Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Art & Antiques

THE DENVER GALLERY K Contemporary has put hundreds of Hunt Slonem’s works on view with “Curiouser and Curiouser.” The exhibition, which runs through November 6, includes more than 200 of Slonem’s iconic pieces, including neon, glass, painting, bronze, and outdoor sculpture. The Maineborn, New York-based artist has had more than 350 exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, but this show marks his first solo exhibition in Denver. Slonem is perhaps best known for his signature bunny form, which he often repeats in dense patterns, as in the expressive Hutch (2019, oil on canvas) and the rose-toned Pink Audrey Hepburn (2019, oil and acrylic with diamond dust on canvas), or reproduces in a variety of media, as in the bronze rabbit sculpture, Midas (2020). Slonem, an eccentric who takes…

JERALD MELBERG Gallery of Charlotte, N.C., opens “Bo Bartlett: American Nostalgia” on November 6. The solo show, on view through January 1, 2022, features works executed last year that depict peaceful and engrossing coastal landscapes and architecture. In the tradition of Grant Wood, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth, Bartlett is known for his ruminative scenes of American life. The Georgia-born realist painter, who now spends much of his time in Maine, studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and also received a certificate in filmmaking from New York University. The influences of film, storytelling, and art history are evident in his works, which often hint at narrative but find poetry in what goes unseen. Among the show’s highlights is Untitled (2020), a quiet gouache on paper that features a…

JOHN LESLIE Breck was one of the first American artists to bring Impressionism to the United States. The artist, who was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Massachusetts, studied painting in Munich and Paris. While abroad, a sojourn to Giverny, France, with fellow American artists Willard Metcalf and Theodore Robinson led to an influential friendship with Claude Monet. When Breck returned to the United States in 1890, he brought with him the wonders of Impressionism. Currently on view at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, N.C., is “John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist,” an exhibition of more than 70 works by the painter (through January 2, 2022). Culled from important public and private collections as well as the Terra Foundation collection of American art, the paintings on view demonstrate Breck’s…

THE AMERICAN West started mythologizing itself even before the “frontier” closed, so it’s hardly surprising that our ideas on the subject are frequently wrong and our images tend to be stereotypes. The classic Western artists focused their attention on the cowboy, the outlaw, and the cavalryman, depicting a uniformly Caucasoid demographic, but the reality is that the average cowboy was as likely to be Black or Latino as white, not to mention the African American horse soldiers who served in the West after the Civil War. As for the Indians, romanticized images dominate, and there is no shortage of demeaning ones, either, not to mention the glorification of conquest and cultural dominance. The curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., wanted to counteract the simplistic and exclusionary…

The United States has the reputation of being a hard-headedly rationalistic, materialistic nation, but in fact, Americans have been ghost-obsessed from colonial days down to the present time. The harsh conditions faced by the early settlers, the frequent violence of their lives, and the rugged landscapes that surrounded them combined to create of sense of being haunted. The Puritan religion, with its emphasis on sin and punishment, brought the other world shudderingly close to its adherents. In later times, the supernatural stream was more likely to run underground, but it was always there, bubbling beneath the surface. In the middle of the 19th century, America gave the world Spiritualism, a mass movement dedicated to making contact with the souls of the dead. In the 20th century, interest in Spiritualism persisted,…

THE COVID-19 pandemic has placed many obstacles in the art world’s way, but resilience and ingenuity find ways around them. The San Francisco Fall Show, a longtime beloved fixture in the Bay Area’s cultural scene, will take place this fall in a virtual format, as was done in 2020. From October 15–24, dealers from around the world will be offering an extraordinary range of fine and decorative arts from antiquity to the present day. Show Chair Suzanne Tucker says, “For anyone interested in art and design, furniture and the decorative arts—buying, collecting, or simply learning about art and antiques—this 10-day online event is not to be missed. Dealers are spending the summer curating a unique selection of items for the show, and they will be available 24/7 to communicate directly…

THE FLORIDA-born, Brooklyn-based artist Leonardo Drew is known for his engrossing three-dimensional works made of natural materials. Through various processes of oxidation, burning, and decay he manipulates mediums like wood, rust, paper, and cotton. Both his processes and the heavily abstracted results speak to notions of entropy, the cyclical nature of existence, and social injustice. Florida International University’s Frost Art Museum is currently hosting “Leonardo Drew: Cycles, from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation” (through November 17). The exhibition focuses on Drew’s highly experimental prints. In these works, the artist transforms cotton paper pulp and pigment into powerfully large yet fragile prints that test the versatility of the medium. As with his sculptural installations, to develop his prints Drew begins with his raw material. He then…

THROUGH HISTORICAL and genealogical research, Mario Moore, a Detroitborn painter, discovered that his thirdgreat-uncle, Thomas Moore, was among the Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War. His relative has since become a subject in his paintings, which address the racial and political divisions in American society. In The Great Reckoning, a recent 17-foot-wide work that is the largest painting Moore has created to date, his uncle, in uniform, is stationed to the right, representing the Black Lives Matter movement and evoking the grandeur of history painting. At left, a white horse is poised on its front legs, a Confederate flag beneath it. The animal, reminiscent of Robert E. Lee’s warhorse, is a stand-in for white supremacists, groups like the Proud Boys, and death. The expanse of ominous landscape between…

THE GLASGOW STYLE, with its stylized natural forms, sleek curves, and emphatic geometries, was the only true British response to the international Art Nouveau movement of the late 1890s and early 1900s. Key within this design movement was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a Scottish architect, designer, and artist who became known internationally for architectural projects like the Glasgow School of Art, the Willow Tearooms, and Hill House in Helensburgh and for his high-backed chairs, which are still collected today. His multidisciplinary practice and stylistic innovations had an outsized reach among his contemporaries. “Designing the New: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style,” a show organized by the American Federation of Arts, is the first exhibition in the United States to contextualize Mackintosh’s work within the broader circle of designers, architects, and…

THE FOLLOWING IS excerpted from Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis, by Gabrielle Selz. Published this month by the University of California Press ($34.95), it is the first indepth biography of Francis, a key figure in postwar American abstract art. The book is based on the author’s unprecedented access to the artist’s files, as well as private correspondence and hundreds of interviews. Selz, whose father was the art historian and curator Peter Selz, is also the author of Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction. As this excerpt begins, it is 1963, and Francis has recently recovered from a serious illness and moved back to the U.S. after having been based in Paris since 1950. Sam was now forty…

The Luzzatto High Holiday Mahzor, which will be sold at Sotheby’s New York on October 19, is the earliest illustrated Hebrew prayerbook ever to appear at auction (est. $4–6 million). It was produced in Southern Germany in the late 13th to early 14th century. The tradition of illustrated Hebrew prayerbooks first began to flourish in this region not long before—around the mid-13th century. Today, very few examples from that time and place are known to exist. In fact, it is believed that there are fewer than 20, none of them in private hands. The creator of the book would have been a Jewish scribe-artist located in the region of Bavaria. The anonymous artist wrote in a distinctive and elegant Hebrew script and employed rich coloration on the book’s illuminations. But…

THE SANTA FE ART Auction is holding its biggest event of the year November 5–7—its Annual Signature Live Auction, held at its headquarters in the Baca Railyard district of Santa Fe. The sale will feature topquality works from a variety of classic Western and Southwestern schools, including the Taos Society of Artists, the Cinco Pintores, and the Transcendental Painting Group, as well as Native American and Spanish American art. Among the lots on offer is Carl von Hassler’s Untitled (Adobe Homes With Cottonwood Tree). It perfectly captures the subtle effect of northern New Mexico’s unique light, which here casts a pinkish glow on the walls of the houses. The cottonwoods are set off against the blue-tinted mountains in the background, and a lone Indian figure walks down the lane, bearing…

NEW YORK gallery Debra Force Fine Art opens “Stimulating Rhythms: Rolph Scarlett—Paintings and Jewelry” on October 7. The exhibition, which features oil paintings, works on paper, and jewelry by the artists from the 1930s through the 1970s, will run through November 12. The lion’s share of the work on view was acquired directly from a private Massachusetts collection. This exhibition will be the first time these pieces have been shown publicly. The paintings and works on paper in the show focus primarily on the artist’s Geometric Abstractions executed from the 1930s through the 1960s. These works, rigorous explorations of the possibilities of abstraction, are what initially brought the artist to the attention of Hilla Rebay, the Director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (predecessor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum)…

ROBERT C. JACKSON, an American painter based in Kennett Square, Pa., creates out-of-the-box still lifes that incorporate Pop Art elements and virtuoso technical ability. Jackson, who studied and worked in electrical engineering before becoming a full-time artist in 1996, takes the table out of still life, orienting objects, toys, vintage boxes and soda crates, and pieces of ephemera in groupings on the floor, against walls, and in innocuous corners. His repeated representation of vibrant treats, fruits, and balloon dogs allows for deep exploration of color, surface, and composition and brings Wayne Thiebaud to mind in its marriage of rigor and playfulness. New York’s Gallery Henoch opens “Robert C. Jackson: The Pursuit of Happiness” on October 7. The show, which runs through October 30, features a number of paintings created this…

A BROAD VIEW of modern African American art is being provided by an exhibition opening this month at the Hudson River Museum. Courtesy of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.—one of the most important of its kind in the world—“African American Art in the 20th Century” places on view 45 paintings and sculptures from the 1930s to the 1990s. The 34 artists represented—including such major figures as Jacob Lawrence, Sam Gilliam, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, and Hughie Lee-Smith—span styles from social realism to abstraction to postmodernism and came to prominence during a tumultuous period for African American history that included the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights movement. The loan exhibition was originally conceived and organized in 2019 and traveled to four museums in…

JASPER JOHNS, at 91, is the ranking member of the contemporary American art world. In the words of the New York Times, he is nothing less than “America’s foremost living artist.” In the late 1950s, Johns was a key part of the group that upended the assumptions of Abstract Expressionism, which by then had hardened into an orthodoxy. His influence on subsequent movements is incalculable—so pervasive that it can be hard to quantify and explain. Johns’ notorious reticence about his own work only adds to the inscrutability. So a massive retrospective exhibition is particularly welcome, as it makes it possible to see and assess a wide range of work, not just the iconic images such as American flags and targets. In an unprecedented collaboration, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and…