Fine Art Connoisseur July/August 2023

This summer finds me again in the Adirondack Mountains of New York at our family’s summer camp. When my wife initially suggested experiencing island life, I wasn’t convinced I would enjoy it. The idea of relying on boats to transport every single building material, every piece of furniture, and even every morsel of food seemed daunting. And life doesn’t pause for thunderstorms. Now I wouldn’t trade this lifestyle for anything. Despite its inconveniences, it instills a sense of planning, discipline, and above all, tranquility. The sounds of silence envelop our island, where the only things to be heard are the whispering of trees in the wind, the ethereal call of the returning loons who’ve spent their winter in Florida, and the occasional splash of water as trout leap joyfully. Life…

Every day I seem to be reading another story about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its potential benefits and drawbacks. Despite stern warnings from the very people who pioneered this new technology, our society is moving full steam ahead, introducing programs like ChatGPT to the public at breakneck speed. Though I lean a little Luddite, I am not automatically opposed to the idea that a chatbot might save us time and brainspace by performing tasks we normally dread. The Internet itself, initially developed for military purposes, has proved a boon to humanity (with the downsides inherent to any technology), so why not AI? Setting aside the proliferation of — just for example — “deep fake” AI videos designed to mislead viewers, my chief worry for the field of fine art is…

ELIZABETH GOLDSTEIN President, Municipal Art Society McSorley’s Bar John Sloan (1871–1951) 1912, oil on canvas, 26 × 32 in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, General Membership Fund, 24.2 Many family road trips in the 1960s involved stopping at natural attractions or visiting grandparents, taking in a small-town carnival or reaching a lakeside cabin for a stay. For Elizabeth Goldstein, they meant piling into the car with her parents and sister and driving from their home in the Bronx to other cities to see Rembrandts and Goyas, Picassos and Mondrians. “I come from an itinerant family always in search of art,” says Goldstein, who serves as president of New York’s Municipal Art Society (MAS), the influential nonprofit that advocates for preservation of the city’s built and natural environments. Goldstein…

 As this issue’s two Historic Master articles reveal, it was never easy being a female artist. Until the 1960s, society expected most women who were trained professionally in the visual arts to teach, rather than to exhibit actively. Those who did successfully pursue a public career often started out with an independent income or privileged access to the system. Even today, when more women than ever earn a living through art, the system remains skewed. According to the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. — which will reopen this October after a major renovation — an impressive 51 percent of American visual artists are women. So why are they not better represented in gallery shows, museum collections, and auction records? The (several) answers to this important…

Sunsets are one of California painter ELLEN HOWARD’s (b. 1965) specialties, and the luminous view illustrated here certainly captures her aptitude and enthusiasm for the subject. Currently second vice president of the California Art Club and formerly co-chair of its San Francisco chapter, she saw this scene during a picturesque drive from Carmel through Pebble Beach and on to Pacific Grove. “California Glow was created on that 17-mile drive near the Cypress Point Club, one of my favorite areas to paint,” she shares. “I love the majestic row of cypress trees along the shoreline, especially at sunset. The warm light shines through these trees, casting a beautiful golden glow on the ocean.” An avid plein air painter who is partial to Northern California but has also followed nature’s call up…

TODAY’S MASTERS For all its red-brick charm, the city of Boston has not been represented on canvas nearly as much as have its leading citizens — think of Copley’s portrait of a pensive Paul Revere, or Sargent’s vision of the scandalously clad collector Isabella Stewart Gardner. With the exception of Childe Hassam, even members of the Boston School, who included Edmund C. Tarbell, Frank Benson, and William Paxton, rarely went out onto the street to paint. Yet the artist Joel Babb (b. 1947), whose work now springs from the backwoods of Maine, once made Boston both his home and his subject. The geometry of its built environment, particularly the 19th-century grid of the Back Bay neighborhood, proved endlessly appealing to the artist, for whom perspective has remained almost an idée…