Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2021 i Art & Antiques

Miami Heat BACK AGAIN after a hiatus induced by the pandemic, Art Miami returns this year to its usual downtown haunt, One Herald Plaza on Biscayne Bay, within walking distance of Museum Park and The Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts. Art Miami and its sister fair, CONTEXT Art Miami, will run December 1–5, with—count them—two VIP previews on Tuesday, November 30—the Opening Night Platinum VIP preview from 4:30–6:30 p.m. and the regular VIP preview from 6:30–10:30. The Pérez Art Museum Miami will be the philanthropic partner of the VIP previews, while Yvel, founded in 1986 by Isaac and Orna Levy, will be the official luxury jeweler to Art Miami. Recognized as a key destination for top-quality works from the 20th and 21st centuries, Art Miami, now in its…

IT SEEMS TO BE a feature of the art landscape that some incredibly talented women artists have to wait until old age to get the acclaim they deserve, especially in terms of museum shows. Think of Carmen Herrera, Luchita Hurtado, and Etel Adnan (see page 36 in this issue)—and the list could be extended quite a bit. Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891–1978) fits into this category. While she was the first woman graduate of Howard University’s fine-art department, in 1924, and an important member of the Washington Color School, widespread recognition didn’t come till she was almost 80. Thomas spent 35 years teaching at the junior-high-school level, imparting the love of art to Black children in segregated Washington, D.C. Only after her retirement was she was able to give herself…

For the upcoming sale “Weston Hall and the Sitwells: A Family Legacy” at Dreweatts Auctioneers in Donnington, England, on November 16 and 17, specialists were brought into Weston Hall to catalogue its contents. The palatial Northamptonshire estate had been the home of the famous Sitwell family since the early 20th century and of its ancestors since the 18th century—more than 300 years in total. A ménage of writers, eccentrics, pioneers, and creatives, the Sitwell family tree boasts Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell, the trio of early-20th-century literary siblings, and more recently, William Sitwell, the restaurant critic and TV personality. The house itself, a sort of repository of British history, features an 18th-century library, a 19th-century Justice Room and Victorian conservatory, a maze of main rooms, and nine attics. The specialists…

THE PAINTINGS of Lennart Anderson bring to mind, variously, Piero della Francesca, Poussin, Degas, Morandi, Balthus, Fairfield Porter, and ancient Roman frescoes. Some of these were inspirations, while others simply happened to share traits with him, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not. The essential qualities of Anderson’s art are balance, grace, and clarity, and no work of art that has these can be derivative. He also had a combination of self-assurance and modesty that made it possible to pursue a quietly figurative style in a noisy era of abstraction. The deep and careful thought process evident in his painting made him an excellent teacher, as well, and in his long career at Brooklyn College he educated and inspired many young artists. “Lennart Anderson: A Retrospective,” at the New York Studio School, is…

THE TERM “Art Deco” comes from the French “arts décoratifs,” part of the title of an industrial design exposition held in Paris in 1925. But it came to encompass far more than industrial design and interior decoration; painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture from the period between the two world wars fell into certain styles that, at least in retrospect, are classed under the heading of Art Deco. It could be argued that the works are so diverse that it’s meaningless to lump them together under one heading, and indeed, many, if not most, of their creators never saw themselves as participating in a movement—or if they did, the movement was simply Modernism, full stop. Nonetheless, to our eyes almost a century later, there certainly is an Art Deco “look” that…

WHILE WORKING as a professor at the Dominican University of California in San Rafael in the 1950s, Etel Adnan renounced writing in French. The essayist, scholar, and poet, who was born in Beirut in 1925 to a Greek mother and Syrian father, grew up speaking Greek and Arabic, but French was her primary language. She attended French schools, then studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris, before decamping to the United States in 1955 to pursue postgraduate studies in Philosophy at Berkeley and Harvard. But during the Algerian War, Adnan began feeling the political implications of writing in French. In solidarity with Algerian independence, she ceased writing in the language and declared she would begin “painting in Arabic.” Of course, this wasn’t the end of Adnan’s writing—she participated heartily in the…

Sandro Botticelli, a Florentine painter known for his fluidity of line and profound sense of elegant beauty, was also an enterprise. The latter role is the focus of “Botticelli: Artist and Designer,” an exhibition currently on view at the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. The ambitious exhibition gathers 40 works by the Renaissance master, as well as several paintings by Florentine contemporaries who influenced him or were influenced by him. Focusing not just on Botticelli as a creative artist but also as an entrepreneur and teacher, the presentation sheds light on the Renaissance workshop, with its many assistants and numerous projects, and on the way in which Botticelli managed and manifested new ideas in his own studio. Botticelli was born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi in 1445 to a Florentine…