Innholdsfortegnelse for July - August 2014 i Fine Art Connoisseur

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…

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…

Relatively few Americans know that our country’s finest collection of Neo-Impressionist paintings is at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). A whole separate article could be written about how this came to be, but now it’s time to focus on an unprecedented exhibition made possible primarily by the museum’s strength in this area. On view through September 7, Face to Face: The Neo-Impressionist Portrait, 1886-1904 has already been presented in Brussels, where many of these artworks were created, and now its only U.S. showing is underway in Indiana. Over many years, IMA curator Ellen Wardwell Lee has collaborated with Jane Block, a professor of art history at the University of Illinois, to select for this project more than 30 paintings and 20 works on paper, made by 15 different painters…

One of the many gifts Paul Mellon (1907-1999) made to his alma mater, Yale University, was the foundational collection of the Yale Center for British Art, the largest and most comprehensive such holding outside the United Kingdom. It is an almost bottomless pit of remarkable objects of the highest quality, housed in one of the architect Louis Kahn’s finest buildings. Beyond the renowned animal paintings by George Stubbs, there are sculptures, drawings, watercolors, prints, rare books, and much more. In sum, it is a true “Wonder House,” the phrase used by Rudyard Kipling to describe the Lahore Museum at the start of his novel Kim. The Center’s director, Amy Meyers, and her team of curators mount shows drawn from this collection, often bringing art and science into dialogue. Invariably, they…

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 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…

The United States established its first national park (Yellowstone) in 1872, and 58 more such entities have been created since then, one as recently as last year. Though Americans are sometimes accused of disrespecting their environment, the remarkably early date of Yellowstone’s designation suggests how prescient our ancestors actually were in protecting that treasure before it was compromised, and it is a credit to Congress that it has sustained the initiative. This model has been followed energetically by most states and many other jurisdictions, and is now emulated abroad, too. Not surprisingly, artists have long sought inspiration and beauty in parks — not only in wilderness areas, but also in cities and even sculpture gardens. The artworks illustrated here all reflect this ongoing fascination, and they even include an example…

A total of 48 sculptures will soon be visiting South Carolina as part of the National Sculpture Society’s 81st Annual Awards Exhibition. Ranging from classical to contemporary, from portrait busts to bas-reliefs and life-sized figures, these works in various sizes reflect the many different styles and approaches employed by the society’s gifted members. The exhibition will appear at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, from August 16 through November 2. Founded in 1893, the society is the oldest such organization in the United States, with a past and present membership roster that reads like a who’s who of the field. Although 178 applications were received for the exhibition, just 48 works were juried in by members Louise Peterson and Michael Keropian, and by Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts curator…

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…

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…