Innholdsfortegnelse for Sep/Oct 2018 i Fine Art Connoisseur

Over the past decade and a half, while publishing this and other art magazines, I have discovered something I never anticipated. People who collect art often become artists, and I see a lot of artists who become collectors. At exhibition openings and other events, collectors often declare, “I wish I could do that,” then, “But I don’t have any talent.” Those are trigger words for me, so I immediately respond that art isn’t strictly about natural-born talent; rather, it is an acquired skill like cooking or typing. It takes instruction and time. As an artist myself, I started out believing that I had no talent and that I could not paint or draw. Thankfully a couple of mentors along the way gave me hope and step-by-step tools, urging me to…

Philip Pearlstein (b. 1924) learned about perspective while awaiting combat. Despite the gravity of his wartime assignment, the real lesson he learned was about the meaning of one-point perspective, more so even than the perspective on life itself. As a young infantryman in Italy during World War II, Pearlstein was stationed outside Rome as preparations were made for an Allied invasion against the Germans to capture a mountainous region between Florence and Bologna. While some servicemen might have been visiting USO halls or doing mess-hall duty, Pearlstein and a group of like-minded soldiers he befriended would visit the Vatican Museum and other venues while waiting for the battle plan to be forged. “We visited all of these galleries and for me it was a fantastic education in Renaissance art,” says…

Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur congratulates Alex Bauwens on her superb painting Asleep, which has won this magazine’s annual award in the latest edition of the ARC Salon. A native of Chicago, Alex Bauwens (b. 1988) has been committed to art and animals for as long as she can remember. Her artistic training began at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Palette and Chisel Club, and the American Academy of Art. At Vitruvian Fine Art Studio, she studied under David Jamieson and Melinda Whitmore, then apprenticed with Scott Tallman Powers. Now based in Scottsdale, Bauwens draws inspiration there from daily life, film, literature, her own vivid imagination, and the barns where she spends time with her beloved animals. Her childhood memories are especially inspirational for Bauwens, who explains, “As children,…

Premiered at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts last spring, the exhibition Napoleon: Power and Splendor is about to close at Richmond’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and will then move to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City (October 26, 2018 through March 10, 2019). Its final venue will be the Château de Fontainebleau in France (April 5–July 15, 2019). Focused on the Emperor’s reorganization of French court life between 1804 and 1814, this show reveals how the extraordinary man born Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) created an effective propaganda machine that modernized and legitimized his reign as self-titled Emperor. Corsican by birth and French by design, he continually reinvented himself: he was a minor nobleman and military general whose political ambition inspired his every move. More than 200 paintings,…

For well over a decade, artists, curators, and collectors have debated whether the term “contemporary realism” makes sense generally, and specifically to folks who don’t know much about what we do. Though some say names don’t matter, I disagree — “branding” is everything in our society, so if people can quickly grasp who you are, things just work better. When you browse Fine Art Connoisseur, you’ll see lots of representational artworks made recently. By “representational,” I mean representing something recognizable. It’s a mouthful of a word, and not exactly enticing, so generally we use “realist” or “realism” instead. Problem is, “realism” has encompassed so much over time that it’s hard to visualize what it is now — is it the peasant scenes made by Gustave Courbet in the mid-19th century,…

Human beings’ engagement with fish is a complicated matter. First and foremost, much of the world’s population relies on fish for sustenance, whether they are “fished” from oceans, lakes, rivers, or “farms” in which they are grown. Frankly, it’s easier to kill and eat a fish that seems unattractive (think tuna, shark, eel, octopus, or skate, which are large and often scary-looking), yet even those species possess a strange beauty that has beguiled people for millennia. There are, of course, beautiful fish, too — most famously the colorful tropical ones that adorn aquariums around the world. Our relationship with fish is further complicated by the fact that they are difficult to touch. We can pet a dog or horse — feel its fur or gaze into its eyes — but…

In the late 19th century, the discovery of a trove of ancient terracotta statuettes at the archeological site of Tanagra — in Boeotia, Greece — captured the world’s imagination. In 1878, approximately 50 of these figurines were exhibited at Paris’s acclaimed Exposition Universelle. Dynamic, brightly colored, and produced for mass consumption, these diminutive works held particular interest for contemporary painters and sculptors, including the celebrated French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904). Indeed, the Tanagra figurines would preoccupy and influence him for the rest of his life, directly inspiring the creation of The Hoop Dancer (1891), his most popular and widely reproduced carved work. TANAGRA Uniquely among his sculptures, The Hoop Dancer was envisioned by Gérôme as an independent work and as part of a larger ensemble. In 1890, plagued by accusations…

ARTISTS & GALLERIES San Francisco through September 29 dolbychadwickgallery.com Dolby Chadwick Gallery is presenting Might and Main, an exhibition of still life paintings by Chris Cosnowski that are whimsical explorations of the conflicted soul of our pop culture. Painted in the Old Masterly tradition of Claesz and Chardin, his toys, trophies, models, and other Americana transport us to a world both playful and haunting, sacred and silly. Ultimately, the artist explains, “I’m a closet minimalist who creates Neo-Classicist Pop Art.” Wilmington, North Carolina October 5–31 beckfineart.com Beck Fine Art Gallery is set to host its first Salon des Beaux-Arts, which will highlight recent paintings by Dan Beck, Kevin Beilfuss, John Cook, Kim English, Louis Escobedo, Bryce Cameron Liston, Nura Mascarenas, E. Melinda Morrison, and John Poon. Based across the U.S.,…

Thomas Moran (1837–1926) was one of those young men who did go West. So compelling were his 1871 sketches of the Yellowstone region that, a year after they saw his finished versions, members of Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant began the process of establishing Yellowstone as America’s first national park. Although Moran would later paint large oil canvases depicting the Grand Canyon and other natural wonders of the West — some of them now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum — his diminutive plein air works are equally coveted, including Laguna, New Mexico, Looking from the East, a watercolor, gouache, and pencil work on paper, signed and dated 1891. When one considers the desert heat and sun, and also the fact that Moran was riding a horse or mule…

In January 2013, when Maine’s Bowdoin College announced the appointment of Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear as co-directors of its campus art museum, initial reviews of the married couple’s hiring varied. “CC me on that, honey,” ARTnews magazine tweeted archly; the Association of Art Museum Directors handle liked that post. In the Observer, Andrew Russeth noted that the co-leadership model follows the ancient Roman diarchy, which was “ruled by two leaders.” An “exit interview” in The Washington Post noted the longtime curators had not come to the National Portrait Gallery as a package deal but were leaving it together. “Forget splitting the household chores,” the Post’s Katherine Boyle wrote. “Their upcoming experiment in management and marriage is one that would make Sheryl Sandberg fans downright euphoric.” The…

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II owns one of the finest private collections of South Asian art — that is, art made on the Indian subcontinent. It is important to know right away that neither she nor her forebears looted even one of these exquisite drawings, vividly colored paintings, or illustrated manuscripts, as is often perceived. Rather, most were presented to British monarchs during several centuries of diplomatic gift-giving, an enriching saga that ran parallel to — sometimes intertwined with, sometimes diverging from — the East India Company’s separate and quite ruthless global trading enterprise. Today, these gifts are part of The Royal Collection, one of the world’s largest art holdings, and one of the last great European collections remaining intact. As well as being given new and much-deserved scholarly attention,…