Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i Art & Antiques

FROM APRIL 21–24, the Dallas Art Fair returns for its 14th edition, held at the Fashion Industry Gallery (f.i.g.). The event will include 85 galleries—a return to full capacity. “We are ready to be back in full swing this April and stage the fullsize, high quality fair collectors and galleries expect from us,” says fair director Kelly Cornell. The day before the opening of the fair, Dallas Museum of Art curators and private donors will choose pieces for the museum’s permanent collection as part of the Dallas Art Fair Foundation Acquisition Program. So far, the program has given almost 40 works to the museum. The fair is scheduled to coincide with Dallas Arts Month, an annual celebration of culture that includes exhibitions and events at museums, theaters, and public spaces.…

Through April 30, Calabi Gallery in Santa Rosa, Calif., will be mounting a Gallery Group Show with over 30 works including some by current gallery artists as well as a selection from Calabi’s inventory of vintage works, including new acquisitions. The show brings together a diverse array of styles, time periods, and artistic media. Among the contemporary artists whose work will be on view are Douglas Ballou, Michael Ramos, and Bambi Waterman. Ballou’s Vessel of Memories, an acrylic on panel with wood and wax, evokes an interior landscape of the mind with an oceanic background of blue, against which tendril-like forms reach out toward and surround a blue sphere. Waterman’s The Garden Under the Surface, a figurative oil on panel, is more explicitly aquatic, zooming in on brightly colored coral…

IN 1903, MORE than a century before Instagram, the Eastman Kodak Company gave consumers a way to share their experiences, memories, and even what you might call proto-selfies. It was called the photo postcard camera, and it created a negative the exact size of a postcard so that the image could be easily contact-printed onto card stock and mailed. The high quality of these cards made them extremely popular, and small-town and itinerant photographers began churning them out. They would offer to snap people’s pictures as they visited tourist sites, went about their daily lives, or posed for humorous set-up shots. Today, these “real photo postcards,” as they are called, furnish a record of everyday life and popular culture in early 20th-century America. More than 300 of them are on…

JACQUES LOUIS David’s greatest paintings—The Oath of the Horatii, The Tennis Court Oath, the Death of Socrates, The Lictors Bringing Brutus the Bodies of His Sons—have an almost marmoreal quality. Suspended forever in their Neoclassical attitudes, the figures in David’s canvases are not only sculptural but inevitable, as if they had always existed. However, they were actually the outcome of a painstaking creative process that in some cases lasted years. This process can be grasped through the artist’s drawings, which document the conceptual thinking and the many stages of planning that went into his compositions. In attempting to do so, we are effectively peering behind a curtain that David did not particularly want parted. While he was famous for charging exorbitant prices for his paintings—despite his revolutionary political views—he never…

JERALD MELBERG Gallery of Charlotte, N.C., will present its inaugural solo show for Donald Sultan on April 22. The artist, who is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, will attend the opening that evening. His work is notable for its use of repeating patterns pulled from nature and applied to large-scale compositions that are both realistic and abstract. Sultan, a native of Asheville, N.C., who studied fine arts at UNC Chapel Hill and has a master’s in fine arts from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, was inspired by found objects to produce his first paintings; since then, he has had over 50 solo exhibitions of his work in venues ranging from the Tate Modern in London to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Museum…

DURING THE 1910s and ’20s, the Impressionist Frederick Carl Frieseke was perhaps the most popular living American artist. Ironically, he had been an expatriate since 1898, when he left his native Owosso, Mich., at the age of 25 to study in Paris, at the Académie Julian. His teachers there were Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens, and he may also have had some interaction with James Whistler, who had an academy in Paris at the time. By 1900 he had settled in Giverny, France (where Monet also had his home and studio), and remained there until his death in 1939. Long after modernism had become the dominant force in art, Frieseke continued to practice the Impressionist style, and his best-known works are loosely-brushed, richly colored depictions of scenes in and around…

THE BAY AREA abstract painter Lee Mullican (1919–98) first saw the work of Paul Klee in 1942 in a memorial exhibition for the Swiss artist, who had died two years earlier. It was, Mullican recalled, “one of the great revelations.…it was a fantasy world to me…The sense of what he could do by making a mark, and then making another mark and the use of color and abstraction…was a great influence.” Mullican shared with Klee a sense of the mystical purpose of art, its ability to carry artist and viewer into another world, one of heightened consciousness and perception. Mullican spoke of this experience as “the opening of a new world, opening of the mind into a kind of cosmic thought… beyond what one saw, beyond form.” For the first…

Anyone who has hiked a mountain or combed a beach to seek out unusual stones can appreciate our shared affinity for the special qualities of rocks—their age, origin, resilience, coloration, textures, and shapes. Natural rocks such as limestone, marble, and slate, formed over millions of years by heat and pressure applied to organic matter, connect us to Earth’s geologic history. It is no surprise that quarried stones became a desirable resource for artists, as surfaces for their paintings, during a particularly innovative period in Europe between the 15th and 16th centuries. “Paintings on Stone: Science and the Sacred 1530–1800,” an exemplary exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum (through May 15), brings together more than 70 artworks by 58 artists, featuring 34 different kinds of stone. The initial inspiration for…

PHILEMONA Williamson’s most recent series of paintings, in oil on canvas and linen, depicts children and adolescents in colorful, dreamlike environments, engaged in enigmatic activities—perhaps playing, exploring, even fighting. The backgrounds of these scenes are richly colored, usually in one dominant hue such as pink or blue, so as to convey a particular mood. Williamson, who was born in New York, lives and works in Upper Montclair, N.J. During the pandemic, in the contemplative quiet of her studio, she was inspired by Indian miniature painting, whose subtle gestural qualities she assimilated into her own work. The figures in her paintings, she says, “are constructed with limbs akimbo, conveying the precarious nature of transitional movements and moments.” Paintings from the series will be on view at June Kelly Gallery in New…

ACCORDING TO legend, German-born Jewish artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–85) was dining with Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at Café de Flore in Paris in 1936 when her companions admired the fur-covered bracelet Oppenheim was wearing. They riffed about how anything could be covered with fur, and, later, invited by André Breton to exhibit with the Surrealists, Oppenheim wrapped a porcelain teacup, spoon, and saucer in fur. The piece, titled Object (1936), gained her worldwide fame but also burdened her with the mantle of being just a Surrealist—a mantle she would later try to shrug off in favor of a more complicated self-presentation as an artist and a woman. As “Meret Oppenheim: My Exhibition,” running at the Menil Collection in Houston through September 18, makes clear, Oppenheim is an artist whose…

Running alongside the foaming rapids of avant-garde art in the 20th century is another stream, quieter, often in the shadows, but steadily flowing nonetheless. In that current can be found movements such as Precisionism, the New Objectivity, Metaphysical art, Neo-Romanticism, and a few others less well known. Among those others is Post Surrealism, also called the New Classicism, a school of painting that was born in Southern California in 1934—announced, in typical modernist fashion, by a manifesto—gave rise to some intriguing exhibitions, and ceased to exist as an organized phenomenon by the end of World War II. While Post Surrealism never became a household word, even in the not-always-cozy household of American modern art, it did yield some works of lasting value and marked the careers of the two artists…