Fine Art Connoisseur September/October 2025

This June, I embarked on a month-long journey through China, speaking at colleges and attending museum openings and exhibitions, many held in my honor. I also got to visit the homes and studios of some of China's greatest living artists. I was expecting to find what we see in Western media coverage: ancient villages, poverty, cultural suppression. Instead, I discovered something that challenges everything we think we know about art education and cultural priorities. I found a modern nation whose beautifully designed skyscrapers eclipse Manhattan's, and where government investment in the arts isn't an afterthought but a national priority. More striking still was a population with universal arts literacy, where the average citizen possesses sophisticated knowledge of visual arts (and skills) that would shame most American college graduates. China's infrastructure…

For well over a decade, we've been keeping a hopeful eye on development of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. Co-founded by the renowned filmmaker George Lucas (b. 1944) and his wife, investment manager Mellody Hobson (b. 1969), this is going to be – according to its website – “the world's first institution dedicated to the exploration of narrative art, celebrating illustrated storytelling across eras and cultures.” It goes on to say that the museum will show us “how narrative art influences societies – shaping beliefs, communicating values, inspiring imagination, and creating communities. We empower people to engage with artworks through the compelling stories they tell.” That all sounds promising, and this September we gained some insights when 6,000 fans packed a room at San Diego's annual Comic-Con International jamboree.…

At the end of the day, it's always time for bed. For Christopher Robin, the fictional 7-year-old owner of Winnie-the-Pooh, it was bedtime back in 1926, when illustrator Ernest Howard Shepard depicted the boy trudging up the stairs with his beloved toy bear. At the top of the landing, other friends, notably Eeyore and Piglet, await. Peter (“Pom”) Harrington, owner of his namesake London-based business dealing in rare books, cites this illustration (often referred to as “Bump, bump, bump…,” given Winnie's rough ride up the stairs) as “one of the key drawings” in Shepard's series. “This is the closing illustration for the Winnie-the-Pooh books and poems,” says Harrington, adding that what makes this particular pencil-and-pen drawing so distinctive is its scale. “Shepard was a master of line, able to change…

“THE AMERICAN WEST” means many different things to many different people, and that fact should make us all glad. At Fine Art Connoisseur we have long been keenly aware of how art of the West differs from – and overlaps with – art made in or about the rest of this remarkable country. That's one reason every issue of this magazine contains a separate section called “Art in the West” – to underscore that very point. Its existence does not mean we have passed on a comparable section titled, say, “Art in the Northeast.” (In fact, this issue has an entire section about eastern Massachusetts.) Rather, it's recognition of the fact that Western vitality in the fields of historic and contemporary realism is so noticeably strong that it shouldn't be…

ELENA BRIA (b. 1992) declares, “Painting has become my way of fully enjoying and experiencing the world around me.” Her world encompasses two places: the Italian village of Valsolda on Lake Lugano, and her birthplace of Chișinău in Moldova, the former Soviet republic located between Romania and Ukraine. Bria's art immersion started at age 8, when she was asked to paint a peony in watercolors. “It felt exactly like what teenagers describe when they fall in love for the first time – butterflies in the stomach and a kind of electric excitement in the brain. From that day on,” she recalls, “I started sketching everything around me.” Fortunately, Bria's parents came from the world of sports and immediately supported her passion and discipline. Three years later, Bria began learning the principles…

Based in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, Jeffrey C. Legg (b. 1959) is a painter who has won many accolades, exhibited widely, and taught hundreds of enthusiastic workshop students. Amazingly, Legg has never been the subject of a solo museum exhibition – primarily because his sales are so strong that he could never accumulate enough works to lend. For the past few years, therefore, the artist has been holding pieces back and creating new ones, and now they are on view through October 25 in Jeffrey C. Legg: Alchemy of Light & Shadow, a show at the George A. Spiva Center for the Arts in the southwestern Missouri town of Joplin. Legg was born in Joplin, so the return is, in his own words, “incredibly meaningful.” Most of the exhibited…