Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar/Apr 2015 i Fine Art Connoisseur

Renowned during his lifetime and unfairly overlooked since then, Gari Melchers (1860-1932) is finally getting his due, at Connecticut’s Fairfield University. On view at the Bellarmine Museum of Art there from March 5 through May 22 is the exhibition Gari Melchers: An American Impressionist at Home and Abroad, which features 23 works in oil, pastel, watercolor, gouache, and charcoal, all borrowed from the Gari Melchers Home and Studio in Falmouth, Virginia. Born in Detroit to German immigrant parents, Julius Garibaldi Melchers was named for his sculptor father (Julius) and the patriot-revolutionary then unifying the Italian principalities into a single country (Giuseppe Garibaldi). At 17, “Gari” headed to the Royal Prussian Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, which, though not as influential as it had been 30 years earlier, gave him the…

Fans of both Early California art and marine painting should head west this year to experience the touring exhibition Armin Hansen: The Artful Voyage. Organized by, and premiered at, the Pasadena Museum of California Art (where it will remain until May 31), this groundbreaking project has been curated by Scott A. Shields of Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, where it will move next. He has also authored the handsome 280-page catalogue that accompanies it. Now familiar to Californians but comparatively obscure elsewhere, the art of Armin Carl Hansen (1886-1957) is well worth knowing. He was born in San Francisco, where he received formal training in painting. In the aftermath of the disastrous 1906 earthquake, however, he moved to the Royal Academy in Stuttgart. There he refined his traditional skills, yet also…

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), known popularly as Canaletto, is remembered today as one of Italy’s greatest view painters. Born in Venice, he was the son of the painter Bernardo Canal — hence his unintentionally prescient nickname, Canaletto (Little Canal). Though his nine-year stay in mid-Georgian England (1746-55) has received much scholarly attention, until now no exhibition has ever placed Canaletto’s paintings and drawings from that prolific period into a broader context, linking them to the growing sense of assurance that Britain was then beginning to display. Premiering this spring at Compton Verney, the English museum that I am fortunate to direct, the exhibition Canaletto: Celebrating Britain will look closely at this fascinating phase in the master’s career. It will be on view here March 14 through June 7, then will…

Renowned as the Big Sky State, Montana is a place that cherishes its land, wildlife, and connections to art. Today it is home to more than 150 professional artists, who create works depicting the state’s pristine landscapes and conveying its calm way of life. GREAT FALLS About this time of year, all eyes turn to Great Falls, a town of 60,000 in the center of Montana. Every year since 1969, artists and collectors have gathered here to celebrate Western Art Week around March 19. It was on that date in 1864 that Charles M. Russell was born in St. Louis, it was in Great Falls that he spent the second half of his life, and the city was where he died in 1926. Russell arrived in Montana aged 16, working…

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) has created a fascinating exhibition with an unusually long title, which is understandable since it encompasses so many themes. On view through May 31, Marvels and Mirages of Orientalism: From Spain to Morocco, Benjamin-Constant in His Time marks the first occasion a Canadian art museum has addressed the 19th-century phase of Orientalism head-on. It does so by focusing on the often huge and deftly conceived compositions painted by Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant (1845-1902), primarily for display at the annual Salons that once defined contemporary art in Paris, and thus in the Western world. Organized by the MMFA’s director and chief curator, Nathalie Bondil, this is an expanded version of the Benjamin-Constant show presented last autumn by Axel Hémery, director of the Musée des Augustins in…

At this time of year, when much of America is enduring comparatively cold weather, and when it’s still “high season” in balmy places like Scottsdale and Tucson, it’s a pleasure to contemplate these magnificent images of deserts made by an array of talented artists who live throughout the country. In fact, it’s not only sand, buildings, and geological formations that they portray, but also the fascinating people, animals, and plants that inhabit these arid regions. Sometimes overlooked by landscapists in favor of more verdant locales, deserts and high deserts are crucial players in the health and diversity of our environment. Far from lacking life, they instead encompass different kinds of life, and are just as worthy of celebration as — say — the Hudson River valley, the Rocky Mountains, or…

On the liveliest commercial thoroughfare of Hamden, Connecticut — a few miles north of New Haven and the Gothic spires of Yale University — stands one of America’s most unusual, and moving, visual art institutions, Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum. The story it relates, and the story of how it came to be, are well worth conveying. Ireland’s Great Hunger (in Gaelic, An Gorta Mór) is one of the darkest passages in human history, yet today it is not as widely known as the Holocaust, apartheid, or the Armenian genocide. Between 1845 and 1852, 1.5 million Irish people died from starvation and disease, while another 2 million had no choice but to leave their homeland. Though this famine was attributed to the blight that decimated the potato crops in 1845 and…

On view through May 10 at the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia, is the exhibition Nature and Nuance: The Art of Clyde Aspevig. Regularly ranked among America’s top landscape painters, Clyde Aspevig (b. 1951) is not as familiar to Easterners as he deserves to be, so this selection of approximately 30 recent works offers a comparatively rare opportunity to admire his virtuosity up close. Steeped in the landscape tradition of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, Aspevig is best known for grand vistas of unspoiled Western scenery, yet he is also a gifted creator of more intimate, even poetic, scenes of ostensibly “ordinary” passages of nature. Though most closely associated with the High Plains, Rocky Mountains, and his native Montana, Aspevig carries his easel much farther afield, from Death…

The California Art Club’s 104th Annual Gold Medal Juried Exhibition is set to occur again at Los Angeles’s USC Fisher Museum of Art. On view there March 29-April 19, this juried show will feature more than 200 never-before-seen paintings and sculptures encompassing every subject and genre. Among the club members exhibiting will be Peter Adams, John Asaro, Belá Bácsi, Brian Blood, John Cosby, David C. Gallup, Adrian Gottlieb, Cindy Jackson, David Kassan, Calvin Liang, Kevin Macpherson, Jennifer Moses, C.W. Mundy, Ralph Oberg, Alicia Ponzio, Jesse Powell, Ray Roberts, Mian Situ, Christopher Slatoff, William Stout, and Ruth Weisberg. This year’s jury comprised Kay Allen and Selma Holo (USC Fisher Museum of Art), Peter Keller (Bowers Museum), and Michael Zakian (Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University). Established in 1909…

Now is an ideal moment to highlight the artist Freya Grand (b. 1947), who is finalizing her latest solo show in Washington, D.C. On view at Gallery Plan B from March 25 through May 3, this exhibition will focus on Grand’s landscape paintings of Botswana and Namibia, countries she has visited several times. Having grown up in Wisconsin, Grand earned her undergraduate degree in fine art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, then pursued further studies at Maine’s Haystack Mountain School. Before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1990, she lived in the wilderness of British Columbia and in rural Wisconsin. In 2000, after a decade of painting primarily what she calls “narrative interiors,” Grand ran out of inspiration, so it was fortuitous that she soon took her first trip…

It’s widely, and rightly, believed that The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) — held each year in the southeastern Dutch city of Maastricht — is the finest of its kind anywhere. Its 28th edition is set to occur March 13-22, and will likely exceed last year’s total attendance of 74,000 visitors. Now presenting 275 leading galleries from 20 countries, TEFAF has always been preeminent in Old Master paintings and antiques and has, over time, grown equally strong in modern and contemporary art, photographs, jewelry, 20th-century design, and works on paper. No fewer than 175 experts vet every artwork for quality, authenticity, and condition, and the stands’ excellence in design, lighting, and installation is unrivaled. This is, as they say, a pop-up museum where everything happens to be for sale. Throughout…

Not nearly enough Americans realize that something exciting is about to happen north of the border this month — in Montreal, to be exact. Scheduled for March 19-29, the 33rd edition of the International Festival of Films on Art (FIFA) is one of the great experiences available to anyone who loves both art and the art of filmmaking. Operated by a non-profit organization based in Montreal, FIFA has become the largest annual event of its kind anywhere, and is unique in North America. FIFA launched in 1981 with a few dozen screenings at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal. Since then, it has presented more than 5,000 films from some 70 countries, and its audiences have grown in both size and enthusiasm along the way. Last year alone, FIFA screened…