Art

Antiques Roadshow: Standing in Line for the American Dream

At first, it seemed that a mass migration might be underway. People by the dozens and then by the hundreds moved along sidewalks and curbsides, pushing carts, pulling wagons and dollies, arms laden, backs straining under the weight of their worldly goods. Were they fleeing the oppressive heat and humidity of Washington, D.C., or perhaps some apocalyptic event about to befall the nation’s capital, of which I was not yet aware? They moved with determination and good humor, as if on an adventure, converging finally at the doorway of the Walter Washington Convention Center in the heart of the city. A sense of camaraderie and common purpose seemed to form an invisible bond between strangers as they gathered up their treasures and moved collectively down the seemingly endless hallway toward a single spot—center stage at public television’s national phenomenon, The Antiques Roadshow; or what one appraiser explained to me about its 14-year run, “It’s ‘the History Channel’ meets ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire.’”

Above: Art appraisers, David Weiss, foreground and Alasdair Nichol, of Freeman’s Auctioneers work the Paintings & Drawings table for Washington, D.C.’s Antiques Roadshow. All photos, unless otherwise noted, by Katherine Arcano fine arts magazine artwork More

Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Exhibits Installation of Charles LeDray

fine arts magazine charles ledray — Charles LeDray, MENS SUITS (2006-2010), mixed media

In the 1970s, when late modernist monuments dominated sculpture, Joel Shapiro caused a hullabaloo when he presented his eccentric miniature work on the floor of Paula Cooper’s Gallery. Spectators came upon a selection of three-inch-high bronze or cast-iron objects—a chair, a dollhouse, a bird and even a coffin. New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center director and curator, Tom Finkelpearl stated, “Shapiro is the patron saint of the small… He is the anti-Oldenburg, taking big things and making them little.”[1] Again the power of the tiny is eminent in Seattle-born and New York-based artist, Charles LeDray ’s retrospective exhibition, CHARLES LEDRAY: workworkworkworkwork. One must be willing to slow down to appreciate this artist’s presentation of intriguing miniature everyday objects. Organized by Associate Curator Randi Hopkins, at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, this show surveys 25 years of the artist’s work. The world LeDray presents is one of the small, the quaint, the curious—a far cry from today’s realm of the immediate, splash, bam and boom! Throughout his work he presents open-ended mini narratives inspired from childhood memories, folk traditions and tacky Americana. Fine Arts MagazineMore

Newport, Rhode Island’s Historic Vanderbilt Hall and Vernon Court Share Passion for Fine Art

fine arts magazine — Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt (circ.1910)

This is a tale of two historic homes in a beautiful seaside, New England town, and of how visionary zeal and coincidence braided history, friendship and a passion for things beautiful together in a most unusual way…

On May 1, 1915 Alfred Vanderbilt boarded the Lusitania bound for Liverpool as a first class passenger. It was a business trip, and he traveled with only his valet, leaving his family at home in New York. On May 7th, off the coast of County Cork, Ireland, the German submarine, U-20, torpedoed the ship, triggering a secondary explosion, sinking the giant ocean liner within eighteen minutes. Vanderbilt and his valet, Ronald Denyer, helped others into lifeboats, and then Vanderbilt gave his own lifejacket to save a female passenger, even tying it onto her himself, since she was holding an infant child in her arms. His selfless actions cost him, and those of 1197 other passengers, their lives. Fine Arts MagazineMore

New York’s Museum of Arts and Design Explores Meaning of ‘Beauty’, in ‘Dead or Alive’

In less sure hands, New York City’s Museum of Arts and Design’s Dead or Alive, an exhibit of thirty-seven international artists’ work composed of feathers, bones, egg shells, insects, fur, antlers, dried and rotting plants– with a few stuffed birds and animals thrown in– would be a creepy, crawly experience, conceivably sending people packing for the exits. Not so with this exhibition, though. Dead or Alive, conceived by chief curator David Revere McFadden and senior curator Lowery Stokes Sims, assisted by curator Elizabeth Edwards Kirrane, examines beauty in the extreme: living proof, so to speak, that a sow’s ear can, indeed, be made into a silk purse. It is also, despite outward appearances, an intellectual adventure encouraging serious thought on ecology, beauty, violence to humans and animals, and most notably, one’s own mortality. Fine Arts MagazineMore

Fine Art Collecting: Art Fairs and Other Insurance Underwriting Challenges

Seeking – Director for Museum, open 4-10 days a year with hundreds of curators involved, and tens of thousands of visitors. Must be able to cope with logistical nightmares and able to please everybody all the time.

How many museums are there in the world? Have a guess. I have no idea so email me if you know. My point is there are thousands upon thousands of museums, more than it would be possible to count with any great ease. Museums are, for the most part, continuously in operation. Their time horizon, as a business, is long range. They are afforded the luxury of time to organize, correct, and improve. But, in the case of an art fair or expo, how do you cram all of these operational considerations into a just a few days of intense activity, and accomplish it without serious incident?Fine Arts MagazineMore

Review of the 2010 Whitney Biennial Exhibition

If ever there were a middle-of-the-road exhibition, this year’s Whitney Biennial is it. In the spirit of an Obama promise for ‘Change’ and to ostensibly try to please everyone—traditional nattering nabob art critics included—guest curator Francesco Bonami and Whitney senior curatorial assistant Gary Carrion-Murayari transformed, with a few standout exceptions, what is usually a messy and colorful cacophony of coloratura voices all fighting to be heard, into a relatively tame and well-ordered blue-haired lady. This latest effort by the Whitney appears to lack pizzazz, speaking mostly in low, hushed tones and preferring dressed-down matinees to paparazzi-fueled, red carpet openings.Fine Arts MagazineMore

The Hudson River School of Painting Helps Define American Identity

By the mid-17th century, English claims in the New World were well-established for those colonies along the New England coastline. The hard-scrabble existence and high mortality which had so characterized the early years of settlement had given way to communal permanence and relative prosperity. Still, the relationship of these growing settlements, with the surrounding forest and inhabitants, remained uneasy. Intent on establishing a wilderness Zion, where tight controls over religious practices could be consistently managed and overseen, these English settlers often described their surroundings as “cursed” land, “the environment of evil,” a “kind of hell” on earth. The earliest Puritans of New England, steeped in an Old Testament, Biblical worldview, believed they found themselves in such a “wilderness condition” of continental proportions. It was their God-ordained destiny to transform the dismal American wilderness into an earthly paradise, governed accordingly by the Word of God. Fine Arts MagazineMore

Contemporary Artist Wolf Kahn: Discovering Symbolism in the Ordinary

What do you think of when you think about Wolf Kahn? Is it the fantasia palette, the barns glowing ember-like, the tangled rushes as if singed by a fire, or his hot pink shirt, green tie and strawberry socks? The artist did not disappoint on Thursday evening at the Center for Creative Printmaking in Norwalk, CT. His molten colored monoprints on exhibit downstairs, Kahn fielded questions about his work and life upstairs. Fine Arts MagazineMore

A New Abstract Expressionism Finds a Voice in the Work of a Connecticut Artist

David Taylor, Artist — David Taylor, Landscape, o/c, 45″x 36″

The Erector Square Building in New Haven, Connecticut has long stood as a landmark of American ingenuity. For decades, it served as the manufacturing headquarters for a number of well-known children’s toys, including the long-forgotten, Erector Set. Now the building’s maze of hallways, linked by well-worn and patched, honey-yellow oak floors, bear the scars of its industrious history; its imposing, sliding metal doors, at certain junctions, tell of a time when sections of the factory may have been closed off for production purposes. Their quilt-like pattern of shiny steel plates and neatly arrayed nail heads, together with a Rube Goldberg-like system of handles, pulleys and counter-weights have me imagining that these doors may have once seen service on a 19th century, Jules Verne apparatus, leagues beneath the ocean waves.More

Henri Matisse Collage Wall-Hanging Debuted at Armory Show, New York

Henri Matisse Océanie le ciel — Henri Matisse, Océanie, 'le ciel' (1948) for sale at C|&|Co, NYC

Oceanie is a masterful, two-part work by Henri Matisse, comprising ‘le ciel’ and ‘la mer’; both pieces realizing the artist’s self-described “dream of….an art of balance, purity and serenity…”

The pair of decorative, mural-sized compositions draws explicitly from ‘reveries’ of his 1930 experience in Tahiti, the exotic iconography of which would become the mainstay of his late-era paper cut-out, collage series. (‘Oceanie’, or the English, Oceana, is a term ascribed to a broad archipelago of South Pacific Ocean and its islands.)More