Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2019 i Art & Antiques

Globe Trotting AS AN HOMAGE to the transportive power of fine and decorative art, the 38th annual edition of the San Francisco Fall Show carries the theme “Wanderlust: Around the World with Art, Antiques, & Design.” The fair, which runs Thursday, October 3 through Sunday, October 6, will feature a vast variety of work from around the globe all under one roof—the Festival Pavilion of the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The show’s 50 international dealers will present work from antiquity to the present day, encompassing American, English, Continental, and Asian furniture and decorative objects, paintings, prints, photographs, books, gold, silver and precious metals, jewelry, rugs, textiles, and ceramics. Four leading designers—Alessandra Branca, Veere Grenney, Hutton Wilkinson, and Cecilia Sagrera-Hill & George Brazil—are creating the show’s Designer Vignettes.…

WHEN ONE THINKS of historically significant teacher-student relationships, that of Socrates and Plato or Plato and Aristotle—the blingiest links in Ancient Greece’s diamond-encrusted philosophical chain—naturally come to mind. In his Nicoma-chean Ethics Aristotle, who was Alexander the Great’s teacher, said of learning, “Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it…we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate ones, brave by doing brave ones.” Learning by doing was certainly the model of Renaissance workshops, where would-be artists practiced all manner of painting and sculpting through apprenticeship. Centuries before the Western artist as we know him became a figure of individual genius, he was a craftsperson whose trade was governed by a guild. He was placed in the workshop of a…

The Price of Everything is a documentary by Nathaniel Kahn released in 2018 that investigates the accelerating monetization of the art world, although that’s hardly breaking news. But there is a refreshing exception to all the talk about strategies, market values, and the crackle of applause that affirms an evening’s skyrocketing sales: Larry Poons, the scrappy veteran abstract painter and the film’s unlikely hero. One scene shows him purposefully walking through the snow-carpeted ground from his house to the nearby barn that serves as his studio in East Durham, N.Y. At nearly 82, he is wiry and rosy-cheeked, and in his eyes a twinkle now and then appears. His head is snugly capped and his clothes are caked with paint, as are his hands and nails. In short, he looks…

FÉLIX VALLOTTON must be one of the most unclassifiable artists in modern art. He virtually defines the Parisian fin-de-siècle sensibility, but he wasn’t really French; from a Protestant family in Lausanne, Switzerland, he was dubbed “the foreign Nabi” when he joined the Nabis (Arabic and Hebrew for “prophets”), the semi-secret club of mainly French Post-Impressionists. He made his name within the underground culture of political and artistic radicalism, then married a rich widow and lived the rest of his life as a comfortable bourgeois. He was a major innovator in printmaking, and his early paintings are decidedly avant-garde, but his later work has a conservative quality. He exhibited with the mystical, Symbolist Salon de la Rose + Croix, but his work was very much of this world. Despite these contradictions,…

LATE 19TH-CENTURY America, prosperous and pious, saw an explosion of church-building. It was said that in the year 1888 alone, 4,000 churches were under construction. Most of these were not of the modest clapboard type of earlier times. The post-Civil War era of “conspicuous consumption,” as Thorstein Veblen called it in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), wanted Gothic stone and stained glass, and from this demand was born a new industry of sacred glass-making, with a kind of creative vitality not seen since the Middle Ages. Long before the 19th century, the medieval technique of stained glass had been forgotten. The astonishing and mystifying blues and reds of Chartres—eloquently extolled by the New England mandarin Henry Adams in his 1905 book Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres—could not be duplicated, so…

FROM SEPTEMBER 10 through December 7, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University is presenting a far-reaching view of modernism, one that extends beyond the popular Eurocentric view of 20th century art. In “Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection,” each country will be represented by 30 to 40 works drawn from this invaluable collection, which represents one of the largest institutional holdings of fine art from these countries. Its cache of Indian modern art ranks as one of the foremost holdings by an American university museum. The collection was assembled by its namesake, Abby Weed Grey, a native Minnesotan who subscribed to a “one world through art” philosophy. In Grey’s view, works of art could foster cross-cultural dialogue. Her focus on modern work…

DESPITE THE FACT that he was among the first generation of Surrealists and produced a vast body of powerful work, André Masson is not very well known in the English-speaking art world. That may be because he never created a single signature style and stuck with it, or it may be because of his refusal to paint according to the dictates of André Breton or anyone else. Then again, it may be on account of relative the lack of exposure of his work through comprehensive exhibitions—which itself may be a consequence of the previous two reasons. In any case, a wonderfully comprehensive loan exhibition, “André Masson: une mythologie de l’être et de la nature,” is on view through October 27 at Le Musée d’Art Moderne de Céret, in the southern…

In 1809, William Blake staged an exhibition of his paintings in the domestic room above his family’s London haberdashery shop at 28 Broad Street. To the present-day art aficionado accustomed to all manner of pop-up exhibitions in locations intended for otherwise practical uses (this writer alone can readily think of a sculpture show in the McDonald’s fast food restaurant on Canal Street in New York and an avant-garde music set in the basement of a Bensonhurst dance academy), Blake’s exhibition sounds like a pretty hip scene. The painter, engraver, and poet wasn’t the first to stage a rogue art show in London at the turn of the 19th century—the Irish-born Nathaniel Hone and Swiss-born Henry Fuseli gave them a stab in the 1770s and 1790s respectively, while J.M.W. Turner started…