Fine Art Connoisseur July - August 2014

Understanding collectors and how they make purchasing decisions is essential to everyone in the art world, especially as the Internet continues to change how things get done. That’s one reason the leading fine art insurer, AXA Art, started posing incisive questions to its clients last year. Headquartered in Köln, Germany, AXA sent some of its staffers to nearby Maastricht, in southeastern Holland, to interview several dozen clients at the 2013 edition of The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF), of which AXA has long been the primary corporate sponsor. The results encouraged CEO Ulrich Guntram and managing director Dirk Heinrich to commission a more expansive quantitative survey, Collecting in the Digital Age, which ultimately involved almost 1,000 collectors from around the world, all participating online. The study’s results were presented at…

Some readers of Fine Art Connoisseur may recall my article in the February 2013 issue about sitting for a portrait — in fact, for 15 portraits of me, made at the same time by the industrious members of the Connecticut Society of Portrait Artists. I had not sat for a portrait again until this past March, when I found myself at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia giving lectures as part of a lively weekend organized by Walls Gallery, which is located in the hotel itself. As luck would have it, the New Jersey-based artist Bill Angresano (b. 1955) was hanging one of his paintings in the nearby home of our mutual friends the Hajjar family, so we decided to meet up. Bill generously offered to paint me while we…

The French artist Gustave Doré (1832-1883) is well known for his illustrations of famous authors ranging from Dante, Milton, Cervantes, and La Fontaine to Hugo and Tennyson, not to mention the Bible. Perhaps without realizing it, many people can easily recognize Doré’s imagery in the subsequent work of such filmmakers as Cecil B. DeMille, Walt Disney, and Terry Gilliam, not to mention the Harry Potter movies. He has also loomed large over more than a century’s worth of caricaturists and comic strip illustrators. Such a legacy might be enough for some, yet this dapper, self-taught artist was also a highly individual and prolific painter and sculptor of his own inventions. Now, for the first time in a major museum, Doré is the focus of a 100-object, no-expense-spared retrospective that allows…

While it is now difficult to imagine that Eugene Speicher (1883-1962) was called “America’s most important living painter” in 1936, he was indeed once a towering figure in the American art world.1 From the 1920s through the 1940s, his works were highly prized by collectors and museums, he mounted a series of profitable and critically acclaimed solo exhibitions at a leading Manhattan gallery, he won numerous awards and honors, and he earned a national reputation for portraiture. Nonetheless, in the more than 50 years since his death, a number of Speicher’s works, including major ones, have been deaccessioned from museum collections, and the remaining ones are rarely hung. In short, he has been consigned to the margins of American art history and is largely missing from the canon of 20th-century…

The painting arrived on my doorstep early in 2006. Having extricated the canvas from its sturdy container, I propped it against a wall and stared. I was mesmerized: Eventide is as visually powerful as it is physically imposing (61 x 43 inches). Its composition is dominated by the crouching figure of a young mother, clad in a simple, rose-colored dress, her gaze fixed on the naked, curly-haired infant she holds protectively in her muscular arms with well-articulated hands. We see the child only from behind; his attention is focused on his father, clad in faded blue overalls and visible through an open doorway, carrying a lunch pail. The man’s face is drained and his gait deliberate as he follows the packed-dirt path leading to the family’s modest home. It is…

In 1881, 54 progressive citizens established the Art Association of Indianapolis under the guiding hand of the suffragette May Wright Sewall. Fourteen years later, the generous bequest of John Herron allowed the Association to begin constructing an art school and art museum.1 In 1906, the John Herron Art Institute opened with much fanfare. Its first director, William Henry Fox, organized a robust schedule of exhibitions highlighting loaned artworks, especially those representing non-Western cultures. In 1907, the New York-based designer Lockwood de Forest (1850-1932) loaned several objects — including chest fronts from Damascus, Indian and Islamic metal vessels, and Oriental rugs — to an exhibition showcasing the carpet collection of Association member Charles Q. Jones. Instrumental in organizing this loan was the nationally known lecturer Frederic Allen Whiting, who had attended…