Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2024 i Art & Antiques

AN ONLINE exhibition highlighting two Postwar Bay Area women artists will be live on Artsy this month courtesy of Jost Fine Art. For the Love of Paint, an exhibition featuring the works of Ruth Wall and Katherine Barieau, brings together two midcentury painters whose contributions to West Coast Abstract Expressionism are currently being reexamined. Wall’s vibrant and richly textured paintings reflect the introspective nature of Bay Area abstraction after World War II, particularly when artists Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Wall studied at the storied art school in the early 1950s, working with both painting and printmaking while joining a dynamic cohort of students whose short-lived artist-run galleries in the neigh-boring North Beach district fostered a culture of experimentation and creative autonomy. Barieau’s…

LOS ANGELES’ largest and longest-running art fair will again fill the halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center February 14-18, 2024. This year’s fair features an impressive international lineup. According to producer and director Kassandra Voyagis, “The LA Art Show is committed to creating the most comprehensive international contemporary art experience imaginable. We keep building a bigger and better version every year.” In addition to premier offerings in Modern and Contemporary art, this year’s fair will feature The European Pavilion, with special curated exhibitions centered on the latest in the continent’s Contemporary art movements. The fair will also showcase and recognize participating female-owned galleries. Ever concerned with philanthropy and outreach, organizers will donate 15% of this year’s proceeds to the American Heart Association. Running concurrently, DIVERSEartLA serves as the fair’s…

IN A CAREER spanning over sixty years, Signe Stuart has dedicated her practice to abstraction and materiality. A retrospective exhibition at the South Dakota Art Museum makes the case for the artist’s wider recognition, Signe Stuart: Events in Space and Time (October 14, 2023-March 30, 2024). After training at the University of Connecticut and the Yale Norfolk Summer Art School, Stuart completed a masters in 1961 at the University of New Mexico. She recalls that no one pushed her to take up abstraction; she always created in that mode. For a decade, Stuart followed her curator husband to various museum appointments. They finally found a home at South Dakota State University in 1971, where she taught painting until her retirement in 1994. She now lives and works in Santa Fe.…

THE SCOTTSDALE Museum of Contemporary Art will debut the first major museum exhibition of Dorothy Fratt (1923-2017), an underrecognized abstractionist. Chronicling over five decades of her career, Dorothy Fratt: Color Mirage (February 3-July 21, 2024) celebrates the artist’s masterful exploration of color and vibrant compositions. A monograph, co-published with Radius Books and previously released in October 2023, accompanies the exhibition. The opening will also coincide with SMoCA’s 25th anniversary celebration. Curators make an argument for Fratt’s wider recognition, especially in light of continued efforts to expand and revise the canon. Born in Washington D.C. and trained at the Phillips Memorial Art Gallery, Fratt’s early development simmered in the same sphere as the later Washington Color School. The artist moved to Phoenix in 1958 and refused to give up her work…

STANLEY Whitney paints like a jazz musician. Having found a solid structure that he can rely on gives him the freedom to improvise. He riffs with color. He is a color improviser. His compositions are rows and columns of eloquent color in a loosely defined grid. Improvisation is the elongation and exploration of the moment, demanding trust and letting go. Whitney lets himself go in his studio listening to Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, a free-wheeling fusion of trumpet blasts, pulsing bass, throbbing drums, and clashing cymbals. Whitney has been painting to this album for 30 years. When he walks into the studio, he immediately puts on the record and the music puts him in the zone. Now he can paint for hours. “I become the music,” he said. Always starting…

LUXURY ABOUNDS at the 21st annual Palm Beach Show, February 15-20, 2024 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center. The area’s most prestigious cultural event of the winter season will boast world-class dealers with magnificent art, dazzling jewelry, and lavish antiques and design. With locations in New York and Palm Beach, Yafa Signed Jewels will present magnificent museum quality jewels, including an Art Deco Diamond and Gem Set Brooch. The French design incorporates a glittering arrangement of diamonds, rubies, sapphire, emerald, and onyx. Guarisco Gallery, Washington, D.C., will feature a superb selection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century paintings. Femme à la promenade by Renoir protégé Albert André (1869-1954) shows a young woman strolling with a greyhound at her side. The artist’s careful attention to the woman’s chic fashion, especially…

NOW IN ITS eighteenth year, Master Drawings New York hosts their annual fair in Manhattan (January 27-February 3, 2024). MDNY’s President and Executive Director, Christopher Bishop notes, “All of us who work in drawings…are invested in seeing that the joy of the study of drawings is passed on to new generations.” Twenty-six international galleries will present an impressive array of work. Abbott & Holder will showcase a J.M.W. Turner composition once owned by critic John Ruskin, while Galerie 1900-2000 will feature work from leading twentieth century avant-garde artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Jean Dubuffet. Also of note, David Nolan Gallery in collaboration with Donald Ellis Gallery will offer ledger drawings from Cheyenne artist Nokkoist (Bear’s Heart) produced while a prisoner of war at Fort Marion.…

RUNNING THROUGH June 2024, Fort Lauderdale’s NSU Art Museum stages Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s-1980s), charting the splendid variety and expressive potential in Color Field painting. Curators derived the title from Frank Stella’s response to a painting by Hans Hofmann: “…the straightforward manipulation of pigment can create exalted art…Glory of the world this painting surely is and glory of the world his painting surely was and is.” Stella’s own diptychs with bold concentric stripes—influenced by 15th century religious paintings—express the sacred in the secular. From Robert Motherwell’s monochrome blues to Larry Poons’ pours, the exhibition also documents original techniques. A Fantastic Sunset (1970) by Washington Color School standout Alma Thomas (1891-1978) features her signature lozenge-shaped marks. She creates a pulsing, prismatic orb. There’s no literal sunset, but,…

PAINTER MAYNARD Dixon (1875-1946) spent his career trying to capture “ideals of truthfulness.” His images of cowboys, such as Steers to Market (1936), personify the Western landscape with the spirited farmhands that he depicts. And, scenes of the landscape, such as Shore-lines of Lahontan (1935), image the West as a space for reflection with their vast cloudless skies and endless plains punctuated by sentinel-like mountains. While Dixon’s oeuvre has been well-examined in recent years, a new exhibition opening in March at the Nevada Museum of Art, Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada (March 2-July 28, 2024) provides the first comprehensive documentation of the artist’s wanderings through the state. Dixon first travelled to Nevada in 1901. He made his last trip in 1939 just before relocating to Tucson. That trip…

THE NOTION of an unchanging perspective on life, history, or art is counterintuitive. To have the opportunity to reexamine the stories and events that shape our ideas about cultural legacies encourages us to appreciate how museum exhibitions reveal new truths and benefit humankind. The exhibition “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village” at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through July 28, 2024, presents an incisive reassessment of the relationships between Native American cultures and the Anglo-American artists for whom New Mexico was both a homeland and cultural wellspring of artistic inspiration. The exhibition encompasses new research that guided a reinstallation of The Lunder Collection—one of the most important private collections of American art in the world. The museum’s curatorial staff members, working with an advisory council made up…

Too often an artist becomes synonymous with that thing that cements their status, leaving a one-sided glimpse into an evolving career. For Mark Rothko (1903–1970), his expressive color field paintings, towering in presence and moodily centered in pure washes of color, have come to define him. A new show at the National Gallery of Art, “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper” (November 19, 2023–March 31, 2024), relishes his mature work from the last two decades of his career and also presents these as one chapter in a lifetime as a painter. With over 100 works on view, the exhibition showcases the NGA’s decades-long project to catalogue the artist’s works on paper. An online resource (rothko.nga.gov) and a forthcoming catalogue raisonné document almost 2,600 known works by the artist. Both will provide…

INTERSECT Palm Springs will showcase an exciting slate of international galleries February 8-11, 2024 at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Billed as a four-day fine art immersion, organizers pride themselves on their innovative programming, including special tours, artist talks, and special on-site exhibitions and activations. One special presentation this year, Emerging: A California Collective, will see contributions from five major West Coast dealers. Featured artist Carrie Ann Plank, represented by Jonathan Carver Moore, creates dizzying acrylic and ink work such as Elemental Lattices Orange Red. Plank’s work is rooted in math and science. She carves wood reliefs that are printed using transparent pigments. Here, brassy orange and red-violet create a moiré effect. What at first appears as visual interference, is countered by the artist’s precision, and reflects Plank’s obsession with…

CHARTING the rise of modernist techniques in American art, A Shared Vision: The Macon and Joan Brock Collection of American Art spotlights a promised gift of 45 paintings, pastels, watercolors, and prints to the Chrysler Museum of Art. On view until March 4, 2024, the show features established names in American art as well as lesser-known artists. Winslow Homer’s Girl with a Letter (1879) dates to a period when the painter produced genre portraits of women with frank intimacy. In this watercolor, his sitter lazes on a tapestry-back folding chair. Despite her Victorian dress, she feels decidedly modern. She stares back at us fixedly and lacks the air of obeisance one might expect from a woman of the era. To those more familiar with John Singer Sargent’s commissioned society portraits,…

ON VIEW AT The Metropolitan Museum of Art through March 3, 2024, “Africa & Byzantium” is an important salvo in the drive to rebalance the myriad cultures of the vast and diverse African continent against the scholarship of the West, which has often relegated those cultures to the status of vassal states and suppliers of resources for the “civilizations” of Rome, Byzantium, and the Islamic empires. Comprised of almost 200 objects of delectable beauty, “Africa & Byzantium” is also comprehensive in scope, revealing the influence of Byzantine art and culture in North and East Africa from the 4th through the 15th century and beyond. The exhibition traces the long and complex histories of Ethiopia and Egypt, the rise of the powerful Axumite Kingdom and Nubian Empire and their early conversion…

Imagine the atmosphere of a crowded and murmurous second-floor loft on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village in 1949: smoky and smelling not a little bit of unwashed clothes, Ballantine Ale, and whiskey. It was a raucous, chaotic atmosphere, full of macho posturing and empty threats (since this is art after all). In the early days of The Club, the storied Abstract Expressionist hangout in the East Village, there were only a handful of women in the room: among them the aristocratic Mercedes Matter, the streetwise Elaine de Kooning, and an intense dark-haired painter, Perle Fine. Working class, as were many of the other Abstract Expressionists, Fine put herself through art school and taught to pay the bills. Then, in those first five years following the end of WWII, at the…