Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2021 i Art & Antiques

Four years after the great German-born American art historian Erwin Panofsky published his landmark Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (1939), the New York Times ran an article by one of its art critics, Howard Devree, that railed against the book. It read, in part: “The other day in a bookshop I picked up a volume on iconology which devoted a whole long heavy chapter to the use and significance of the blind cherub in certain Renaissance paintings!” Devree went on to complain that such scholarship “imbued all but the initiate with a sense of ignorance and unworthiness and erected a wall of erudition between the ordinary citizen and the pretorian guard of Germanic art specialists.” He argued, further, that the approach of Panofsky and…

When she died in 2019 at the age of 98, Mary Abbott was one of the last living members of the original Abstract Expressionist group of painters. In Abbott’s New York Times obituary, Gwen Chanzit, curator of a 2016 exhibition at the Denver Art Museum titled “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” said, “Mary Abbott was an early participant in the development of Abstract Expressionism, but like other women painters she was mostly left out of histori-cal accounts of this male dominated movement. Only now are the women of Abstract Expressionism beginning to be recognized for their contributions.” In Abbott’s case, that rec-ognition is coming not only in the form of museum exhi-bitions but of a new biography being released by McCormick Gallery in Chicago. Owner Tom McCor-mick met Abbott in 2002…

A SELECTION of works by John L. Moore is currently on view at June Kelly Gallery in New York. The show, which consists of introspective, abstract paintings and drawings, will be up through June 29. Moore was born in Cleveland and studied art at nearby Kent State University, but he’s lived and worked in New York since 1985. Black ovals began appearing in his paintings not long after, some time in the early 1990s. Initially, these ovoid shapes were stand-ins for the figure, but in later works they came to represent mirrors. “I use the image of mirrors,” says Moore, “as a metaphor in an oblique way of referring to various contemporary issues.” The artist continues, “As they do not reflect images, the mirrors are used in a manner of…

“BEAUFORD Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom,” an exhibition organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, is now on view at the Asheville Art Museum through June 21. The show features more than 40 paintings and works on paper by Delaney, a Black, Appalachian-born artist who moved to the Paris suburb of Clamart in 1955. Delaney’s 50-year career is punctuated by a nearly 40-year friendship with the writer James Baldwin, and the works on view in Asheville either depict, are inspired by or are dedicated to Baldwin. For Delaney, Baldwin served as a powerful intellectual and spiritual anchor, and for Baldwin, Delaney was a guide for how to persevere as a gay man of color. The work that emerged from the friendship is as vibrant as it is crucial. Delaney’s Portrait of…

THE AIRPLANE HAD a huge impact on 20th-century art—and not just in its role as a conveyor of jet-set collectors. The phenomenon of flight itself gave rise to artworks from the very beginning, most notably by speedobsessed Futurists. Not only did the sensation of flight betoken a breaking of age-old boundaries that enthralled the avant-garde, but the unprecedented velocities reached by planes came to symbolize the onrush of modernity and its new pace of life. For those few artists lucky enough to go up in an early aircraft, the downward vantage point was revolutionary; the landscape viewed vertically became almost abstract, like a real-life map. In 1930s Italy, there arose a school of painting called aeropittura, oriented toward conveying the visual and physical experience of being in a plane (with…

“RARE AND Wondrous: Birds in Art and Culture 1620–1820” soars at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, through July 25. The exhibition will showcase the museum’s recent acquisition of the important six-volume series Ornithologie (1760), written by Mathurin-Jacques Brisson and illustrated by François-Nicolas Martinet. It also feature paintings, prints and decorative arts from the TMA’s collection, as well as prints and illustrated books on loan from the Yale Center for British Art, the University of Michigan Museums Library and Special Collections, and the Bowling Green State University Libraries Center for Archival Collections. Among the highlights is a recently restored mechanical singing bird box. The box was made of silver and enamel around 1845–65 and is attributed to Charles Bruguier, a prominent automata maker of the day. “Rare and Wondrous”…

IN THE IMAGINATIVE universe of the ancient Greeks and Romans, love is a force that pervades all and conquers all. Myths embodied in works of literature such as Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid and especially Ovid’s Metamorphoses tell of Eros’ inevitable power over gods and human beings alike. During the Renaissance, these stories came alive again in the imaginations of artists and their patrons, and the frenzied escapades of the Classical gods and heroes furnished the themes for elaborate large-scale paintings that reveled in beauty, sensuality, and sheer invention. Even in devoutly Christian Europe, pagan myth proved immensely attractive within elite artistic and scholarly circles during the 16th and 17th centuries. A rare opportunity to see some of the greatest examples of this kind of painting is provided by an exhibition…

The first artist group to establish roots in the Hamptons was a sort of boys’ club. The Tile Club, an informal, New York City-based fraternal order of artists, writers, and musicians, was formed in the 1870s and included figures like Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, J. Alden Weir, William Merritt Chase, and Stanford White. The group, indulging in the decorative arts fervor of the Aesthetic Movement, gathered weekly in the city to paint eight-by-eight-inch tiles and socialize. But the club also made excursions to paint and sketch en plein air, with these trips taking them on numerous occasions to the secluded, naturally abundant East End. The Long Island Railroad even sponsored a sort of artist junket out to the Hamptons with 11 Tile Club Members in tow. The sketches and resulting…

A LOT OF THINGS are said to come in threes. “Three Treasures—Collected by Stuart Weitzman,” an auction at Sotheby’s New York slated for June 8, brings a trinity of incredibly rare and highly coveted collector’s items. The first is the world’s most famous coin, a 1933 Double Eagle (est. $10–15 million). The second is the world’s most famous and valuable stamp, the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta (est. $10–15 million). The third is the world’s most famous American stamp, the 24-cent Inverted Jenny Plate Block (est. $5–7 million). Stuart Weitzman, a renowned luxury shoe designer, began collecting stamps and coins while growing up in Queens, N.Y. Over the years, boyhood interest grew into serious collecting, and in 2002, the making of history. That year he acquired the Double Eagle—the only example…

THIS MONTH, Findlay Gal-leries in Palm Beach, Fla., will be having a one-man show for British painter Hugo Grenville. “Juxtaposition/Composition” (June 1–July 1) features fig-ure subjects, landscapes, and still lifes in a style that immediately recalls Matisse, Vuillard, and Bonnard. In his joyful enthusiasm for bright colors, sunlight, textile patterns, and open windows, Grenville most resembles Matisse, while the quality of interiority in his work recalls the Nabis. His skill with dense patterning is on display in works like The Chequered Dress, in which the dress, worn by a young woman, meshes with the patterns of the pillow she leans on and a cloth draped behind her. The whole composition is like a complex fugue of intersecting patterns and colors. The purple and yellow that dominate are regulars in Grenville’s…

DOROTHY DEHNER, who was born in Cleveland in 1901, studied drama before she turned to fine art. As a teenager, she moved with her family to Pasadena, Calif., where she got involved with the local playhouse. Later, she dropped out of her theater studies at UCLA to hit the stage in New York, finding starring roles in off-Broadway productions. But not finding fulfillment in acting, she left showbiz—and the U.S. altogether—to travel alone throughout Europe in the mid-1920s. When she returned to the states, her head full of masterpieces by the Cubists, Fauvists, and Constructivists, she was determined to study art. Dehner quick ly enrolled at the Arts Students League and began to be active in New York’s avantgarde circles in 1925. However, it wasn’t until 1950 that she began…

THE ARTIST Wosene Worke Kosrof has lived in the U.S. for over 40 years, but he was born and raised in Ethiopia, and the language of his native country is an integral part of his painting practice. He creates complex, layered abstractions in which the characters of the Ethiopian Amharic script are essential elements. He has observed that knowledge of Amharic is not necessary for an understanding of his paintings; in fact, those who know it may assume that the meaning of the artwork is reducible to what the syllabic characters spell out, while those who do not can experience their graphic power and mystery without grasping for literal meanings. Recent works by Wosene will go on view later this month at Paul Mahder Gallery in Healdsburg, Calif., in the…

IN HIS 1953 book Prints and Visual Communication, William M. Ivins, Jr. wrote about the posters of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, which were virtually omnipresent in the Paris of the 1890s, “A Parisian might never have been to an art exhibition, and might never have looked attentively at any painting, but he could not evade the Lautrec posters… [T]hey had the great quality of ‘carrying’—their arbitrary and wilful patterns could be seen from afar. The solemn and the traditionally minded did not take them seriously, but many picture-makers did. And they had their undoubted effects on the public’s eyes…. The shock of his posters was for many people an ocular liberation.” Lautrec’s poster style relied on bold, simplified forms and big expanses of bright yet flat colors, with which he replicated…