Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2019-20 i Art & Antiques

PALM BEACH Modern + Contemporary Art Fair (PBM+C) returns this year for its fourth edition. The international fair, which is presented by Art Miami, kicks off with an invitation-only VIP preview on Thursday, January 9, before opening to the public on January 10 and running through January 12. It will be staged at the PBM+C Pavilion, a posh tented space on South Dixie Highway at Okeechobee Boulevard. There, important international dealers will showcase blue-chip modern and contemporary works of art from the 20th and 21st centuries. One highlight of the fair comes from London gallery Archeus/Post-Modern: Thomas Downing’s Swap Series #9 (acrylic on canvas). Downing was part of the Washington Color Field Movement, and the 1967 triptych, with its zig-zagging bands of color, is a prime example of Color Field…

“ROBERT HUOT Paintings,” a retrospective that spans 60 years of the artist’s career, will be on view at Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute Museum of Art in Utica, N.Y., through January 19. Huot, a politically-engaged minimalist painter, became deeply entrenched in New York’s post-war art scene. He collaborated with fellow artists such as Robert Morris and choreographer Twyla Tharp, his first wife, exhibited his large-scale works at commercial galleries in Manhattan and Europe, and participated in shows at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum. By the end of the 1960s, however, Huot made radical changes to his career. Disillusioned by the art world’s growing commercialization and lack of political awareness, he left the city for an upstate farm in New York’s…

THE PHOTOGRAPHER Marcus Leatherdale chronicled the downtown art scene of the 1980s, and now highlights of his oeuvre from that era are on view at Throckmorton Fine Art in New York, in the exhibition “Marcus Leatherdale: Out of the Shadows, Photographs New York City 1980–1992” (through January 25). Gallery owner Spencer Throckmorton says, “Leatherdale was just a twenty-something trying to get by when he began shooting often spontaneous shots of the celebrated personalities partying at the downtown clubs popular at the time. He says he didn’t realize he was archiving a raucous era that would soon be extinct—he was just photographing his friends.” Those friends included Madonna, Debbie Harry, Kathy Acker, Leigh Bowery, Lisa Lyon, International Chrysis, Larissa, and Divine. Leatherdale became the studio assistant and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe,…

IN 1999, CANADIAN artist Jennifer Angus began creating site-specific installations using insects. In these works, Angus arranges large numbers—sometimes thousands—of dried exotic bugs into intricate, ornamental patterns. Arrayed together, the insects’ colors and textures lend themselves to the recreation of Victorian wallpaper or textiles or 19th-century book illustrations. Angus’ works also speak to the beauty of insects and ask viewers to move beyond the “ick” factor and develop a greater respect for things entomological. “‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’ and Other Stories”, the largest installation of Angus’s 20-plus year career, is currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, in St. Petersburg, Fla. Angus made the site-specific project specifically for the museum’s Hazel Hough Wing galleries, and it will not travel after the show closes on January…

AS ONE OF the preeminent museums for German modern art in the world, the Neue Galerie in New York is a fitting venue for a career-spanning survey of the work of one of the greatest modernist artists of early 20th-century Germany, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. On view though January 13, the exhibition, titled simply with the artist’s name, takes in all phases of Kirchner’s work while focusing in particular on his use of color, and indeed on the central role of color in his work across a multitude of media. Kirchner called himself a “Farbenmensch ,” (“color man” or “color person”), an artist who thought of color before line or even composition. He would lay down planes of color and then let figurative elements emerge from them. He took advantage of new…

There are easier ways to gain instant fame than how Captain James Cook and his crew on the HMS Endeavour achieved it. Cook, a junior naval officer, led the King George III-commissioned voyage across the Atlantic to Brazil and around Cape Horn. This ship sailed to Tahiti to observe the 1769 transit of Venus and then to three Pacific islands. From there, Cook and crew clocked six months in New Zealand before becoming the first European explorers to reach the east coast of Australia. Sailing northward along the Austrialian continent and just barely evading shipwreck on the Great Barrier Reef, the ravaged Endeavour landed in the port of Batavia in the Dutch East Indies. Finally, it circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope in March 1771 and reached England in July.…

“JULIE MEHRETU” is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) through March 22. The show, a mid-career survey of Mehretu’s work co-organized by LACMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, hits New York in June before arriving at the High Museum of Art in October and the Walker Art Center in March 2021. It features 36 paintings and 41 works on paper that date from 1996 to the present, providing a picture of the Ethiopian-American artist’s career until now. Mehretu’s work examines history and global issues like war, colonialism, geopolitics, and diaspora. She blends abstraction and figuration to create works that feel at once like landscapes, topographical maps, and architectural and technical schematics. Her pieces, be they large-scale paintings, intimate drawings, or experimental prints,…

IN 1930, YASHWANT Rao Holkar II, the Maharajah of Indore, had the Manik Bagh Palace in Indore, India, built in the European Modernist style. The German Modernist architect Eckart Muthesius developed the design, which restructured a pre-existing building from the foundation up, and the Maharajah selected some 20 interior designers to furnish the palace’s rooms. The result was a veritable showcase of the foremost Modernist icons of the 1920s and ’30s, with designs by Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray, Jean Puiforcat, and Louis Sognot and Charlotte Alix, and many others adorning its rooms. “Moderne Maharajah, un Mécène des Années 1930,” an exhibition on view at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris through January 12, featuring more than 500 objects from the Manik Bagh Palace, alongside rare archival materials. The show…

IN THE 17TH century, Rome came into its own—again. The city, which was once the focal point of the Classical world, had made advances during the Renaissance but also suffered damage from attacks during the Reformation. Emerging from the Catholic Church’s Counter-Reformation, the popes of the Baroque era, beginning with Sixtus V (reigned 1585–90), wanted to rebuild Rome as a symbol of Catholic majesty. Backed by papal—and independent—patronage, the city saw major changes to its layout and architecture. Simultaneously, painting and sculpture thrived, and as many established artists flocked to Rome from elsewhere, others built their careers there from the ground up. “Caravaggio and Bernini,” an exhibition running at The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna through January 19, showcases the two artists who epitomized Baroque Rome. It is the first exhibition…

The association of camouflage with modern painting is a little-known chapter of art history. Quite a number of important artists cut their teeth designing patterns for the concealment of arms and men during the first and second World Wars, or even made their mark as innovators in this aspect of strategy. Considering that artists of the caliber of Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Roland Penrose, Stanley William Hayter, Edward Wadsworth, Thomas Hart Benton, and Charles Burchfield all worked on camouflage, one could even be forgiven for speaking of a military-artistic complex. In some cases, modernist art concepts influenced camouflage design; for example, the bold geometric “dazzle” patterns on some warships in World War I came directly from Cubism and Vorticism. In other instances, the experience of creating camouflage influenced painters’ future…

Porphyry is a stone that possessed a mystique in antiquity due to its purplered hue, its hardness, and its rarity. The Greek word porphyra means purple, and the substance was reserved for use by the Roman emperors, analogous to the Tyrian purple dye used for Imperial togas. Porphyry was mined at only one place, a site in Egypt that was supposedly discovered by a Roman legionary in 18 A.D., according to Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. Since the location of this quarry was forgotten around the 4th century and not rediscovered until 1823, any porphyry used for sculpture in the intervening years had to be reclaimed from Classical ruins, especially architectural columns. The pair of Egyptian porphyry oval vases shown here was carved in Rome, most likely during…

THE TERM “Orientalism” has become a bit of a curse word—so much so that a current exhibition at the British Museum avoids it entirely, preferring to title itself “Inspired by the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art.” On view through January 26, the show contains important works of Orientalist painting by artists such as John Frederick Lewis, Frederick Bridgman, Ludwig Deutsch, and Eugène Delacroix, alongside decorative art objects made by Westerners in Islamic styles, as well as works of contemporary art that reference the Orientalist era in various ways. Organized in collaboration with the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur, “Inspired by the East” intends to flip the script on the long-standing Orientalism debate by placing the works in a new context. Chiefly a product of the…

IN THE LATE 1930s, more than a century after the French architect Jean-Jacques Lequeu died in penurious obscurity, a Viennese art historian discovered some visionary renderings he’d donated to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and resurrected him as an essential precursor to Modernism. Emil Kaufmann had already had some practice with historical resuscitation. Back in 1933, he’d published a book making the case that the Modernist austerity of Le Corbusier could be traced back to a Neoclassical architect of the French Revolutionary period named Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. Kaufmann’s ambition grew over the ensuing decades, as he sought to relate all aspects of 20th-century building to the visionary architecture of the French Revolution. After reviving Ledoux—who had once been celebrated and whose work was still studied by specialists—he disinterred a talented 18th-century…

ORIENTALIST ART is usually thought of as the product of a voyeuristic European eye objectifying and stereotyping the Middle East. But the picture is a little more complicated. One of the greatest Orientalist painters, Osman Hamdi Bey (1842–1910), was an “oriental” himself. In fact, he was the son of a Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, Ibrahim Edhem Pasha. Osman Hamdi was a man of parts—an artist, an art educator and administrator, an archaeologist, and a museum curator. Living at a time of transition in Turkey, during which the Ottoman elite was grappling with the problems of modernization, Osman Hamdi inhabited two worlds, East and West. In the mid-19th century, Turkish art was making the transition from a medieval style heavily influenced by Iran to one modeled on French academic…