Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2022 i Fine Art Connoisseur

As a man on a mission, I had three art-related goals I wanted to see fulfilled in my lifetime. One was furthering appreciation for plein air painting, which is why I founded PleinAir magazine in 2004. Due to lack of support, we retired it for a couple of years, and then it roared back to life in 2011. We have just finished celebrating its first full decade of robust health. The second goal was to promote the making of portraiture from life, which is why more than 26 top artists have been commissioned to paint my portrait. (One of them graces this page.) The final objective has to do with this magazine, Fine Art Connoisseur, which has been guided by a different set of priorities. Back in 2004, I believed…

1999 was a year of firsts for the then 30-year-old painter Johanna Harmon (b. 1968). It marked the first time she had visited a large city (Boston), savored her first bowl of New England clam chowder, boarded her first ferry, and taken her first subway ride. That subway brought her to the first major art institution she had ever visited — the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. More important to Harmon as an artist was the exhibition she saw there, a retrospective of oil paintings, watercolors, and mural studies by John Singer Sargent — 160 works in all. A number of those Sargents stayed in her memory, such as the portraits of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (which Harmon describes as a “powerful composition of soft tones, lost and found edges”)…

Clad in a diaphanous green gown, with bits of lace at her elbows and a bow at her waist, a graceful young woman is engrossed in her book. Light plays upon her fashionably bobbed hair, and her pale skin is luminous against the dark brocade of the Renaissance-style chair on which she sits. It may come as a surprise to learn that the sculptor of the iconic seated figure of Abraham Lincoln inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., was also a talented portrait painter. As a means of relaxation, Daniel Chester French (1850–1931) created portraits of his family and friends beneath the north-facing skylight in the reception room of his studio at Chesterwood, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife, Mary French commented that her husband’s “greatest…

ONGOING FROM 2021 Through January 23, 2022: Revisiting America: The Prints of Currier & Ives; Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT Through March 20, 2022: The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Through April 2, 2022: Portrayals of the American West: Curtis, Reed, Huffman, Wallihans Historic Photography; Steamboat Art Museum, Steamboat Springs, CO Through May 22, 2022: The Sun Dance Series: Heart of the Blackfeet People by Gary Schildt; C.M. Russell Museum, Great Falls, MT Through May 22, 2022: The Great Animal Orchestra: Bernie Krause and United Visual Artists; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA Long-term: Sculpture from the Brookgreen Collection (Portico Gallery) and Waccamaw Neck Memories exhibit of art, decorative objects, and furnishings (Holmes Gallery); Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, SC Long-term: National Sculpture Society Honorees,…

Before the COVID-19 storm whipped up its tragic drama on the global stage, the career of artist Maria Kreyn (b. 1987) was flying high. Long ago the Russian-born American had abandoned her austere, abstract studies of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago and ventured to cold Norway, where she joined master painter Odd Nerdrum’s clan of apprentices and acolytes. Kreyn even borrowed his creaking house in volcanic Iceland, where she painted through nightless summer days and endless winter nights. Nerdrum was a generous host, but ultimately Kreyn broke away from her long-robed mentor and settled into a high-ceilinged Brooklyn studio. There she began exploring her inner world, producing tall baroque canvases of surreally floating savage dogs intertwined above abandoned bodies and detached hands, all indigo and charcoal-stained, with…

Sometimes a book arrives and unexpectedly opens your eyes to an unfamiliar world. Such was my reaction when art historian Gianni Orsini kindly sent me his impressive 2019 publication about the fascinating Italian painter Romualdo Locatelli, who was born in 1905 and probably died in 1943. The word “probably” is only one of his story’s many intriguing aspects. Romualdo (“Aldo”) Locatelli was born in the northern Italian city of Bergamo and grew up helping his father, an accomplished decorative artist, create fresco paintings in the region’s churches. He studied art at Bergamo’s Accademia Carrara, which was aesthetically conservative, uninterested in futurism or other avant-garde approaches then underway. In fact, we see throughout Locatelli’s work the influence of the much older, Rome-based master Antonio Mancini (1852–1930), who won fame for what…

You don’t have to be in Philadelphia for long before you start noticing the murals. Every city has at least a few. Some have hundreds. But all told — large, small, outdoors, indoors, in subway stations, and everywhere in between — Philly has more than 3,000. That they exist in such abundance is thanks to Mural Arts Philadelphia (MAP). Born of an anti-graffiti program for youth 38 years ago, MAP has grown into America’s largest public-arts organization and a national model. Occasionally it commissions a name artist to create a mural. Early on, Keith Haring (1958–1990) painted one on the side of a house in South Philly. Completed in 1987 and restored in 2013, it is a quintessential Haring composition of gyrating, roly-poly stick figures and one of his barking…

Sometimes collecting art is much more about falling in love than about research or prestige. The sheer joy of buying and living with art permeated the air recently when I visited the distinguished gastroenterologist Saad F. Habba, M.D., and his wife, Janan, at their homes in New Jersey and Manhattan. Originally from Iraq, they have lived in Europe and then the U.S. for most of their lives, though they also keep a house in London in order to enjoy the city’s cultural riches and visit family members there. Saad Habba is a graduate of Ireland’s Royal College of Surgeons and has been practicing medicine for more than 40 years. Formerly chief of gastroenterological endoscopy at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, he is in private practice and…

Michael Bastian dreams about rooms. Like many New Yorkers, in his sleep he imagines opening a closet door in his Greenwich Village apartment to find a new, unexpected room, or, unpleasantly, being stuck in a room, or simply moving through a space in an unfamiliar location. “Sometimes, I’d call these dreams, other times nightmares,” he muses, “but for some weird reason, I often find myself in these architectural settings.” As for this painting by Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), one of Bastian’s favorites, he admits to feeling as if he dreamed being in the room that’s depicted here, even before he saw it. “There’s a feeling of déjà vu when I look at this, as if I saw it in my sleep.” For decades, Bastian has been one of the…

A NEW TAKE ON AN OLD TRADITION JANE JONES’S HYPERREALIST FLORAL PAINTINGS Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts Spring, Texas pearlmfa.org January 29–May 14 It’s long, but the title of a new solo exhibition at Texas’s Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts says it all — Cultivating the Dutch Tradition in the 21st Century: Jane Jones’s Hyperrealist Floral Paintings. On view soon will be 25 still lifes this talented artist has painted since 2012. Well before she published the book Classic Still Life Painting in 2004, Jones admired the great 17th-century Dutch floral painters, including women such as Maria van Oosterwyck, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Rachel Ruysch. She brings to this timeless genre a decidedly contemporary approach informed by both the precision of photorealism and the bright, clear light of the…