Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2024 i Fine Art Connoisseur

Digital photography has changed our world, and especially how we look at images. Because I went digital very early, I now have terabytes of data on multiple hard drives. They contain what must be millions of photos that will never be discovered in a shoebox by my descendants as they sift through my belongings. Soon enough those hard drives will become unreadable, and most of my photos will never even have been printed. Those images that did get printed will surely fade away, since most home printers do not use archival-quality inks. Though my shelves are lined with photo albums from my youth, I have not assembled a single album since I went digital. Perhaps, then, our children's children's children will never actually know what we looked like. In contrast,…

Although the editorial team at Fine Art Connoisseur loves all kinds of art — fro landscape to still life, from the ld Masters to the still-wet — we hold a special place in our hearts for figu ative works and portraiture. People are at the center of what we do, and so images in which artists depict other people — be they models, strangers, or commissioning clients — carry a special fascination. Capturing a face or human body is incredibly challenging. We all have them, so we can see immediately when something is “not right” in a painting or sculpture. We may not be able to articulate what's wrong, but we sure do spot it. This makes figu ative and portrait artists all the more extraordinary in my estimation; even…

TODAY'S MASTERS Everyone has one, so everyone is interested, to a lesser or greater degree. I'm referring to the human body, surely the most important touchstone in the history of art. Artists have been depicting the figure for millennia, sometimes in exacting detail and sometimes vaguely, but always with the understanding that every viewer has a direct connection with the subject – and also a way of assessing the rendition's accuracy. The ongoing renaissance of classical realism means that figure drawing and painting have not been this good in North America for more than half a century. Though it would be easy to fill this section entirely with examples from the classical ateliers, we have decided to mix it up stylistically. There are several emphatically modernist images here, and we…

INSIDE TRACK In his 1880 work, The Enemies of Books, the English printer and book collector William Blades asserted, “I feel quite inclined to reckon among ‘enemies’ those bibliomaniacs and over-careful possessors, who, being unable to carry their treasures into the next world, do all they can to hinder their usefulness in this.” That criticism could never have been lodged against financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) — whose voracious acquisitiveness was not restricted to books — or more particularly his son, J.P. Morgan Jr. (1867–1943), who was responsible for opening his father's Manhattan library to the public in 1928. Like his father, “Jack” Morgan relied significantly on the dedicated and perspicacious librarian Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950), whom the older Morgan had hired in 1905. Paul Sachs, the longtime director…

HIDDEN COLLECTION One of the most impactful leaders in the revival of contemporary American realism, and also of late 19th-century European academic art, has been Dr. Gregory Hedberg, who lives in New York City and Southampton, Long Island, with his wife, Margaret. I have known Greg since 1990 and have long admired not only his reassessing of great artworks across time, but also the enthusiasm he and Margaret convey in everything they do. Margaret directs the 70-year-old International Debutante Ball that she inherited from her aunt, the socialite Beatrice Joyce. The couple are now at a crossroads, as they have decided to sell their handsome brownstone townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side, built in 1870 and home to the couple and their now-grown son, Stewart, for more than 35 years.…

ARTISTS & GALLERIES Greenville, Delaware somervillemanning.com November 8–30 A Winter's Day is the title of painter Greg Mort's latest show at Somerville Manning Gallery. Long fascinated by science and nature, he creates still lifes and landscapes that juxtapose the rigorous realism of the Dutch Old Masters with striking contemporary designs that make us look again. The self-taught artist winters in rural Maryland and summers in the scenic fishing village of Port Clyde, Maine. New York City clwac.org, salmagundi.org November 19–December 6 The Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club is set to present both its 127th Annual Art Exhibition and its Small Works Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club. Named for the collector (1828–1887) who helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this organization has served American women artists since the late 19th…

Poets are good at imagining. The prolific American poet and poetry editor Daniel Halpern noticed the details in Watteau's drawing of a nude woman asleep in her bed, but he keeps imagining who it was she might have spent the night with. In 1982 he even published a poem entitled Nude about this work, which resides in storage at the Louvre. But of all the earthy details that Watteau rendered here and that Halpern took note of in his verse — the tangled wet mass of hair, the limp wrist encircled by a bracelet, rumpled blankets gathered about her — what is not shown is what especially compels Halpern. “What's most important to me in the drawing is to imagine what had taken place, and who isn't there next to…

TODAY'S MASTERS Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth had been married for more than 50 years when Phyllis died in 2019. Beginning even before their marriage, Jamie painted her portrait continuously, and she is also present in many “indirect portraits” — homages, really — to his partner, model, and ever-present muse. An artist who once declared, “Everything I paint is a portrait,” might be seen by some as out of step with our everywhere, everything, all-at-once art world of postmodern eclecticism. Wyeth's direct antecedents — in addition to his father, Andrew, and grandfather N.C. — include the twin pillars of American portraiture, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent. Illustrated here, Sargent's small Capri Girl on a Rooftop (1878) — in the tenderness of its brushwork as well as the charged motif of…

BEHIND THE SCENES For 20 years, I lived in The Bronx at the confluence of the Hudson and Harlem Rivers, a point dubbed Spuyten Duyvil (Spewing Devil) by 17th-century Dutch settlers for its powerful, shifting currents. My former street, Johnson Avenue, bears the name of a long-demolished iron foundry that radically changed the landscape between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, influencing the area's economic, social, and environmental character. Today, commuters waiting for MetroNorth trains at this stop alongside the narrow ship canal can look across toward the northern tip of Manhattan and west to the New Jersey Palisades without ever knowing the neighborhood's history of industrialization. Built by Elias Johnson in 1853, the iron works — a behemoth of furnaces and polluting smokestacks — produced cannon parts during the…

Stay abreast of up and coming as well as established American realist artists in person or online through regular exhibits: • The Grand National Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club of New York is AAPL's flagship juried xhibition showcasing America's top realist fine a tists. October 28-November 15, 2024 • Realism on the Hudson, A Small Works Show at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY gathers together premier AAPL artists and collectors from all over the country to showcase exceptional talent across various media. March 1-April 13, 2025 • Our Affordable Works Online Show is always a hit with entry-level as well as seasoned collectors. aaplinc.org/artwork-store/affordable Check out all our upcoming shows Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur salutes the talented members of the American Artists Professional League (AAPL) on their…

JENNIFER CRONIN (b. 1986) makes meticulously rendered images that explore the mystery and complexity of everyday life, skewing toward magic realism and often evoking emotions that range from enchantment to melancholy. She was born and raised in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago, the metropolis where she lives today. “I have always been struck by the visual world,” Cronin explains. “I remember my older brother drawing a slice of pie and thinking it was almost magical the way he used the pencil to shade the texture of the fruit filling. In school I was quiet, but I could communicate and be seen through my art, which was a great motivation to continue learning and growing.” Cronin headed to the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where she earned a B.F.A. in painting…

TODAY'S MASTERS Fine Art Connoisseur rarely covers the field of fine art photography, lively as it is, because many other publications do so regularly. We've made an exception, however, for Paulette Tavormina (b. 1949) — an artist who works in New York City and Litchfield, Connecticut — because her photographs are not mere replicas of the Old Master still life paintings we love, but rather distinctly contemporary, highly personal riffs on them. Beyond their luminous beauty, they reflect Tavormina's thoughtful decisions about what to retain, delete, or alter to make the resulting scene fresh, sometimes autobiographical or whimsical, always poetic. Some of her elements sustain their allegorical meanings from the 17th century, while others resonate for the artist herself. These tabletop arrangements result from Tavormina's exhaustive experimentation with different shapes…

DESTINATION ART Editor's Note: Readers of Fine Art Connoisseur travel widely to great cities around the world to enjoy artistic masterworks in museums and galleries. Next time you journey to London to get your fix of British art, consider visiting Bath, a city that is itself a work of art, and only an 80-minute train ride from London's Paddington Station. In 1710, Ralph Allen, aged just 17, arrived in the modest English city of Bath to take up a job as post office clerk. His meteoric rise would parallel that of Bath itself. After making his first fortune by revolutionizing the country's postal system, he bought the nearby Combe Down quarries that were supplying honeycolored limestone to the men developing Bath's nascent healthresort infrastructure. To speed up delivery, Allen found a…

EVENTS PREVIEW BOTH GRAND AND NATIONAL AMERICAN ARTISTS PROFESSIONAL LEAGUE Salmagundi Club New York City AAPLinc.org/96-gne, salmagundi.org through November 15 The American Artists Professional League (AAPL) is presenting its 96th Grand National Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club. This juried show contains landscapes, still lifes, and figures made by more than 80 AAPL members in a range of media; most are for sale. Over $35,000 in awards will be announced by judge Brandon Soloff during the celebratory reception on November 1. Founded in 1928 to foster traditional realism, AAPL is open to all U.S.-based artists working in oil, water media, pastel, graphics, and sculpture. Prominent past members include Alden Bryan, Jasper F. Cropsey, and Frank J. Reilly. The organization's mission is to encourage and protect artists’ interests, to promote high standards of…