Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2021 i Fine Art Connoisseur

This March, the Charleston-based digital artist Mike Winkelmann (born in 1981 and known as “Beeple”) sold an NFT (non-fungible token) of his collage artwork for $69 million at Christie’s. According to the auction house, this sale places him “among the top three most valuable living artists.” An NFT is a unique digital file that exists only on a blockchain. The buyer gets limited rights to display the artwork it contains, but in many ways, you’re just buying bragging rights and an asset you may be able to resell. NFT marketing has exploded in the past month and seemingly everyone is offering one, including athletes and musicians. Until last autumn, the most a Beeple print had ever sold for was $100. As a technology, the NFT’s potential is unclear. We may…

Founded in 1999 by the New Jersey collectors Fred, Sherry, and Kara Lysandra Ross with several of their fellow scholars, the Art Renewal Center (ARC) is a nonprofit educational foundation that encourages the re-emergence of traditional art and training techniques. The fruits of its labors are becoming ever more apparent as time goes by. ARC is probably best known to readers of Fine Art Connoisseur for its impressive website (artrenewal.org), which contains more than 80,000 high-resolution images by Old Master, 19th-century, and early-20th-century artists, along with artist biographies and related articles. The site has evolved into an invaluable reference for anyone interested in historical realism. ARC is equally committed to bringing this rich heritage up to date by highlighting the booming field of contemporary realism. In addition to its ever-growing…

Last Sunday I headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, partly to catch up on exhibitions and partly because it was raining. Manhattan has been comparatively sleepy during the pandemic, so I was astonished to find a long line of people waiting patiently to visit the temporary exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First. On view through August 1, this is the first retrospective devoted to Alice Neel (1900–1984) that New Yorkers have seen in 20 years. Its 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors reveal her as one of the 20th century’s most daring painters, as well as a champion of social justice at a time when that wasn’t particularly cool. I personally had not encountered so long a line at the Met since its blockbuster featuring the late fashion designer Alexander…

Currently on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the exhibition Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement is more than halfway through its triumphant tour of the United States. This intriguing project focuses on three generations of young and rebellious artists and designers whose response to the increasingly industrial world around them revolutionized the arts in 19th-century Britain. The exhibition has been organized by the American Federation of Arts (based in New York) and England’s Birmingham Museums Trust, which holds the world’s largest Pre-Raphaelite collection inside its Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. This is the trust’s largest touring exhibition ever, encompassing approximately 145 works. The project was co-curated by Prof. Tim Barringer (Yale University), Martin Ellis (formerly Birmingham’s curator of applied art), and…

FROM THE PLAINS AND BEYOND OGALLALA, NEBRASKA americanplainsartists.com  petrifiedwoodgallery.com through May 22 The nonprofit organization American Plains Artists (APA) is presenting its Signature Show in partnership with the Petrified Wood Gallery. On view are representational artworks made with traditional media that depict the Great Plains region — its landscape, wildlife, people, and ways of life in both historical and modern times. The exhibitors are 22 APA Signature Members who live throughout the U.S. When the exhibition opened in March, awards juror Don Dernovich faced a difficult challenge choosing among its high-quality works. Ultimately, he bestowed the honor of Best of Show upon Comfort Mood, an oil painting created by Sherry Blanchard Stuart of Scottsdale. The Arrowhead Award, chosen by the management of the Petrified Wood Gallery, went to General’s Game,…

YOANN LOSSEL (b. 1985) is a French artist re-imagining the highly visual worlds of Roman and Greek mythology, Celtic folklore, and medieval romance in graphite, oil, and gold leaf. His large-scale, otherworldly scenes resonate like stills from an epic film — forms of time-intensive art that rarely emerge from someone of his generation. Although Lossel depicts fairytales and legends, he actually does not have to go far afield for inspiration. Living in the Brocéliande forest of Brittany, he is surrounded by enchanted woodland, with wide-open spaces ideal for roaming and dreaming. An avid reader, Lossel has assembled an extensive library of classic literature and art history books — including a first-edition collection of Golden Age of Illustration masters — that is at his fingertips in the studio, while his greatest…

In December 1900, Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1874–1954) arrived at the New York City studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931). She was clasping letters of introduction, including one from French’s older brother, William, first director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “She wore a grey hat with a curling feather down over her ear which, with the dark eyes beneath, took Mr. French’s eye, quite as much as the reputation she had already acquired as to talent,” recalled Mary Adams French in her 1928 Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife. French wrote his brother immediately, praising Longman as “a very attractive young woman.” Born in Ohio, she was inspired to study sculpture after visiting the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; “I could do such things if I had the chance,”…

While some people metaphorically light up a room — as the expression goes — with their personality or sheer presence, Niamh Barry actually does light up a room. In fact, as the Dublin-based designer says of her preferred medium of LED technology, “It allows me to write with light.” Barry’s polished and patinated bronze fixtures are as much sculpture as sources of light, some assuming the presence of abstract objects seemingly floating in space, magically aglow. Not surprisingly, light is something she thinks about whenever she’s looking at art; she says, “Light in my life is very important and I’m always drawn to it.” Even as a young girl she was drawn to a rectangle of daylight that pours through an open window into a bedroom in one of her…