. The artworks that come out of this exhibition, accompanied with an experience with the artist, will help construct part of the story of the new year.” Each of the show’s artists are offering an experience in conjunction with their…

THE KIMBELL ART Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, celebrates female power in ancient Egypt with a queen-themed exhibition opening on December 6—“Queen Nefertari’s Egypt.” In recent years, the Kimbell has distinguished itself with a number of important Egyptological exhibitions, including “Egypt’s Dazzling Sun: Amenhotep II and His World” (1992), “Gifts of the Nile: Ancient Egyptian Faience” (1998), “Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt” (2002) and “Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh” (2006). The present show (on view through March 14), which continues that tradition, is the result of a collaboration between the Kimbell and the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. It was under the aegis of the Museo Egizio that the tomb of Nefertari, the favorite wife of the Pharaoh Ramesses II (reigned 1279–1213 B.C.), was discovered in 1904. The…

FOR THE FIRST time in a generation, the American artist Frank Duveneck (1848–1919) is getting a comprehensive museum exhibition. The Cincinnati Art Museum, in Duveneck’s home city, is mounting “Frank Duveneck: American Master,” from December 18, 2020, through March 28, 2021. More than 125 works will be on view, 90 of them from the museum’s own collection, which is the largest trove of Duvenecks in the world. This broad selection, plus the accompanying catalogue, will give viewers what they need to appreciate and assess the work of this influential but now relatively little-known painter and printmaker. Duveneck’s trademark brushy style, dark palette, and innovative subject matter including gritty everyday-life studies, and Orientalism marked an important shift in the priorities of American art in the post-Civil War period. Julie Aronson, curator…

IN OCTOBER, William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies—often referred to as the “First Folio”—set the world auction record for any work of literature. The tome, a masterpiece that has been highly sought after for nearly four centuries, went for just under $10 million at Christie’s “Exceptional Sale” in New York. After a six-minute volley with another phone bidder, Stephan Loewentheil, the antiquarian book collector and founder of the 19th Century Rare Book and Photograph Shop, emerged as the highest bidder. Loewentheil says, “The First Folio is the most important collection of plays ever published and revered throughout the world. It is an honor to purchase one of only a handful of complete copies of this epochal volume. It will ultimately serve as a centerpiece of a great collection of intellectual…

THIS SEASON, Selkirk Auctioneers & Appraisers of St. Louis, Mo., is staging two exciting sales. December 12 brings the annual “Historic St. Louis” auction, which is dedicated to rare art and objects from the auction house’s environs. The sale will feature a particularly strong roster of paintings, with offerings by historic St. Louis artists like Fred Conway, Ernest Trova, and Siegfried Reinhart. Mid-Summers Day 1915, a large-scale oil on canvas by the celebrated St. Louis painter Fred Green Carpenter, is a standout. Selkirk director Bryan Laughlin describes the work perfectly, saying, “The painting is quintessential of the artist’s potent oeuvre. Every square inch is brimming with gem-like hues of fantasy by the master colorist.” The sparkling, Impressionist-inspired work, which was featured in a 1982 exhibition at the Saint Louis Art…

MCCLAIN GALLERY of Houston, Texas, is currently mounting its first solo exhibition of work by the Vermont-born, Brooklyn-based artist Julia Kunin. “Rainbow Dream Machine,” which is on view through January 30, presents ceramic pieces from Kunin’s Caryatid series. These intricate wall-mounted high reliefs occupy a space between abstraction and figuration and borrow from the language of architecture, from the ancient to the futuristic. Kunin says, “These abstracted surreal female and non-gender-specific figures that I am continuing to develop address sexuality while incorporating imagery from once utopian structures. The body and architecture become intertwined, creating portraits that verge on the robotic and otherworldly, stand-ins for future Guerilleres, or warriors.” Works in the series, like Double Portrait (2018, ceramic wall piece) and Labrys Queen (2019, ceramic wall piece), feature symbols of femininity and…

IN THE XHOSA and Zulu languages of South Africa, the word ubuhle means “beauty,” and it is used by a group of women artists in rural KwaZulu-Natal to describe the works they are making in a new art medium. Ndwango, which literally means “cloth,” involves sewing colored Czech glass beads onto a black fabric backing to create “paintings in beads.” From a distance, an ndwango appears to have a smooth, continuous surface but on closer inspection reveals itself as having a shimmering mosaic-like texture. Due to the very large number of beads used, it can take 10 months to make one ndwango. Whether figurative, abstract, or a combination of both, the brightly colored and graphically bold panels are described by their creators as coming “directly from the soul,” and the…

In late 19th-century Spain, history painting’s stronghold on the state’s interest was supplanted by paintings of social denunciation and the so-called “subjects of the day.” These works both reflected societal mores and created a heightened, clichéd version of them. As such, their portrayals of women were an outgrowth of how a patriarchal society expected them to behave—or not behave. And as painting moved away from religious or mythic allegorical subjects and instead dramatized moral “everyday” quandaries, the behaviors and predicaments of women in paint reached a level of unprecedented histrionics and implied judgement. As these works were rewarded by Spain’s official exhibitions, a cyclical relationship between life and art developed, as did a host of pictorial stereotypes. For instance, the National Exhibition of 1895 saw the beginnings of a bizarre…

When Rembrandt Bugatti began creating his celebrated series of Nubian lions toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century, he was in his mid-20s and already at the height of his powers. After relocating to Antwerp, Belgium, from Paris in 1907, the Italian sculptor began working primarily outdoors at the Jardin Zoologique. There, he was able to observe animal behavior directly--experience readily seen in his evocative wildlife bronzes. Bugatti worked with plastiline, a common type of Italian modeling clay. He modeled his figures using strokes of his thumbs, exacting incredible lifelike detail while still imparting a sense of the artist’s hand. The Hébrard foundry in Paris, under the direction of chief founder Albino Palazzolo, cast Bugatti’s finished works in bronze. The sculpture seen here, Lionne de Nubie,…

JAN DAVIDSZ. de Heem, a painter who was active in Utrecht and Antwerp during the 17th century, is the innovator of the pronkstilleven, or sumptuous still life. The artist’s series of four monumental canvases, painted between 1640 and 1643, cemented the bountiful genre. Embodying a harmonious marriage between Dutch precision and Flemish grandeur, these works are bacchanals of sumptuous foods, luxury items, and the occasional lobster. Today, Tables of Desserts (1640) is in the collection of the Louvre, Still Life in an Interior (1641) in that of the Brussels Municipal Museum, and Banquet Still Life with a Lobster (1642), which sold at Christie’s New York in 1988 for $6.6 million, is in private hands. The fourth painting in the series, A banquet still life (1643), was lost for 200 years until…

TO CREATE HER Color Field-esque abstractions, Jill Nathanson employs a multistep process. The artist begins with sheets of translucent color, printed from digital files, that she layers in various formations looking for new and emotionally resonant color combinations. She then scales these preliminary collages into finished works, working on large gessoed wood panels. Nathanson uses a thick polymer she developed with the custom lab at Golden Artist Colors; it looks milky-white when wet, even after pigment has been added, and thus it’s a painstaking process of trial-and-error to reach the ideal hue, saturation, and degree of transparency for each color. Nathanson lifts and tilts the panels in rhythmic motions to control the flow of the runny paint. Each color takes a day to dry, adding another degree of rhythm and…

WITH LONDON’S Great Exhibition of 1851 on the horizon, Herbert Minton, the owner of Minton & Co., hired Léon Arnoux. The French modeler, designer, decorator, and ceramic chemist had worked at Sévres, and the idea was that he would plan the Staffordshire pottery company’s display at the international exhibition. What Arnoux developed for the show, a form of molded earthenware, ended up taking home the Council Medal for technical innovation. It became known as “majolica.” A benchmark of industrial design, majolica was quickly and widely embraced, popping up in places like the Royal Dairy at Windsor and the tables of the nascent British and American middle classes. Arnoux drew on Renaissance ceramics to create majolica’s style and developed lead-based glazes in rich, saturated color to decorate the molded pottery. Minton…

WITH ALL THE attention paid to the Italian Renaissance and the Netherlands’ Northern Renaissance, the other Northern Renaissance—the one in Germany—tends to get eclipsed. And when we do turn our eyes toward it, Albrecht Dérer takes center stage, with Lucas Cranach waiting in the wings. But there was another great German artist of the early 16th century, Albrecht Altdorfer (1480–1538), who created amazing works and innovated in several media. While he was hugely influential in both artistic and public life in his home base of Regensburg, in the southern German region of Bavaria, after his death his fame began to decline, although the works themselves were never forgotten. Altdorfer’s name, fame, and artistic genius are now getting full recognition in a major exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. “Albrecht Altdorfer:…

ROBERT FRANK’S The Americans has been called “the most influential photography book of the 20th century,” and now, 62 years after its first appearance and one year after the death of its creator, it’s not hard to see why. When The Americans came out, no one had ever seen a book like it; it wasn’t a sumptuous paean to its subject, nor was it a showcase of high-production-value photographic technique. Frank’s black and white pictures were emotionally raw, rough around the edges as far as technique went, and enigmatically sequenced. Other than the introduction by Jack Kerouac and the briefest of captions, the book was wordless. The pictures spoke for themselves, and what they seemed to be saying about America in the ’50s was difficult for many to hear. Frank’s…