Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2024 i Fine Art Connoisseur

“How can I know what’s good?” asks a friend who has recently grown fascinated by the idea of collecting art. “I know what I like, but what if it isn’t good?” His question stirs a valid debate because each collector has distinctive objectives. For most, there is the passion for art and the need to be surrounded by it. Eor others, it’s about filling their homes with pieces that impress visitors. Still others want a hedge against inflation, something that rises in value as currency falls. In all these cases, the best thing a collector can acquire is the ability to assess an artwork’s quality. Today I shudder to recall what I loved at age 20, and I’m thankful I did not get it tattooed on my arm because my…

The Cincinnati-based artist BRAD DAVIS (b. 1993) is drawn to symbols of change in his life and surroundings. “When I paint the city,” he says, “I look for places that are on the verge of demolition or renovation. When I paint portraits, they’re often of people with whom I interact daily and who operate as vessels for personal narratives. Painting has the incredible capacity to preserve, and I am at my core a preservationist.” Davis inherited his gift for representation from his father, an elementary school art teacher. “I was always in awe of his ability to translate the visual world, and I remember him drawing with me anywhere we went,” he recalls. “At age 9, I saw N.C. Wyeth’s Treasure Island illustration series at the Brandywine Museum of Art [in…

TODAY’S MASTERS The artworks of Sara Gallagher (b. 1990) sometimes come with an asterisk, actual fine print that defines what she does in case someone might be confused. When her San Francisco gallery, CK Contemporary, exhibits her works at Art on Paper in New York or the San Francisco Art Fair, it affixes the following two words: “Pencil drawing.” As the gallery’s founder and director, Lauren Ellis, says of Gallagher’s work, which she has been showing since 2022, “At art fairs, where people are often walking past our booth and assume that many of our pieces are photographs, we find it helpful to put up that sign, especially for Sara. We make the type size large enough that people can read it from the aisle.” So uncannily realistic are Gallagher’s…

HISTORIC MASTERS Art has long been considered a commodity, a way to show off personal net worth and pave a path into higher echelons of society. Thus the field of art collecting has often been dominated by those with enormous means, and so it is hardly surprising that most scholarly attention has been directed to their acquisitions. Comparatively overlooked, however, are the collections formed by artists themselves, who often seek to feed their creative souls, decorate their studios and domestic living spaces, and gather tokens of treasured personal relationships. For example, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) adorned his New Hampshire home with artworks by fellow Cornish Colony artists such as Thomas Wilmer Dewing; a portrait of his wife, Augusta, and their son, Homer, by John Singer Sargent; and a tasteful…

DESTINATION ART Yellowstone and Yosemite may be more famous, yet the largest publicly protected park in America’s lower 48 states is Adirondack Park in northeastern New York, owned not by the U.S. government but by New York State. In the middle of it, Adirondack Experience: The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake is the latest iteration of a private, nonprofit museum that arose from the 1948 formation of the Adirondack Historical Association, and the establishment of The Adirondack Museum 11 years later, on the former site of a hotel built in 1876. According to the website of ADKX, as the museum is known today, its original mission was “ecological in nature, showingthe history of man’s relation to the Adirondacks. The first objects collected were from the Blue Mountain Lake area. The…

TODAY’S MASTERS DIGITAL CONTENT This winter, talented plein air painters around the world participated in the February 2024 edition of the PleinAir Salon competition, which was judged by Darrell Beauchamp, executive director of the Western Art Museum in Kerrville, Texas. The program encompassed a bonanza of honors and awards: First Place ($600 cash prize); Second Place ($300 cash prize); Third Place ($200 cash prize); People’s Choice Award ($100 cash prize); and the category winners ($50 cash prize each). Dr. Beauchamp notes, “I believe that every art competition results in the growth of the artist. First, it requires the artist to ask serious questions about the overall quality of a work and how it will hold up against other works in its genre. It requires an artist to take a chance, to…

TODAY’S MASTERS There is nothing quite so soothing as the sound of water, whether it comes in the form of a crashing wave or a lapping ripple. This pleasure is often enhanced by the experience of rocking gently aboard a boat or ship, a sensation that many of the artists illustrated here have chosen to convey. Whatever their motif, whatever their style, these talents have succeeded in welcoming us into their visions of life along the shore and on the water. Enjoy, and please head to the water yourself, soon. MATTHIAS ANDERSON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.…

HISTORIC MASTERS The year was 1924, and an American artist named Isadore Levy was visiting the tiny town of Le Pouldu on the south coast of Brittany in France. As he sat at a table in a small inn awaiting his food, he began studying some murals that workmen had recently uncovered beneath layers of wallpaper. The proprietress was about to repaper the walls. But Levy spied a signature on one mural that would change everything: “P Go,” short for Paul Gauguin (1848–1903).1 Levy came along at exactly the right moment to rescue an astonishing piece of art history. It turned out that Gauguin had lived in this very building — the Buvette de la Plage — between October 1889 and November 1890. The Buvette had a dining room and…

ART IN THE WEST A GIFTED GENERATION SAN ANTONIO briscoemuseum.org June 14—September 8 The Briscoe Western Art Museum is set to open a major loan exhibition titled Survival of the Fittest: Envisioning Wildlife and Wilderness with the Big Four. On view will be more than 50 works created by a quartet of masters who rewrote the book — so to speak — on the painting of wildlife worldwide. They were the German-American artist Carl Rungius (1869-1959), the Germans Richard Friese (1854-1918) and Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865-1926), and Sweden’s Bruno Liljefors (1860-1939). Part of a remarkable generation, they are especially admired for their unprecedented ability to show creatures in their natural habitat, integrating them into the greater whole rather than isolating them like anatomical specimens. These works have been borrowed from the only…

While the self-described New York Fashion Geek, Reginald Ferguson, knows that clothing styles go in and out of fashion, his taste for the artist William H. Johnson (1901– 1970) never varies. Ferguson, who is New York’s best-dressed man, is also someone who helps make other men look their best, and he remembers the first time he saw the paintings and drawings of Johnson, an artist he so reveres that he calls him “Mr. Johnson.” “I’ve known of Mr. Johnson’s works since childhood, when I first encountered them at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Now here he is in the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art [The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, on view through July 28].” (A portrait painted by Johnson serves as that exhibition’s lead image.) So intrigued…

TODAY’S MASTERS At the snow-covered tip of southern Norway, the liminal coastline shimmers between the end of the earth and the beginning of water. Smooth little islands, ground gray by ancient glaciers from extrusions of Stavern granite, push through the surface. Steam from the sea freezes into a stripe of hanging fog suspended in a weighty layer beneath a pale blue sky. A bare and brief winter sun lights the thickened snow in a low, elongated dawn and stretched dusk. The reflected northern light bounces through a tall window into the second story of a cold, wooden barn, its exterior walls of red ochre contrasting sharply against the white snowdrifts. Inside the barn is a warm bohemian tangle of bare wood, chaos, and creativity, with a cluster of huge linen…

HISTORIC MASTERS Perhaps the most singular event in the life and career of Walter H. Everett (1880–1946) was the day in 1935 when he set fire to many, perhaps most, of his own paintings and drawings. A student of the renowned illustrator Howard Pyle (1853–1911), Everett had been a highly successful illustrator himself, producing covers and inside-the-book art for The Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, and Woman’s Home Companion, as well as other popular publications. But it all ended in 1935, when he decided to terminate his illustration career, apparently with some bitterness. Was he depressed? Did he have a mental breakdown? Had he wanted to be accepted as a fine artist, rather than as an illustrator (to some, a second-tier pursuit)? Had his later work deteriorated in quality,…

EVENTS PREVIEW LOOKING BACK FINDING HIDDEN TREASURES Long Island Museum Stony Brook, New York longislandmuseum.org through June 2 The Long Island Museum is the first institution to organize a retrospective devoted to the artist Samuel Adoquei (b. 1964), which it has titled Finding Hidden Treasures. Born in Ghana, Adoquei came to New York in 1987 to continue his education; there he matured into a master and has since become the first and only African artist to teach at all of the city’s major art institutions and academies. On view are almost 30 works, ranging front portraiture and still life to scenes of nature. Among the highlights are his 10-foot-wide triptych The Legacy and Burial of Martin Luther King, as well as landscapes painted not far from the museum in East Hampton…

ARTISTS & GALLERIES Loveland, Colorado governorsartshow.org May 11-June 9 To be held at the Loveland Museum, the 33rd annual Colorado Governor’s Art Show & Sale will feature more than 60 artists offering four works each, encompassing sculpture, mixed media, and paintings in oils, pastels, watercolors, and acrylics. Twenty of the artists are new to this juried program; returning to it are Legacy Artists Clyde Aspevig, James Biggers, Jane DeDecker, Kim English, Quang Ho, and Daniel Sprick, along with 2023 Best of Show recipient Jen Starling. Albuquerque papnm.org weemsgallery.com June 1-23 The nonprofit organization Plein Air Painters of New Mexico (PAPNM) is set to launch Paint New Mexico!, its first statewide paint-out for members, to be followed by a juried show of up to 90 of their new paintings at Weems…