Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Fine Art Connoisseur

Before the era of mass tourism, wealthy families sent their college graduates on the “Grand Tour” before the graduates started their careers. The main idea was to broaden their horizons and expose them to great artists and museums so they would become more interesting people. One destination considered a “must” on the Grand Tour was the Italian city of Venice, not only for its spirit of fun, unforgettable geography, and beautiful architecture, but also for its incredible art. It became the one place every artist wanted to depict, attracting virtually every important talent from Turner and Whistler to Monet and Sargent. It has remained a magnet for artists and those who love art. For 12 years now, I’ve hosted a fall Fine Art Trip along with Fine Art Connoisseur editor…

INSIDE TRACK In many communities around the country, newcomers to town join a church — or, if they have children, the PTA— as a way to meet people with whom they may have something in common. When she moved to Atlanta in 2007, IT manager Latania McKenzie joined the High Museum of Art’s Young Professionals. This group is part social — “it’s a party scene at times,” McKenzie laughs — and part educational, which was more her interest since she wasn’t seeking dates; rather, she collects paintings by local artists and “wanted to learn how to become a museum patron one day.” Through the Young Professionals, McKenzie has met local art dealers and artists, participated in guided gallery visits, and heard talks by High Museum curators about art and by…

DESTINATION ART If you were to build a model of the quintessential New England town, it would look like New Salem, Massachusetts. With a population hovering around 1,000 residents, New Salem is situated in the north-central part of the state, beside the Quabbin Reservoir and surrounded by forests that burst into color every autumn. Its beautifully preserved town common is a designated historic district that dates back to 1737. Main Street is lined with centuries-old white-painted houses and churches. And now the town is home to the New Salem Museum and Academy of Fine Art (NSMA), a carefully conceived and presented venue that showcases contemporary realist works made by living artists. NSMA is a passion project for Laura and Vincent Barletta, whose personal art collection forms the basis of the…

EXHIBITION PREVIEW In January 1977, Western New York experienced a devastating blizzard; more than 30 inches of snow brought life to a standstill, buried cars, and reached the roofs of homes. While the event felt like an adventure for my 15-year-old self and the neighbor kids, many people lost their lives, and President Jimmy Carter declared a federal disaster in the region, the first for a snowstorm in the U.S. This experience of severe weather catalyzed in me a deep appreciation for the unpredictable forces of nature, and for the vulnerability of all living things. More recently, in December 2022, the interconnected challenges relating to climate, infrastructure, and communications tragically impacted Buffalo during an even more severe blizzard, when 31 people lost their lives. Over the past few decades, indigenous…

ARTISTS & GALLERIES Jeffersonville, Vermont bryangallery.org through August 25 In 1984, artists Mary and Alden Bryan founded what is now the Bryan Memorial Gallery in the historic town of Jeffersonville. To celebrate the intervening four decades, the exhibition 40 Years Together lays out the gallery’s story, encompassing not only the Bryans, but also the many gifted historical and living artists who have depicted the scenic Lamoille region over the past century. San Antonio hindes.com July 21–August 30 Artist Janice Yow Hindes opened Hindes Fine Art in 2018; five years later, artist Andrea Wollenzin joined her as co-owner. Now their gallery is presenting the exhibition Landscape Lalapalooza, what they call “a serious look at fun and a fun look at the seriousness of America’s vanishing landscape.” On view are recent landscape…

TODDAY’S MASTERS It almost goes without saying that any artwork relies - to some degree on the play of light across forms, even when the forms are abstract. Whatever the artists’ intention may be, viewers expect them to manage the relationship of light and shadow in a way that convinces us, often moving or inspiring us through the drama of a juxtaposition or transition. This skill has been explored and revisited continuously since the Renaissance, soaring to new heights in the hands of such masters as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Francisco Goya, Auguste Rodin, Käthe Kollwitz, and Edward Hopper. Preparing this portfolio section has confirmed — to our staff’s delight — that the skillful rendering of light and shade is flourishing among artists today. We hope you will enjoy discovering how some…

BEHIND THE SCENES Over the years, I’ve gotten used to the three additional people who moved into my one-bedroom apartment. While the two young women remain bare-shouldered, albeit fully dressed, the young man still insists on walking around shirtless and barefoot. As I write this, they are at home in the kitchen — the man making coffee on the stove, one of the women rummaging in the refrigerator for breakfast fare, and the other pulling a volume from a bookcase. At first, it required some getting used to one another, all of us feeling a slight awkwardness since we didn’t know each other, at least until their painter, Tim Kennedy (b. 1954), introduced us. They no longer seem reluctant to look me in the eye, and I keep shooting surreptitious…

DESTINATION ART "It's about the pictures, the quality of the collection. And what a collection to work with!” exclaims Per Rumberg, head of the curatorial department at the National Gallery (NG) overlooking Trafalgar Square in central London. Launched in May, the NG’s 200th-birthday celebration encompasses the loaning of star paintings to other British museums for the first time ever, the transforming of its Sainsbury Wing to become the main entrance, and a rehang of each gallery without closing the rest — a reinstallation to be led by Rumberg and completed by May 2025. Around the corner, Alison Smith, chief curator at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), bursts forth with equal gusto about the building renovation and collection rehang that required a three-year closure that concluded in June 2023. Smith cites…

EVENTS PREVIEW IN HER OWN RIGHT CAMILLE CLAUDEL Getty Center Los Angeles getty.edu through July 21 Camille Claudel (1864–1943) was a daring and visionary sculptor. Inordinate attention has been paid to her tumultuous life, including an affair with her mentor, Auguste Rodin, and the premature end to her career due to mental health issues. It was unusual for women of her generation to become professional sculptors, and her protean talent was noted at the time; one critic declared, “We can no longer call Mademoiselle Claudel a student of Rodin; she is a rival.” Unfortunately, the art itself remains little known outside her native France and fewer than 10 compositions are held by U.S. museums. On view at the Getty Center this season is the first North American exhibition to focus on…

TODAY’S MASTERS The myths of the American West, one-sided narratives of manly bravery and Manifest Destiny, were undone by scholars long ago. In 1991, for example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum offered its own revisionist view with The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the American Frontier, 1820–1920. While idols have been toppled and ambitions decried, the landscape — so central to any understanding of the West — remains. It has certainly changed since Albert Bierstadt rendered the Sierra Nevada and Thomas Moran produced Shoshone Falls on the Snake River (1900), but as one of nature’s finest expressions, it continues to captivate artists. While it may be difficult for some to see nature plainly — not as the locus of conquest, but as what Willam Blake called “imagination itself” —…

Howard Zar called his mother from Krakow. Zar, who is executive director of Lyndhurst, a National Trust historic property in Tarrytown, New York, was visiting the Polish city, a place where his mother had once lived, and hidden, during World War II. “As we talked, she’d ask me about a particular corner or store, wondering if a certain bakery was on the street still or if I was walking in the central square.” Later he told her about a painting he had gone to see at the Czartoryski Museum, Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine. Like many masterpieces, it had vanished during the war, but then was found and is now one of the collection’s most prized items. Zar’s mother and father were key participants in the Warsaw Ghetto…

EXHIBITION PREVIEW In southern Vermont, the 400-resident village of South Newfane harks back to a slower pace, to down-to-earth living amid verdant scenery and vernacular architecture. At its heart sits Willow Vermont Retreat, an 1899 Colonial Revival inn-turned-center for yoga and culture that for the past two years has been in the stewardship of Tom Concannon and Ravi Shimpi; they had come from Boston to Vermont after the pandemic seeking a better quality of life. This August, Willow’s high-ceilinged, sensitively lit parlors will host the exhibition Passage: The Future of Contemporary Realism — another step on the couple’s “joint path to find and support artists we love,” in this case the students, teachers, and alumni of Brooklyn’s Grand Central Atelier (GCA). GCA’s approach to realism combines the techniques and principles…

ART IN THE WEST THE WEST IN ALL ITS DIVERSITY RENO, NEVADA cdaartauction.com July 27 The 39th annual Coeur d’Alene Art Auction is set to occur at Reno’s Grand Sierra Resort. Over the past 20 years, this event has generated more than $400 million in sales of top-quality paintings and sculpture reflecting the American West, both historical and contemporary. Auction partner Mike Overby stresses the significance of the major works that have been consigned by the estate of the late Texas entrepreneur Red McCombs, who owned the Minnesota Vikings, San Antonio Spurs, and Denver Nuggets. Among the masters represented in this group are Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, John Clymer, and Howard Terpning. The historical painters in this year’s auction include Eanger Irving Couse, Gerard Curtis Delano, Harvey Dunn, William…