Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2022 i Fine Art Connoisseur

Throughout this issue of Fine Art Connoisseur, we celebrate the quality and diversity of artworks being made by women nationwide today. We also applaud the growing number of organizations and institutions that are training, encouraging, exhibiting, and documenting women artists. This current vitality is especially heartening given that, until the 1960s, society expected most women who were trained professionally in the visual arts to teach, rather than to exhibit actively. If they did choose to compete in the professional arena, it was hoped they would not try too hard. Even today, the system remains skewed: an impressive 51 percent of American visual artists are women, yet only 11 percent of the artworks on view in this country’s museums were made by women. How can this be? The (several) answers to…

As milder weather arrives in North America, the editorial team at Fine Art Connoisseur has looked out the window and highlighted more than 30 recent images of “green zones.” These are areas of natural verdure including gardens, pastures, woodlands, forests, valleys, rivers, ponds, waterfalls, golf courses, marshes, and dunes — places where all kinds of foliage are in charge. Artists see such places from many perspectives, so we are glad to include not only the panoramic vistas you would expect, but also some flowering branches, a close-up study of a clump of earth, animals enjoying the greenery, and even a figure seemingly emerging from the mist with a floral offering. Timeless as these artists’ visions seem, we can no longer gaze at such art without recalling that climate change triggered…

ISLANDS IN FOCUS PHILIP KOCH: ISLE OF DREAMS Ogunquit Museum of American Art Ogunquit, Maine ogunquitmuseum.org May 1–July 19 On view this season at coastal Maine’s Ogunquit Museum of American Art is the evocatively titled exhibition Isle of Dreams, which features Philip Koch’s recent paintings and studies highlighting islands as both subject and symbol. Scholar Eva J. Allen has written that Koch’s art constitutes “a contemporary re-imagining of the romantic panoramas of the great 19th-century American landscape painters,” including Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, and George Inness. The artist himself notes that “Nature is older than us, and if we open up to it, it offers a great deal of emotional power.” His landscapes are composed and drawn so realistically that we recognize them as of this world, yet their expressive, anti-naturalistic…

This article is a tribute to my dear friend John H. Schaeffer, who was born in Amsterdam in 1939 and died in his adopted city of Sydney in 2020. At the request of John’s partner, Bettina, and his daughter, Jo, I am honored to recount the art-related adventures of this fine man, who had been placed in an orphanage during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, adopted by an elderly couple, and then hired as a penniless cabin boy on a ship headed Down Under. Through intelligence and determination, John became Australia’s second-largest corporate employer and its greatest art collector. I entered his life during his professional heyday and was fortunate to work with him closely for 23 years. John’s achievements in business and culture were justly rewarded, including a…

What a joy it has been assembling this issue! From our front cover image by Megan J. Seiter right through to the back cover adorned by Kathryn Mapes Turner — not to mention the impressive gatefold cover created by our friends at The Bennett Prize — this is an issue that takes Fine Art Connoisseur’s longtime championing of women artists to a new level. Our team has enjoyed reconnecting with colleagues at various organizations devoted to women in art, and we thank them for bringing us up to date on their exciting activities. See, for example, our editorial coverage of the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club (page 74), the National Association of Women Artists (page 110), and the important exhibitions of female artistry on view this season at museums in…

DIEGO GLAZER (b. 1992) describes his style of painting as indirect and his artistic position as interpretive, meaning that his imagination and personal experience are as much a part of the process as reality. “I work in several layers of oil paint,” the Denver-based artist explains. “This approach makes the painting itself a physical object with great variety and complexity. There are thick and thin areas, as well as passages of transparency interacting with opacity. When working from life, I take suggestions from the beauty of nature and reality, but I distill them through my own aesthetic and emotional lens.” Painting figures, portraits, still lifes, and landscapes with equal dexterity, Glazer is an artist who purposefully availed himself of a wide range of techniques throughout his education. He earned a…

The Connecticut painter Don Troiani (b. 1949) is having a moment. Through September 5, Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution is presenting the exhibition Liberty: Don Troiani’s Paintings of the Revolutionary War. Based upon the artist’s painstaking research, the more than 40 works on view reconstruct a variety of the conflict’s events and participants with both rigorous authenticity and technical virtuosity. In the accompanying catalogue, the museum’s chief curator, Philip Mead, rightly praises “the power of Troiani’s art to confront the errors in our expectations, and to see the Revolutionary War with its far-reaching promise, and bitter ironies.” A PROUD HISTORY American art depicting military history has a rich heritage traceable back to Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, and John Trumbull. Heroic paintings such as William Powell’s Perry’s Victory (1857)…

The COVID-19 pandemic seems to have scrambled most people’s sense of what happened when, so now it’s especially helpful to recall and anticipate our milestones whenever possible. Hard to believe, it was exactly three years ago — in May 2019 — that the winner of the first Bennett Prize for Women Figurative Realist Painters was announced. This unique honor was presented to the Tampa-based artist Aneka Ingold — specifically $50,000 payable over two years — constituting what is still the largest award offered solely to women figurative painters. Endowed through a $3 million fund at the Pittsburgh Foundation by the San Antonio-based art collectors Steven Alan Bennett and Dr. Elaine Melotti Schmidt, this biennial prize is designed to propel the careers of full-time female painters who have not yet reached…

Art school can teach artists a number of interesting things, but sometimes not quite what they want to learn. When Anne Hightower-Patterson (b. 1950), already a reasonably skilled watercolor painter of figurative subjects, entered the studio art program at the University of South Carolina in 1968, she found that its faculty didn’t offer classes in watercolors or even oils, and they had little interest in any subject matter other than abstraction. “I had to do some abstract painting,” she recalls, “but I didn’t do a lot, and I wasn’t very good at it.” This was 1968, after all, when the art world was dominated by minimalism, conceptualism, process art, Op Art, performance art, Fluxus, and other trends having little to do with two-dimensional images of a recognizable person. Art departments,…

Ulrich Gleiter (b. 1977) is a man on the move whose latest plein air paintings will settle, though only briefly, at Denver’s Gallery 1261 from June 24 through July 15. On view in his exhibition Migration will be almost 40 works, primarily landscapes, that evoke recent travels in French Burgundy, Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Spanish Andalucia, and Croatia’s Dalmatian islands. Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, Gleiter pursued his undergraduate studies at Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he learned to paint with the bold, colorful strokes handed down from the early 20th-century German expressionists. Students there prioritized their individuality — no one but you could have made this picture, they were told. Gleiter then absorbed a different view of artistry during his exchange year at Moscow’s Surikov Institute, followed by six more…

Creating an art collection often begins with the purchase of a single work that is particularly appealing. For Gabriel and Yvonne Weisberg, it was a charcoal drawing by François Bonvin (1817–1887) they found in a London gallery in 1970. That image of an elderly ragpicker engaged their attention not only because of their ongoing scholarly research into the origins of French realism, but also because of the artist’s evident compassion for the humanity of those who struggled to survive in poverty. Now, 52 years later, Reflections of Reality, an exhibition on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA) from May 14 through December 10, showcases the depth of the collection that grew from that initial Bonvin drawing. From the outset, the Weisbergs chose to purchase drawings because they were…