Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i Art & Antiques

NEW YORK City’s history as a commercial and financial center will be explored through work by self-taught artists in the American Folk Art Museum’s new exhibition “Made in New York: The Business of Folk Art.” The show, which opens on March 19 and runs through July 28, puts one hundred works dating to the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries on view. The exhibition focuses on two perspectives: “The Art of Business,” which showcases the characters and characteristics of commercial life in New York and “The Business of Art,” dedicated to products created by artists and manufacturers, including commercial signs, store figures, and advertising imagery. As Elizabeth V. Warren, the exhibition’s curator, points out, American folk art is often associated with rural areas of the country rather than with its…

WHEN GILLES GORRITI died on January 16 at the age of 79, the art world lost one of the last remaining links to the School of Paris, as well as a passionate exponent of French colorist tradition. Gorritihad Basque heritage and, although born and based in Paris, always made sure to spend two or three months of the year in his ancestral region in the far south of France. “This is the country I love,” he said. “In the Basque country, there is life all year.” The bright palette of Gorriti’s works reverberates with the heat and clarity of the Mediterranean sun. Gorriti hailed from a family of artists. His grandfather, Ignacio Gorriti de Aïzpiri, went to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and became a sculptor and…

THERE ARE specific moments in art history at which new ideas seem to spring into life, creativity blossoms, and traditional ideas about representation recede into the background. “LandEscape: New Visions of the American Landscape,” which opens at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, N.Y., on March 17, examines the work of two of those moments: the Fauvist- and Expressionist-inspired landscape paintings of early 20th-century American modernists and paintings by contemporary artists who are reinventing the genre. By juxtaposing works from these two time periods, the exhibition spotlights the unique treatment that these very different artists have given what was, according to the Academies of Fine Art, one of the lower-ranked and more unexceptional genres of painting. Associate Curator Michele Wijegoonaratna, who assumed curation of the show after the original…

THE PHOTOGRAPHS of Ralph Eugene Meatyard seem to depict a dream world. Sometimes scary, sometimes endearing, but always uncanny, his small-scale black-and-white prints invite the viewer into a zone where faces are replaced by masks, dolls come to life, and children play amid ruins. So it might come as a surprise to learn that Meatyard’s work was firmly grounded in a real place, his home town—to be specific, in Lexington, Ky., where Meatyard lived with his wife, Madelyn, and their three children, all of whom are featured in his photographs. There he pursued a career as an optician and business owner while photographing on weekends and holidays. He also spent a good deal of time with a very creative group of friends who helped him become an artist and sustained…

IN THE 18TH and 19th centuries, only the very wealthy could afford furniture made of top-quality woods. Decorating furniture with paint came about as a way to conceal the less-than-optimal grain of humble woods in pieces meant for the average consumer. Soon, though, it flowered into an exuberant art that reveled in polychromy and encouraged folk craftsmen to give their imaginations free rein. In the Pennsylvania German community, painted furniture was a particularly vibrant phenomenon, with abstract geometric forms and floral motifs proliferating against backgrounds of inimitable colors. The Pennsylvania German lift-top dower chest shown here, of pine with brass and iron hardware, was made in Berks County around 1780. The painter (who likely was not the cabinetmaker) is known only by the symbols that are found on a group…

THE 57TH Philadelphia Antiques and Art Show brings 60 top dealers from across the country to the Navy Yard. Opening with a preview party on Thursday, April 25, the show runs through April 28. It specializes in furniture, paintings, jewelry, silver, textiles, porcelain, and several other collecting fields, ranging from the early colonial period to the present. One highlight of the show, Henri DeLattre’s The Race between Mac and Zachary Taylor at Huntington Park Course, Philadelphia, Jul 18 1849 (1850, oil on canvas), which Red Fox Fine Art of Middleburg, Va., will feature, has special resonance with the Pennsylvania city. The French-born, largely self-taught DeLattre established himself as a prolific equestrian painter in Philadelphia and captured this scene at a local racetrack. Another work that invokes the power of place…

THE PAINTER and educator Ralph L. Wickiser began his career in the 1930s. In the mid-20th century, he rode the wave of Abstract Expressionism, wrote influential pedagogical texts about modern art, and was included, among such acclaimed company as Milton Avery and Willem de Kooning, in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1953 Annual. In the mid-1970s, he discovered a wellspring of inspiration when photographing a shallow stream near his Woodstock home at 1 / 400th of a second. The organic forms and fleeting compositions of these photos became the basis for “The Reflected Stream” series. Translating the impressions of nature into a unique blend of flattened abstraction and visceral representation, Wickiser experienced a late-career breakthrough. “The Reflected Stream, The Early Years 1975–1985,” a solo exhibition of work from this…

AN EXHIBITION now on view at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, Tenn., affords an opportunity to assess the full career and vision of a photographer who is known to most people only through isolated images—above all, through one, the so-called Migrant Mother. This image, now vying with the Mona Lisa for the title of most iconic in visual history, is one of five similar photos that Dorothea Lange made in haste on a March day in 1936 at a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, Calif., as part of her work documenting rural workers’ conditions during the Great Depression for the U.S. Farm Security Administration. However, as visitors to “Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing” (through May 27) will realize, Migrant Mother needs to be situated within a body of work that…

Oliver Lee Jackson’s potent, explorative gestural abstraction often shares the canvas with humanoid figures. Punctuating or delineating—or even serving as vessels for—passages of abstraction, the figures are removed from a figurative world, as if out of time. They instead seem to occupy a tumultuous space of mass, motion and energy that reverberates outside of narrative. Jackson has said that these humanoid figures are not people. “He has often corrected me when I’ve been in the studio and said, ‘I like this figure or that one,’” says Harry Cooper, senior curator and head of modern art at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. “He has often said, ‘These are not figures, we are figures.’” Cooper, who is the curator of a new exhibition at the NGA that explores…

“BY WOMEN, For Tomorrow’s Women,” a partnership between Sotheby’s and Miss Porter’s School, is the first-ever all-women artist benefit auction held at a major auction house. Part I of the sale, held live in New York on March 1, surpassed its $2.8 million high estimate, totaling $3.9 million. More than half of the total came from the sale of Blanco y Verde, a 1966–67 acrylic on canvas by Carmen Herrera. Its price established the new world auction record for the Cuban-American abstract painter, edging past her previous record of $2.7 million set at Phillips in November. Herrera worked on her acclaimed series Blanco y Verde for 12 years—from 1959 to 1971. Masterful exercises in reduction, the series’ works deconstruct traditional landscape painting into purely geometric interpretations of horizon in white…

ON APRIL 10, Christie’s New York will offer “The Tibor Collection: A Noble Eye for Chinese Export,” one of the most significant collections of Chinese export porcelain in the world, in a single-owner sale. Top lots from the 500-piece collection will pepper upcoming sales in New York, London, and Paris, as well. The dazzling array of rare porcelain works is expected to exceed $6 million in total. A distinguished Latin American family amassed the cache over the course of four decades, sourcing pieces from leading dealers and auctioneers. They gave the intricately decorated objects pride of place throughout their family home, alongside Old Master paintings and Hispanic American furniture. The Tibor Collection gets its name from the term tibores, used by Hispanic buyers to denote richly decorated, oversized porcelain vases…

THE 11TH edition of the Dallas Art Fair takes place April 11–14 in the Fashion Industry Gallery, in the Dallas Arts District, with nearly 100 exhibitors from over 30 cities in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia showing modern and contemporary art. The international character of the art and the exhibitors alike underscores Dallas’ growth as a global art center. Several new international galleries have joined the fair this year, including Blain|Southern of London and Berlin, Sadie Coles HQ of London, and Lisson Gallery of London and New York. Berggruen Gallery of San Francisco will have recent works by iconic postwar American modernists, such as Mark di Suvero and Richard Serra. Di Suvero’s Nardos de Angustia (2010) is a semi-abstract zoomorphic steel sculpture, while Serra’s Finally…

ON MAY 2, Bonhams will hold its first sale of modern and contemporary African art in the U.S. since 2010, at its New York location. Giles Peppiatt, Director of Modern and Contemporary African Art for the auction house, says, “The sale will be an excellent addition in the summer calendar, coinciding with Frieze New York and 1-54, the celebrated Contemporary African Art fair. It contains some of the most exciting pieces we have ever brought to auction, with the works of Demas Nwoko and Gerard Sekoto being particularly outstanding.” Nwoko, a Nigerian artist, will be represented by Bicyclists, a figurative painting with rich colors and flattened space, which carries an estimate of $70,000–100,000. From Sekoto, a South African artist, comes Blue Head (est. $40,000–60,000). Nigerian artist Benedict Chuk-wukadibia Enwonwu’s The…

TONY BERLANT may be a Southern California artist, but he’ll be getting a warm reception in Northern California this month when Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco opens the exhibition “Tony Berlant: High Ground” (April 13–June 1). Known for his intricately— even obsessively—assembled metal collage works, starting in the 1960s Berlant developed his signature method of applying printed metal elements both to flat and three-dimensional surfaces using hammered-in steel brads. The printed elements, some of which are found and some of which are fabricated, include lettering and photographic imagery, and the overall effect can be either dense and layered or open and subtle. The exhibition at Brian Gross will feature recent works by the artist, wall-mounted pieces as well as sculptures. In works such as Song (2018) and Hat…

DISTILLING 17th-century society into terms a current 17-year-old might understand, Peter Paul Rubens was popular. A friend to scholars and monarchs and an international diplomat and businessman, Rubens’ cachet spread far beyond paint—though, considering his virtuosic facility with oil, it seems it certainly could have stopped there. Yet Rubens seemed to intrinsically know that held aloft by high social standing was a stalwart stage on which to showcase one’s talent. As a favorite of Europe’s noble class and an aristocrat himself, Rubens was able to take his uncanny knack for capturing pathos and drama on canvas to the privileged few and then gain a legendary reputation among the masses. Today, Rubens is thought to be the most important artist in the Flemish Baroque tradition, with a hulking oeuvre of nearly…

The Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida had a very fortunate life, both professionally and personally, but in terms of posterity he had the misfortune to have been doing his best work just as avant-garde modernism was about to change the art world forever. Often grouped with his contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Anders Zorn, Sorolla was a master of bravura paint handling, influenced by Impressionism but basically anchored in the older European tradition of realist depiction, and particularly the Spanish tradition from Velázquez and Ribera through to Goya. In his time, Sorolla became an international sensation, hailed as “The World’s Greatest Living Painter” by the London gallery where he had a one-man show in 1908, and in 1909 and 1911 he had blockbuster shows in New York, a city…