Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2019 i Art & Antiques

Behind the Wheel CLASSIC CAR Week roars back to California’s Monterey Peninsula this August, with historic automobiles rolling across the auction block in the runup to the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance. The Concours, which began in 1950, is the premier collector-car competition in the world, staged on the Pebble Beach Golf Links overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This year it takes place on August 18. On August 15–16, Bonhams holds its annual Quail Lodge Auction at the Quail Lodge Golf Club in Carmel Valley. In keeping with the house’s reputation as a Bentley specialist, the line-up includes four of the iconic British maker’s cars, including a 1931 Supercharged “Birkin Le Mans Replica” Tourer. One of 50 factory examples, it comes from the Virgil Millett collection and was formerly part of the…

This year Art Aspen—the Colorado city’s first and only art fair dedicated to contemporary art—turns 10. The fair, which will be held at the Aspen Ice Garden from July 25–28, brings together more than 30 top dealers showcasing work from 1950 to now. Opera Gallery, a dealer with locations in Aspen and a host of other cities around the world, will feature Joe Black’s Blink 2 at the fair. The British artist is known for working with far-flung materials—hand-printed badges, Lego bricks, and Airfix planes, to name just a few—and this is no exception: the piece, which looks like a hyper-realistic eye, is made from toy soldiers. Meanwhile, local dealer Raven Gallery will showcase Azul Mountain Crystals, a striking group of cast, cut glass, and fused steel sculptures by Alex…

IN THE LAST decades of the 19th century, New York real estate magnate Ogden Goelet commissioned ornate silver sailing trophies for New York Yacht Club races held off Newport, R.I. “Spectacular Silver: Yachting’s Goelet Cups,” an exhibition running at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum in Newport through September 29, puts a dozen of these elaborate rophies on view, alongside a trove of historic material and ephemera related to the races. The cups showcase both America’s golden age of silver and its Gilded Age, a time of growing wealth and excess. One highlight, the 1884 Goelet Cup for Schooners, comes to the show from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Tiffany & Co.-designed trophy, which was won by Grayling, has been described as “the most flamboyant trophy Tiffany ever produced.” The…

THE NATIONS OF the Caribbean are incredibly diverse in culture, ethnicity, and language, but they have in common a 400-year legacy of slavery and colonialism as well as a complex and conflicted set of ties to Europe and the U.S. A traveling exhibition now on view at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington ambitiously attempts to discern some commonality among the various modes of visual creativity deployed by artists from the 21stcentury Caribbean. “Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago” (through September 8) is curated by art historian Tatiana Flores and was organized by the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Calif., originally for the massive multi-exhibition event “Pacific Standard Time LA/LA,” in 2017. Since then, it has gone on the road, making stops at the Patricia…

The work of the painter David Park presents what seems a reverse trajectory in American painting. Rather than slowly but surely removing the figurative elements from his work until paint became a purely real and present formal element divorced from representation, Park’s work did the opposite. During the heyday of America’s first homegrown easel painting tradition, Abstract Expressionism, David Park painted figures and spaces from life. The artist dabbled in abstraction under the influence of Cyfford Still’s ideas on non-objective painting, but found it did not suit him. Around 1950 Park summarily (and some say apocryphally) brought the canvases of this period to the city dump. For Park this was not a moment of desperation but one of liberation, like parting with a pair of trendy, ill-fitting pants bought with…

During its August 15–17 auctions at Monterey Peninsula Car Week, Ontario, Canada-based RM Sotheby’s will offer the very first car ever to bear the Porsche badge, the 1939 Porsche Type 64 Berlin–Rome, No. 3. This rolling piece of history, a futuristically streamlined, gunmetal-gray racing coupe, is a prototype vehicle that predates the first production Porsche, known as the 356. Designed by Ferry Porsche, the Type 64 was intended to compete in a 1,500-kilometer road race from Berlin to the other pole of the fascist Axis, Rome. The event was intended to promote Germany’s Autobahn system as well as the original Volkswagen, designed by Ferdinand Porsche Sr. Despite the government-ordered work on this mass-produced car, the younger Porsche had ambitions to design a great sports car, and the Type 64 was…

ON AUGUST 1, Schantz Galleries of Stockbridge, Mass., will open its second exhibition of work by Dale Chihuly, a revolutionary figure in the studio glass movement. The exhibition will showcase Chihuly’s mastery of blown glass while highlighting new architectural installations and pedestal works that emphasize the artist’s inventiveness within the medium. One highlight of the show is Copper Ruby Persian Wall Sconce, a striking blown-glass piece made this year that features lush, shimmering blossoms. The sconce’s flowers have a variety of colors and patterns, which are refracted beautifully onto the wall they are mounted on. Ikebana Glass on Glass Painting (2017), is part of Chihuly’s latest series, in which he paints glass panels with vitreous-glass enamel and layers them on top of one another. The result is a rousing exploration…

TO SAY JAMES Abbott McNeill Whistler had a colorful life would be a gross understatement. The American artist, who was born in Massachusetts, grew up in part in Saint Petersburg, Russia. There, his father advised on the construction of the railroad and young Whistler took drawing classes at the Imperial Academy of Sciences. The United States Military Academy at West Point came next, but Whistler failed chemistry and left the academy in 1854. He learned etching while working at the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey before leaving for Paris in 1855 to become an artist in the true 19th-century definition of the word. In Paris, he studied at the École Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin and with Charles Gleyre, but it was his own immersion in the works of…

CLARENCE JOHN Laughlin considered himself a writer first and a photographer second. Though he never made it past his freshman year of high school, a passionate love of literature passed down from his father stayed with him throughout his life, greatly informing his photography. As a young man he wrote poems and stories inspired by the French Symbolists, and after he picked up the camera, he described image-making as his “visual poetry.” Like Southern Gothic literature, Laughlin’s work grew beneath the looming phantom of the postbellum American South. Laughlin, who was born in Louisiana, moved with his family to New Orleans in 1910 after they were left penniless from a failed rice-growing venture. By 1930, Laughlin had taught himself how to use a camera and made his first photograph in…

SHORTLY AFTER the Japanese raided Pearl Harbor in 1941, formally drawing the United States into the Second World War, the mayor of Chicago assembled a camouflage committee to protect the city from aerial bombardment. A 34-year-old instructor at the Chicago Institute of Design named György Kepes proposed a fiendishly clever scheme. All buildings would be blacked out, and lights would be strung across Lake Michigan in a grid that emulated the arrangement of streets. Enemy pilots attacking the city at night would miss the urban center, dropping their bombs in the lake. Although Kepes’ plan was too elaborate to be implemented, and probably too expensive, his engagement with camouflage set the course for his seven-decade career as an artist, designer, writer, curator, educator, and administrator. As art historian John Blakinger…

On July 20, 1969, the lunar module Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility, carrying two American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. When Armstrong emerged from the landing craft and stepped onto the surface, he became the first human being to walk on the Moon, ending a decade-long space race. “That’s one small step for [a] man; one giant leap for mankind,” said Armstrong, as his words were broadcast live from the Moon to the Earth, where over one-fifth of the population is estimated to have watched him on television. Fifty years later, moon-mission madness is afoot in the collectibles world, with auction houses and dealers offering various kinds of memorabilia to mark the anniversary of Apollo 11. M.S. Rau Antiques of New Orleans, a specialist in fine…

CHARLES MARTIN, a New York-based photographer, began traveling to Brazil several decades ago as a Yale graduate student studying Portuguese. Since then, he has amassed an oeuvre that captures the idiosyncrasies of the country’s landscape and people with sensitivity and curiosity. “My photographic subject,” says Martin, “is mainly my pleasure of being there, a place that feels more or less at home, as though it were a land of cousins.” “Affinity with Brazil: 1982–Present” is currently on view at the June Kelly Gallery in New York. The exhibition, which runs through August 2, showcases Martin’s nearly five-decade-long attraction to Brazil and its environment, people, customs, and architecture. In Distant Lights, Rio de Janeiro (2012, C-print), Martin captures Rio at night, glittering as if it has been tucked in with a…

RALSTON CRAWFORD was known during the 1930s for his Precisionist-style paintings of the American scene, but in the aftermath of World War II, he shifted his focus toward abstraction and spirituality. He also explored the use of different media, notably photography. “Ralston Crawford: Torn Signs,” an exhibition on view through November 13 at the Vilcek Foundation’s new space in New York presents a selection of black and white photos Crawford took during the 1960s. In this series, the artist cropped closely in on the peeling, palimpsest-like advertising posters commonly seen on city streets, finding abstract patterns that dissociate them from their original intended meanings. They are almost like in-situ readymade collages. The Vilcek show also includes photographs from another series, “Semana Santa,” in which Crawford chronicled Holy Week celebrations in…

ÉDOUARD MANET continued to create heroically-scaled pictures for the Salon—including major achievements like A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1892)—until his death in 1883. But as the 1870s gave way to the 1880s and his health diminished, Manet’s output changed, as if, like whipped cream, it had been whisked with air. He painted velvety still lifes, delicate pastels and intimate watercolors. His café and garden scenes of this period bloom with flowers and fashionably dressed women, often models, actresses, and demimondaines of his acquaintance, or his charming wife, Suzanne. Sometimes, as in Boating (1874) or In the Conservatory (about 1877–79), he pairs women with men and sets a mood that’s about 99 percent courtly and one percent flirty. In these works, he fully embraces beauty. Critics have dismissed this corner of…

THIS SUMMER, monkeys, frogs, cats, fish, octopuses, and flocks of birds invade the halls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. No, it’s not an exchange program with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, it’s an art exhibition, and the animals aren’t in cages; they’re in frames, on pedestals, on ceramics and enameled boxes, woven into garments, and, as Gilbert and Sullivan put it, “on many a screen and fan.” “The Life of Animals in Japanese Art” (through August 18) is a massive loan show featuring more than 300 works that portray wild and domestic creatures, spanning 17 centuries of Japanese visual culture. Co-organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Japan Foundation, with special cooperation from the Tokyo National Museum, the exhibition features 180 works lent…

If you don’t like art, don’t go to Santa Fe. You can’t avoid it, and that’s how the locals want it. It’s impossible to live among landscapes that practically scream, “Paint me!” without succumbing to the pull of gallery walks, museum exhibitions, studio demonstrations, art fairs, and more. The summer art scene in Santa Fe knows no bounds, spilling over into every aspect of city life, and that’s how it should be. Before the summer ends, make a plan to see “A Gathering of Voices: Folk Art from the Judith Espinar and Tom Dillenberg Collection,” which is on view at the Museum of International Folk Art (706 Camino Lejo) through September 8. Espinar, a cofounder of the International Folk Art Market, loaned more than 200 pieces to the show, which…

WHEN DOUBLE Portrait of a husband and wife, half-length, seated at a table, playing tables sold on May 1 during Christie’s suite of Classic Week auctions, it earned a pair of world auction records: one for the artist and the other for any early Netherlandish painting. The work is the second-earliest known painting by Jan Sanders van Hemessen, one of the most significant artists active in Antwerp during the second quarter of the 16th century. But adding to the painting’s cachet is the fact that it came on the block from Frank Stella’s personal collection. Stella, one of the leading artists of his generation, has accumulated an important collection of work by his postwar contemporaries as well as pieces from a range of genres and periods. His studies as a…