Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2020 i Art & Antiques

ONE OF THE interesting things about abstract painting is how it continues to feed upon the visible world even as it eschews any conventionalized effort to represent it. A case in point is Leon Berkowitz (see page 66), an artist who is usually classified with the Washington, D.C., Color Field school but actually did a different kind of painting. While the Color Field painters stained their canvases with diluted paint, Berkowitz layered his with complex glazes that allowed them to radiate light outward through the colors, creating a uniquely luminous effect. Berkowitz actually called himself a “latter-day Luminist,” identifying himself with the second-generation Hudson River School artists who aimed for a transcendently peaceful effect in which light evenly suffuses the entire painting. Berkowitz made his artistic breakthrough while painting outdoors…

AMONG THE early-20th-century artists who depicted the American West, Maynard Dixon is the only one who was actually born west of the 100th meridian. A native of Fresno, Calif., in the San Joaquin Valley, he “had to go east to see the West,” as the saying went. Over the course of a career that spanned the 1890s to the year of his death, 1946, Dixon portrayed the landscape and people of the great Western desert in a unique manner that is both modern and timeless, and his work reflects his deep personal immersion in that world. He painted not as a mere observer but as a participant. Born in 1875, he came of age as the Old West was dying out and reached the peak of his creativity during a…

Chang Dai-chien (1899–1983) occupies a special place in the history of modern Chinese art. Critics, journalists, art historians, curators, and collectors all agree on his importance but have been at something of a loss as to what to make of him. That is at least partly due to the fact that Chang occupied so many roles, each of which contained within itself complexities and contradictions. As a painter, he was both a supreme master of traditional Chinese styles and a modernizing innovator. As a scholar, he was immersed in the old literati culture but also engaged in 20th-century archaeology. As a collector, Chang preserved historic works and made major contributions to their study, but he also used his knowledge and the old materials that he owned to engage in forgery,…

FUTURISM, AS AN art movement, always had a romance with flight. As early as 1909, only six years after the Wright Brothers’ first flight, F.T. Marinetti wrote in Futurism’s founding manifesto of “the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.” That same year, at an air show in the northern Italian city of Brescia, the nationalistic poet and amateur military man Gabriele d’Annunzio, an inspiration for the Futurists, persuaded one of the pilots to take him up. After an extremely short spin in a plane that rose only a hundred feet or so off the ground, D’Annunzio announced ecstatically that the feeling of flying was “divine and yet inexpressible.” A few years later, during World War I,…

The Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is one of the most legendary cars from the era of early motoring. Produced from 1906–26, it was named for its silver-plated finishings and for its ghost-like quietness in operation. Known more technically as the 40/50 HP, it was dubbed “the best car in the world” by the Pall Mall Gazette of London in 1911. This month, classic-car collectors will have the opportunity to own one of these historic automobiles. A 1914 example, Chassis 67RB, will be offered at Gooding & Company’s 11th annual Amelia Island Auction in Amelia Island, Fla., on March 6. Known as a Silver Ghost Torpédo Phaeton for its sporting “torpédo” open coachwork, this particular car features a large “London to Edinburgh” carburetor, a 22-inch radiator, a high-compression engine, strengthened springs, C-type…

THIS SPRING, Paris Photo, producer of the French art event that’s the world’s largest art fair dedicated to the photographic medium, joins the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) in presenting the first edition of Paris Photo New York. The fair will bring more than 100 top galleries and photo book dealers to Pier 94 from April 2–5. A gaggle of exhibitions, discussions, and awards and events are also on the show’s docket, providing a deeper look into fine art photography and its major players. One of the fair’s highlights comes from New York-based dealer Throckmorton Fine Art: Nickolas Muray’s Frida Kahlo with Magenta Rebozo “Classic” (1939). The iconic photograph captures a confident Kahlo with arms crossed. She wears her signature style of traditional dress, and as the title…

MUCH OF THE distinctive aesthetic of photography from the 1930s on derives from one small camera—the Leica. The German-made pocket-sized camera with the fast lens, which hit the market in 1926, revolutionized photography by making it possible for photographers to quickly and intuitively take pictures almost anywhere, anytime, from unexpected new angles and in difficult lighting conditions. The Leica popularized the 35mm film format with 36 shots on a roll, and it launched what we now call photojournalism. One of the early adopters of the Leica was a young German-Jewish woman named Ilse Bing (1899–1998). She bought hers in 1929 and is considered the first professional photographer to wholeheartedly embrace the new device (for the first few years it was available, the Leica attracted mostly amateurs because professionals though it…

THE NOCTURNE is a genre that thrived in California during the Tonalist era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it apparently put down deep roots in the state. An exhibition on view through April 25 at the Bakersfield Museum of Art attests to the vitality of night-based art in contemporary California. Organized by Winfield Gallery of Carmel-By-The-Sea, “One Night in California” presents the work of 25 artists of today who in one way or another follow the nocturne tradition. Of course, they don’t do it literally, and while Monterey County painter Charles Rollo Peters (1862–1928) painted mysterious night views of ruined adobes, the contemporary artists in the Bakersfield show tend to choose more banal subjects, such as a Western Union office (Marc Trujillo’s 2019 painting 6801 Van…

WITH PHOTOGRAPHS selling at auction for millions of dollars, art fairs dedicated entirely to the medium of photography, and galleries galore selling everything from daguerreotypes to digital C-prints, it’s hard to remember that not too long ago, there was virtually no commercial market for photography. Until the 1970s, when photographs were sold it was usually by their creators, as works of journalism, illustration, or portraiture. Museums such as MoMA purchased photographs, but they paid very little. Photography collectors were hobbyists swapping prints with each other. One of the key players in changing all that was the LIGHT Gallery, a New York commercial establishment that courageously championed contemporary fine-art photography. Though it lasted only 16 years, from 1971 to 1987, LIGHT helped build a community of photographers and collectors, and some…

FRANZ JOZEF PONSTINGL teetered on the edge of oblivion for decades. He taught himself to make paintings and drawings that look like covers of science fiction books yet to be written. He spent his time making art, not marketing or promoting it. A Salvador Dalí fan, he created surrealist works when the prevailing fashion was for Pop art and minimalism. After serving in the Air Force during World War II and Korea, he eked out a living through occasional interior design work and the generosity of family. He lived mainly in rural Pennsylvania and California, far from the hub of the 20th-century art world. And once, in the late 1960s, he hauled everything he’d made up until that point to his local Salvation Army and left it there. He died…

THIS PEN-AND-brown ink drawing, 10 ½ inches square, is the only surviving preparatory drawing for Mantegna’s nine-painting series The Triumphs of Caesar, one of the greatest works of the Italian Renaissance. It is not often that an Old Master drawing of this level of importance appears at auction, and bidders at Sotheby’s Old Master Drawings sale in January responded accordingly, pushing the price up to the record for any drawing by the artist. The Triumphs of Caesar was executed between 1484 and 1492 as a commission for the Ducal Palace of the Gonzaga family of Mantua, Mantegna’s principal patrons. The series depicts different aspects of the triumphal processions that celebrated Julius Caesar’s victory in the Gallic Wars and in the recovery of Pontus, as described in ancient Roman-period histories such…

THE 16TH ANNUAL Scottsdale Art Auction will be held on April 4. The sale will feature more than 350 lots of fine Western, wildlife, and sporting paintings and sculptures. All of the works coming on the block will be on view at the auction house’s galleries in Old Town Scottsdale, Ariz., for two weeks leading up to the sale. There will be an all-day preview and evening preview party on Friday, April 3. In the sale, classic meets contemporary. Major works by American masters like Frank Tenney Johnson, Charles M. Russell, Henry Farny, and the Taos Society artists will be available alongside important pieces by modern and contemporary artists like G. Harvey, Logan Hagege, Martin Grelle, and Mark Maggiori. Frank Tenney Johnson’s Tejon – My Palomino is a standout of…

IT SEEMS THE painter Amaranth Ehrenhalt hasn’t struggled for good company throughout her seven-decade-long career. The artist, who is one of the last surviving Abstract Expressionist painters from the New York School of the 1950s, hobnobbed with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline at the historic Cedar Tavern on University Place. When she moved abroad, she traded the Tavern for Le Select Café on Boulevard du Montparnasse. Sonia Delaunay became her patron, and she fell in with Joan Mitchell, Seymour Boardman, and Shirley Jaffe, among others. She traveled to North Africa with Friedensreich Hundertwasser and was asked by Alberto Burri to translate for him and Martha Jackson when he had his first gallery show in New York. Ehrenhalt lived and worked in France and Italy for more than 30 years,…

THE GIANTS of Baroque art aren’t British. Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Poussin, and Vermeer cast the period’s longest shadows, and none of them hail from the British Isles. Perhaps that’s why Tate Britain hasn’t once since its inception in 1897 staged an exhibition about the late 17th century. With its current show “British Baroque: Power and Illusion,” which runs through April 19, the London museum sticks a flag in fresh soil. The show chronicles the period 1660–1714, a historic time of upheaval and its aftermath in Britain. It’s safe to say that where history is tumultuous, art is interesting. This is clearly attested by “British Baroque.” Though no towering masters emerged from the region onto the global stage, the period is still marked by work of rich meaning. The use…

Between 1956 and 1964, the painter Leon Berkowitz and his wife, the poet Ida Fox, traveled throughout Europe. They spent two and a half years in Wales and made trips to London, Paris, Italy, Greece, and Jerusalem. For the painter, who had been a fixture of the Washington, D.C., arts community since the early 1940s, the trip served as a major turning point in his practice. Berkowitz said of this period, “Living and working as I did during those years in Europe in the open air under expanding skies, light itself became an ultimate goal. I became concerned with the dissolution of matter, the fragmentation of light, the conversion of ‘matter into spirit.’ I wanted to look into color, not at color.” If one were to wonder, what does transcendence…