Innholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2021 i Fine Art Connoisseur

From childhood I remember the celebration when my Uncle Hugh bought one of the first televisions in our town. The extended family gathered around that small screen, about the size of a book, with its scratchy black-and-white images. We eventually got one, too, and then the first color TV when it came out, making Bonanza so much more enjoyable. Of course, screens have evolved to take over our lives, commanding our eyes every second of the day. I go from working on a big monitor in my office to looking at a bigger screen for entertainment at home, all while looking at the small screen in my hand as I scroll through hundreds of comments and videos. I can remember clearly the first time I saw a giant flat-screen television,…

The soft sensibility that radiates from David Rem-fry belies a strength of purpose that has taken him from struggling teenage art student to one of Britain’s most respected artists. “I was always going to be an artist,” he remembers, smiling out from his London studio during our pandemic-necessitated Zoom conversation. From the start, Remfry resisted the pressure to train as a teacher in order to earn his living. “I’d seen that route. Whatever I did” — one job was sweeping up cockroaches at night in a seedy hotel — “I made sure I always had eight hours a day back in the studio being an artist.” It paid off. Remfry is equally esteemed in Britain and the U.S., where he lived for 18 years. His work is in more than…

On May 1, 1915, a 39-year-old Old Masters dealer, “of slight build, with a high forehead” and “wearing a pearl tie pin,” boarded a steamship in New York Harbor bound for England, where he lived. Along with the personal belongings of Hugh Lane, the ship’s manifest listed “one case of paintings.”1 Sadly, Lane and 1,958 other passengers and crew would never disembark in Liverpool. On May 7, the RMS Lusitania was struck by a German torpedo, sinking in sight of Ireland’s southwestern coast, near Cork, the county where Lane was born. While the primary objective of Lane’s trip to America — the sale to Henry Clay Frick of Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Cap and Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell — had been successful, the young dealer’s efforts to…

Marion and George Howard became enthusiastic art collectors for a very specific reason, and have pursued their passion in a very effective way. Marion explains, “I grew interested in art in 1995 after my daughter went off to college. I needed a hobby and signed up for art lessons at a local community center near our home in Houston.” Clearly she caught the art bug then because Marion has never stopped painting or attending events that bring gifted artists and their admirers together. Over the years, Marion and George have attended many conferences, workshops, and demos, which they relish as “great opportunities to discover artists and acquire their work.” Much of their collection has been acquired from the artists themselves after the Howards watched them paint that picture. In this…

Tim McLaughlin came to collect contemporary artworks thanks to his long-standing passion for historical ones. A resident of Farmington, Connecticut, the retired orthopedic surgeon is a committed museum booster: he once chaired the board of the New Britain Museum of American Art and now serves as a trustee of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford) and Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme). He notes, “My wife, Marian Kellner, and I are incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by so many opportunities to see great art. We can just walk up the street to the Hill-Stead Museum to enjoy best-of-type Monet haystacks, Degas ballerinas, Manet portraits, and works by Puvis de Chavannes and Whistler. Even in these COVID times, we are nourished by experiencing fine art up close.” Growing up in rural…

ARTISTS & GALLERIES Philadelphia studioincamminati.org March 17–May 9 For more than 18 years, Studio Incamminati, the school founded by artists Nelson and Leona Shanks, has championed contemporary realist art. Now it is presenting Rising Voices, a show of 29 works by the winner and 10 finalists of the 2019 Bennett Prize competition. Established by the collectors Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt and her husband, Stephen A. Bennett (who serves on Incamminati’s board), this initiative highlights the achievements of women figurative realist painters, who have been overlooked for too long. Santa Fe lewallengalleries.com through March 27 LewAllen Galleries is exhibiting more than 30 works from the estate of Edgar Foster Daniels (1932–2020), who lived in Santa Fe for 42 years and received the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts…

My favorite issue of the year is the one that highlights real-world collectors of contemporary realist art. This is that issue, and we hope you will enjoy “meeting” the individuals and couples who have so generously opened their doors (see pages 96–115). These folks now join 72 others we have profiled since 2015, and we are honored and grateful to welcome them to this community. Why do we do this? First, people need role models, in any walk of life. We play football better after watching Tom Brady, and we cook more effectively after Rachael Ray demonstrates the recipe. It’s harder with art collecting because there is no single way to do it, and unfortunately the best-known collectors are financiers and movie stars paying millions at auction for a Koons…

As much as we all love painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking, the most public of all visual art forms is architecture. Whether we want to or not, we must look at the buildings around us: we cannot turn them toward the wall or hide them in a closet if they prove to be unattractive. That’s one reason great architects are so appreciated, even by people born centuries later who don’t know their names yet can patently see the artistry they conveyed through stone, brick, or steel. This season we invited artists across America to show us which buildings they have been examining from the outside (rather than the inside, where so many of us have been confined lately). We were thrilled with the images they shared, ranging from famous historical…

WHEN TIME STANDS STILL JULIETTE ARISTIDES: A LIFE’S WORK Customs House Museum & Cultural Center Clarksville, Tennessee customshousemuseum.org through March 31 On view at the Customs House Museum this season is an exhibition of recent still life, interior, and figure paintings by Juliette Aristides (b. 1971), founder and instructor of the Classical Atelier at Seattle’s Gage Academy of Fine Art. Almost all the works were made during 2020, which the artist describes as “a year of solitude and introspection set against a backdrop of intense disruption — a pendulum of extremes. My body of work is centered on a deep appreciation for the simple and unchanging parts of my everyday life. This collection of paintings, in their stillness and silence, is a record and a gift of that particular time. The…

Loryn and Doug Brazier live happily among the 55 artworks that adorn their elegant home in a historic neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Art has long been a passion for Loryn, who recalls, “Since I was the kid in elementary school who could draw, I was always the one designated to decorate the blackboard.” She went on to become an illustrator and own an advertising agency, then launched a career painting portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and figurative subjects — one so successful that her works are in the collections of such museums as the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Somehow Loryn also found time to run her own Richmond gallery for 23 years; there she represented other talented artists and in 2012 founded the…

Toni and Steve Kellenberg are beloved members of the lively and historic arts community in Laguna Beach, California. When the couple met in 1992, Steve was already living there, and it made sense to remain when they married two years later. A landscape architect and urban planner with clients worldwide, Steve still enjoys drawing plans by hand, and Toni became more interested in art as they started traveling together, always making a beeline to the local galleries and museums. It was at the 2003 edition of the famous Laguna Festival of Arts that the Kellenbergs bought their first landscape painting together. They had recently acquired some land in the Sierra Foothills and dreamed of building a home there, so Jeff Horn’s painting of an oak tree instantly reminded them of…

Toni Moran of Las Vegas is the proud owner — with her husband, Dan — of 314 works, mostly paintings, by 146 artists. “I have acquired objects since childhood,” she recalls, “first seashells and coins, then crafts. My first painting was a detail of a tugboat made by another student at my high school. It cost $10, and I had to get an advance on my allowance. It knocked me out then and has ever since. Because it’s unsigned, I brought a photograph of it to a school reunion, but we couldn’t identify the artist. That disappointment reinforced my desire to document my artworks.” Moran’s zeal for art grew out of “school trips to museums and through my mother’s interest; I recently realized that one of her books influenced me…

Keith and Allison Sullivan have, like so many art collectors, recalibrated their tastes as they move through life and changing environments. Keith explains, “Our interest in art developed as we set up our first home in the Baltimore area. That collection included several editioned prints by Paul McGehee, who is well known in the region for his luminous depictions of Maryland’s Eastern Shore and Baltimore’s historic harbor.” Allison picks up the story: “From there, our interests refined and evolved thanks to our first visits to the museums and galleries of Europe, especially in Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome. We acquired numerous pieces of primarily Impressionist art from local artists who beautifully captured the landscapes and cityscapes around them. Back in America, we purchased two paintings by Clemente Mimun, a gifted…

JEREMY MIRANDA (b. 1980) is an environmentalist, but not in the strict textbook sense. As an artist who waxes poetic about his immediate surroundings through paint, he endeavors to make sense of, and bring broader meaning to, the everyday spaces and places we inhabit. In particular, he’s interested in closely observing the play of light and intricate color patterns he sees around him in the hope of unearthing some quiet corner or hidden narrative. While environmentalists try to solve such problems as how to eliminate pollution and protect nature, Miranda is helping to solve such visual dilemmas as cursory glances and our tendency to overlook. A recent painting titled Home Remedy is a good example. The brightly blazing fire in the foreground could symbolize numerous things, and often the artist…

Viewers in search of experiential art need look no further than Alina Grasmann’s paintings from Sculpting in Time, the solo show that New York City’s Fridman Gallery devoted to her recently. Born in 1989, Grasmann grew up on the outskirts of Munich, the German city where she now lives and works. Earlier in life, Grasmann studied at Munich’s Academy of Fine Arts, including a stint at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, yet somehow her work is distinctly American. Thus it’s only fitting that New York was where Grasmann chose to present Sculpting in Time, which actually contained two new series of large paintings — a curated blend of places both real and imaginary, emblematic of the artist’s fascination with American mythology. The first series — titled The Montauk…

Though domestic travel is challenging this season, anyone who can should visit Cincinnati before March 28 to experience the exhibition Frank Duveneck: American Master. A century after his death, this extraordinary talent is nowhere near as appreciated as he should be, and the Cincinnati Art Museum (CAM) is the ideal institution to rectify this oversight because it is the world’s leading repository of Duveneck’s work. This is his first comprehensive retrospective in more than 30 years, organized over many years by the CAM’s curator of American art, Julie Aronson, who has undertaken new research and set many misconceptions straight. She has selected over 90 works from her museum’s holdings and borrowed 35 more from collections across the U.S. These works range from oil paintings, drawings, watercolors, and pastels to etchings,…

Jill DeTemple and Gordon O’Brien are living proof that art can enhance your life in varied ways. “Our parents did not collect art,” they recall, and although Jill enjoyed studying art history and even painting during college, her family encouraged her to pursue a business career. Together the couple have built a successful real estate investment business, while Gordon conducts a separate career as chief financial officer of a large manufacturer. They split their time between two homes — one in northern Virginia near Washington, D.C, and the other on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Before Jill and Gordon met in Chicago, they had each acquired a few artworks, but art was definitely not a priority. In fact, Gordon lived in the Windy City for 15 years and never visited…

David Lile and Fred Ehlers split their time between Atlanta and Palm Springs, where both homes are filled with art they love. David explains, “We came to appreciate art in our 30s and more so in our early 40s while building a new home and wanting to start an art collection together. We suddenly realized we had a lot of wall space and it was going to take time to find pieces that had meaning to us.” He continues, “Our collecting journey began as we were building a house in Norfolk, Virginia. We visited Atlanta regularly to meet with our designer, and one weekend she took us to see a gallery show of new works by Thomas Darnell. She thought we would love one of his paintings of roses, but…

Leslie Pritchard is always eager to see and learn something new. For a decade she served on the board of Tulsa Town Hall (TTH), a leading nonprofit organization that brings fascinating visiting speakers to Oklahoma, and naturally many of these experts address artistic matters. As part of her new role as a TTH advisor, Leslie and her husband, the businessman Bob Pritchard, sponsored a lecture last season by Robert Edsel, who established the Monuments Men Foundation in 2007, and who has been covered often in Fine Art Connoisseur. Leslie began to appreciate art during high school, when a summer trip brought her and 80 other lucky students to six European countries. While traveling, she read Irving Stone’s famous 1934 novel about Vincent van Gogh, Lust for Life, and so it…

Libby and Dan Whipple grew up in Indiana and now live near Indianapolis, but they are also enthusiastic globe-trotters who first met in Austria as exchange students. They have enjoyed visiting museums and galleries worldwide ever since, and participate in Fine Art  Connoisseur’s European tours almost every autumn. Art was an interest from early on: as a child, Dan took lessons, and Libby enjoyed drawing with her parents, who were both quite adept. She recalls, “It wasn’t until I was in law school that I started painting as a break from reading.” Libby has gone on to become a superb painter and notes, “Collecting was a natural next step after attending art workshops and conferences and getting acquainted with other artists.” Today Dan is a leading ophthalmologist who has adorned…