Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021 i Art & Antiques

THE LEGEND OF English exceptionalism dies hard. Certainly in terms of art, “this little world, this precious stone set in a silver sea” stands somewhat apart from the European continent. British art is in many ways a thing unto itself, and the English have usually been happy to celebrate that insular distinctiveness. In this issue of Art & Antiques, we do some celebration of our own with no less than three articles about major figures in British art—Holbein, Hogarth, and Turner. Thanks to institutions on both sides of the Atlantic—Tate Britain and the Getty Museum—important exhibitions on these three are currently on view, affording opportunities to reassess artists we thought we fully understood. Earliest in date and not exactly an English artist, given that he was born and raised in…

IN NAUDLINE PIERRE’S paintings, dreams become reality, spirits take form, and wishes are granted. Her figures, many of them winged, glow incandescently in pink, purple, orange, yellow, green, or else they are shrouded in shadow, gray and brown. In this visionary world, scales and feathers turn into flesh and vice versa, while disembodied heads nestle amid the human figures. These are large-scale canvases, and their size augments their power to draw the viewer into the alternate universe portrayed therein. Born in Leominster, Mass., Pierre now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she has a studio in the Greenpoint section. At just 32, she is a new star in the art firmament, with a solo exhibition currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art and another opening in April at James…

IN THE PORTRAITS of Hans Holbein the Younger, the men and women of early 16thcentury England and Continental Europe come alive again. Resplendent yet understated in their garb of velvet and furs, these worthies of “half a thousand years ago,” as Johan Huizinga put it in The Waning of the Middle Ages, seem astonishingly real. Sir Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Jane Seymour, Desiderius Erasmus, Henry VIII, as well as a museum’s worth of lesser nobles and notables of the Tudor era, appear in realistic detail yet also, one senses, much as they would have wanted to be presented to posterity—self-possessed, poised, and surrounded by the accoutrements of their offices and tokens of their status. To our hindsight-endowed eyes, Holbein’s portraits have a slightly uncanny quality, in common with many Northern…

Émile Gallé, a French artist and designer who was a leading voice in Art Nouveau and a major innovator in glass, created this important and rare “Brize D’Amour” vase in 1904. The piece is representative of the late work of the artist, as he died that same year. In 1905, another example of this vase was presented in Paris at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Made in a double-layered marbled crystal with a light brown outer layer and translucent bottom, the vessel was designed to imitate agate. It is decorated with charming ears of Brize d’Amour, or Amourette, which have been deeply wheel-engraved. Its blue and green marbled crystal foot, blown separately from the vessel, was hot-applied. The handle, made in amber crystal, was also hot-applied; it is deeply carved…

Paint People AN EXHIBITION devoted to the work of Oliver Lee Jackson is currently on view at the Saint Louis Art Museum through February 20, 2022. The show spans five years of the American artist’s career, showcasing 12 paintings, drawings, and prints created from the mid-1960s through 2020. Viewers have the opportunity to trace the evolution of the artist, a St. Louis native, who works in abstraction but incorporates figurative elements. Jackson refers to the figures that populate his fields of abstraction and vibrant color as “paint people.” They create a sense of movement, intensity, and deep meaning in his engrossing work. Jack-son draws on Western art traditions from the Renaissance through the 20th century to create what he describes as an “African sensibility.” Jackson was born in 1935. He…

The Italian-born American artist Harry Bertoia entered into the midcentury modern design pantheon with his Diamond Chair. The famous design incorporates a bent wire-mesh grid in the form of a large diamond (with many miniature diamonds formed within the grid) supported on a rod frame. Per meable yet solid-looking, formally complex yet visually simple, “indoor” yet “outdoor,” the Diamond Chair sits at the same hallowed table as the Wassily chair, the Eames lounger, and the Saarinen “Tulip.” Knoll released the chair in 1952. Then a growing design firm run by Florence Knoll, Bertoia’s former classmate at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and her husband Hans, Knoll invited Bertoia to come East. They were based in New York and Pennsylvania; he was in California, where he had…

IN OCTOBER, Love is in the Bin set the world action record for Banksy, the mysterious British figure who has become one of the most popular and reported-on artists in the world. Nine bidders in Sotheby’s auction room, on the phone, and online vied for the work for more than 10 minutes before it went for more than £18.5 million, triple its high estimate. To understand the appeal of Love is in the Bin, one must think back to October 5, 2018, when Girl with Balloon, Banksy’s former auction record holder, sold for $1 million, also at Sotheby’s. That painting was a rather restrained work that featured a female figure in the artist’s signature spray-painted street-art style holding the titular red balloon. Its rather unassuming gold frame housed a hidden…