Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i Art & Antiques

THE CELEBRATED landscape painter Gregory Kondos turns 98 on April 3. In celebration, Caldwell Snyder Gallery is presenting an exhibition of rare artworks by Kondos this month at its San Francisco gallery location. The show includes a selection of oil on canvas, charcoal drawings, and works on paper. Kondos was born to Greek immigrants in Massachusetsts, but after a move to Sacramento in 1927, California became his most enduring muse. Just like much of his subject matter, Kondos’ unique style is also inspired in large part by the Golden State. His palette and composition are reminiscent of Bay Area contemporaries like Richard Diebenkorn, and his thick, almost creamy paint application rhymes with that of his close friend Wayne Thiebaud. But Kondos was also influenced by the Abstract Expressionists, especially Willem…

“THE POND,” A solo exhibition of Thomas McNickle’s work, is on view at Jerald Melberg Gallery through April 24. Followers of the Charlotte, N.C.- based gallery’s programming will likely be familiar with McNickle’s sumptuous paintings—the artist has been the subject of 14 other shows at Jerald Melberg. This one, the 15th, focuses on new landscape paintings that are inspired by one particular location: a picturesque pond near the artist’s home in the Pennsylvania Amish country. The pond has proved a source of abundant inspiration for the artist, as well as a constant through which to explore environmental and temporal variables. McNickle explains, “The core of this exhibition is a group of paintings of the pond and its wonderful reflective beauty. I have painted it in the crisp morning light, the…

SCOTTSDALE ART Auction, one of the largest Western, wildlife, and sporting art auctions in the Southwest, will have more than 400 works of art for sale this month, split between two afternoon sessions, one on April 9 and the other on April 10. On offer are Western paintings and sculptures by the masters—William Gollings, William Herbert Dunton, Joseph H. Sharp, Charles M. Russell, Edgar Payne and Albert Bierstadt. Joining them are works by the genre’s young guns, contemporary greats elevating the field, such as Martin Grelle, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Bill Anton, Mark Maggiori, Kyle Polzin, and Morgan Weistling, among others. The celebrated wildlife artist Carl Rungius will also be represented in the sale by two major works. Among the highlights are Bierstadt’s Star King Mountain, a luminous, expansive oil on…

WHILE PERSIAN (or Farsi) is the national language of Iran and originated there, it is also an international language. Today, its reach extends into Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and in previous eras it had an even bigger footprint. In fact, for over a millennium Persian was understood throughout a vast region extending from India to Central Asia and as far west as Istanbul and Cairo. Famed for its elegance and aptitude for poetry, it was also the language of commerce and empire, putting an indelible stamp on other languages of the Islamic world, such as Turkish and Urdu. The cultural power of Persian was comparable to, or even greater than, the power that French used to have in Europe and the New World. These facts are important to keep…

Spain once exerted a magnetic force on the American imagination. After losing most of its New World colonies in the 1820s, Spain entered a long period of political and economic decline during which it came to seem like a backwater of Europe, a land that time forgot. The country represented the opposite of modernity, an improbable survival of folkish and even medieval ways of life. During the later part of the century, and for Americans in particular, tourism in Spain was a trip back in time to a romanticized rural Mediterranean world of colorful costumes and customs, exotic dances and music, and delightfully affordable arts and crafts. In addition to the ambience there was the Prado in Madrid, full of works by Spanish Old Masters such as Velásquez, Murillo, and…

When the Japanese designer Katsu Hamanaka arrived in Paris in 1924, he opened a workshop dedicated to objets d’art of shagreen, ivory, and precious woods. In Tokyo, he had studied with the celebrated lacquer artist Katsutaro Yamazaki, and in France, after meeting Seizo Sugawara, the master craftsman famous for teaching Eileen Gray how to work with lacquer, Hamanaka resumed his study of traditional lacquerware techniques. He sent for traditional Japanese books, tools, and materials, and began working in a style that favored geometric patterns. Hamanaka began regularly exhibiting lacquer work at the Paris Salons at the turn of the decade, and eventually adapted a more figurative style as per contemporary French tastes. Jean Dunand, also a student of Sugawara’s, was tasked by Mademoiselle Colette Aboucaya to create a smoking room…

IN 1969, “OBJECTS: USA,” a survey dedicated to American craft designers, opened at the National Collection of Fine Art at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. The show was the brainchild of visionary gallerist Lee Nordness and featured works by artists like Anni Albers, Wendell Castle, Sheila Hicks, and George Nakashima, among others. Highly influential in refocusing the way craft was seen within the art world, “Objects: USA” went on to tour 33 venues throughout America and abroad. “Objects: USA 2020,” an exhibition that takes inspiration from the trailblazing 1969 show, is on view at the New York gallery R & Company through July. It mounts works by 50 of the object makers featured in the original exhibition and 50 works by leading contemporary design artists. The result is both…

ALEXANDER CALDER and Pablo Picasso barely knew each other, and only met four times in their lives. Their works are, at least superficially, very different. Nonetheless, an exhibition now at the de Young Museum in San Francisco makes the case for commonality, examining these two titans of 20th-century art together in an attempt to place them in dialogue with each other. “Calder-Picasso,” which runs through May 23, is a collaborative work of filial homage, being the brainchild of the artists’ grandsons, Alexander S.C. Rower and Bernard Ruiz-Picasso. The exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in partnership with the Calder Foundation, New York; Musée national Picasso-Paris; and the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso…

“For Modernism, we may take it that abstraction is the law and that realism is the criminal,” wrote the art historian Linda Nochlin in the early 1970s. At that time, abstraction had already lost some of its dominance, but the point was and still is sound. With the rise of Pop, representation had begun its return to the art world, but of the multiple modes of representational art that have come into being since then, few can be considered “realism.” And with the widespread use of photography and other machine-generated imagery in mixed media, it has become possible, even easy, to engage in figurative or representational art without using the traditional techniques of realist painting at all. So in that sense, realist painters remain outsiders even if they are no…

TOWER OF THE Koutoubia Mosque, which is considered Winston Churchill’s most important painting, set a world auction record for the artist and former British Prime Minister at Christie’s Modern British Art Evening Sale in March. The painting came on the block from the Jolie Family Collection (yes, Jolie meaning Angelina; the work was a gift from her ex-husband Brad Pitt). At the sale, a nine-minute battle ensued for the painting between 10 passionate bidders. Two other paintings by Churchill, Scene at Marrakech and St Paul’s Churchyard, also appeared in the sale, both bypassing their presale estimates by healthy margins. Churchill began painting in 1915 at a notable lull in his career. During World War II, when his duties as a wartime Prime Minister left little time for artistic hobbies, he…

Francesco Marmitta was born in Parma in the 1460s. He was the son of a wool and wax merchant and became an acclaimed painter, goldsmith, engraver of gems, and illuminator. Today, his work is in several high-profile collections. Virgin and Child Flanked by Sts Benedict and Quentin, which Marmitta painted for Parma’s San Quintino church in the years leading up to his death in 1505, is in the Louvre. Adoration of the Shepherds (circa 1500, tempera and gold on parchment), a small painting created for private devotion and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, belonged to the Medici pope Clement VII and was gifted to Christine of Lorrain, grand duchess of Tuscany, by Pope Gregory XIV in 1591. The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore acquired the Rangoni Bentivoglio Book…

MAKING UP the bedrock of Zaplin Lampert Gallery, a mainstay of Santa Fe’s art scene for nearly 35 years, are “explorer artists,” the stalwart painters and photographers who ventured into the American West during the 19th century. In fact, the gallery’s founders, Richard Lampert and the late Mark Zaplin, found the impetus for their own move west from Massachusetts after discovering a large collection of photographs by pioneering photographer and ethnologist Edward S. Curtis in a Boston bookstore in the 1970s. Since then, the gallery has grown to encompass works by the Taos Society of Artists, the Santa Fe Art Colony, and a host of American artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but it’s always maintained a selection of work by pioneering westward explorers. True to form, this…

JAMES CALK and his wife, Betsy Havens, are both painters, though in different styles. Calk’s work is gestural abstraction with a suggestion of landscape, executed with a bright palette and thick impasto. Havens, a figurative artist is as inspired by the human world as her husband is by the realm of nature. She does street scenes—cafés, markets, fishermen, dancers—as well as portraits of historical figures and contemporary Americans. The couple, who live and work in historic Georgetown, S.C., have won many awards and exhibited widely, including at the Myrtle Beach Art Museum, and their works are in both private and corporate collections. Paintings by both artists are available this month at LePrince Fine Art in Charleston, S.C., and at Crown Gallery in Blowing Rock, N.C., as well as at Havens…

ALICE NEEL PAINTED some of the 20th century’s most evocative portraits. Over the course of her seven-decade-long career, she rendered stirring representations of friends, lovers, colleagues, and the diverse groups of people who populated her longtime home of New York. “Alice Neel: People Come First,” an exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 1, positions Neel not simply as a singular voice in figurative painting but as a radical figure herself. Examining her work through the lens of her prolonged engagement with civil rights, social justice, and leftist politics, the show considers her commitment to figural representation as a bold, humanistic declaration. The exhibition spans the length of Neel’s career, from her start in Cuba in the 1920s, when she was briefly married to painter Carlos…

Clyfford Still sold approximately 81 works during his lifetime. He had only 15 exhibitions. But neither statistic is due to a lack of demand for the pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter’s bold and uncompromising work, nor to a dearth of output. Still’s contemporaries celebrated his outsized, exuberant paintings vociferously. He had arrived at pure abstraction between 1938 and 1942, shedding figurative tendencies earlier than his colleagues (many of whom continued to paint in a figurative-surrealist style into the 1940s). The intense effect of Still’s abstract shift was perceived quickly and deeply by the art world’s leading players. Jackson Pollock, the popular face of Ab-Ex, said Still’s work made the rest of the New York School’s output look “academic.” Comparing Still’s 1946 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery to…

IN 2017, WHEN he turned 80, David Hockney decided to move to rural France. The artist, who had long split his time between his native England and Los Angeles, had been traveling in Normandy and felt the impulse to move there for a while. He was craving solitude and quiet—a new desire for someone who had always thrived on attention. By the time he got settled, in a centuries-old farmhouse on four acres called La Grande Cour, it was late in 2018, and Hockney was looking forward to welcoming the spring of 2019 in Normandy before returning to L.A. However, fate intervened, and he ended up greeting the first spring of the pandemic in the farmhouse, too. The enforced isolation ended up being conducive to productivity, even for the prolific…