Fine art connoisseur january february 2017

GR EAT COLLECTOR S | A RT IN CH A R LESTON | MR S. ROCK EFELLER'S FOLK A RT | FIGUR ES NOW

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EMERALD ELEGANCE

The Emerald Necklace by Jean-Pierre Cassigneul Uninchingly bold and sophisticated, this entrancing oil on canvas by Jean-Pierre Cassigneul is a classic example of his celebrated aesthetic.

His impressive oeuvre is beloved by collectors worldwide who remain transďŹ xed by his vibrant and dramatic scenes of elegant women at leisure. Signed “Cassigneul 88â€? (lower left). Canvas: 51â€?h x 381/4â€?w; Frame: 603/4â€?h x 473/4â€?w. #30-5277

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Backed by our unprecedented 125% Guarantee, we stand behind each and every piece.

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Alexandre Hogue (1898–1994), Moonlight, 1934, lithograph on paper (edition 44/50), 12 5/8 x 15 3/4 in., Gilcrease Collection, 1427.291, on view through May 14 at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum (gilcrease.org) in the exhibition Creating the Modern Southwest

Alexandre Hogue “always viewed himself as a radical, yet his passion stemmed from a deeply conservative idea: that art, culture, and nature should form a central force in the life of every human being.”

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

— Susie Kalil, author of Alexandre Hogue: An American Visionary (2010)

JANUARY/ F E B R U A R Y

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David William Terry

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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

Figurative Paintings and Sculptures

JOSE BORRELL ESCAPE | oil on canvas | 26” x 32”

JUAN COSSIO CRIMSON DREAMS | mixed media on panel | 67” x 43”

MARK YALE HARRIS CHAOS Bronze Sculpture | 22” x 10” x 10”

JUSTO REVILLA APPLE HARVEST oil on canvas | 31” x 25”

5650 Peachtree Parkway |

JAVIER ARIZABALO CONTEMPLATION | oil on canvas | 45” x 28”

FERNANDO PEDROSA REMEMBRANCE oil on canvas | 18” x 13”

PAIGE BRADLEY EXPANSION (THIRD LIFE) Bronze Sculpture | 18.50” x 21” x 9.50”

Atlanta | 770.609.8662 | w w w.ralexander f inear t.com

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PRESENTED BY PENINSULA SCHOOL OF ART, DOOR COUNTY, WI

Known for our dramatic sunsets over water, our outstanding diverse scenery, and for being one of the top three plein air festivals in the U.S. for both artists and collectors.

• 38 invited plein air masters from across the country • • Unparalled access to our featured artists • • Unique events for all ages • • A welcoming arts-centered community • • Relaxed, fun and lots of Midwestern hospitality • Complete schedule of events and tickets online.

PeninsulaSchoolofArt.org DoorCountyPleinAir.com

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A S S I S TA N T TO T H E C H A I R M A N

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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

Gianni Strino

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Frontispiece: Alexandre Hogue

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Publisher’s Letter

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Editor’s Note

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Auction: Franz Bergmann's The Tiger Hunt,

by David Masello

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Favorite: India Hicks on Salvador DalĂ­,

by David Masello

104

Off the Walls

130

Classic Moment: Linda Lucas Hardy

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VO L U M E 14 ,

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Discover the talents of Ulrich Gleiter, Lauren Mills, and Richard Oversmith.

By Peter Trippi

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By Cora Hollema

We survey 12 top-notch projects on offer across America this season.

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By Max Gillies

By Kelly Compton

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The flourishing of contemporary realism becomes even clearer as we highlight outstanding collectors living throughout the country. • • • • • • • • • •

Alan Brock Sharon & Mike Cole George Fraise Don B. Huntley Chuck McIntyre David & Virginia Mullins Bob & Judi Newman Jordan D. Schnitzer Bob & Sharman Wilson Lisa & Bill Wirthlin

By Thomas Connors

ON THE COVER DANIEL GERHARTZ (b. 1965), From the Garden (detail), 2012, oil on linen, 40 x 30 in. For the full image, please see page 89.

Fine Art Connoisseur is also available in a digital edition. Please visit fineartconnoisseur.com for details.

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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

JULIE CHAPMAN

“Homage to Muybridge” 24 X 32 Scratch Board

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PORTRAITS BY KATHERINE GALBRAITH “THE GUITAR PLAYER” 24x20” OIL ON CANVAS

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JoAnn Peralta Fine Artist

First U.S. Land Patent awarded, Dominguez Family, 1858 30x38 oil on linen canvas | by JoAnn Peralta Available at the Autry Museum of the American West “Masters of the American West Art Exhibition and Sale”, on Feb. 11, 2017 Manuel and Engracias Dominguez became U.S. citizens after America gained the California territory they were already living on.

Their ancestors were awarded a Land Grant when Spain had ownership of the territory. Then, when Mexico defeated Spain, the Land Grant was upheld by the Mexican government. After the war and U.S. occupation, the family legally filed for a land patent and after many years, were awarded the first U.S. Land Patent in 1858. The Dominguez Family flourished under American dominance. Their contributions greatly affected the California landscape and added to the success of their new country, the United States of America.

A video of the making of this painting is included with the purchase of this original oil painting.

TheAutry.org/Masters jperalta.com

H T IST JO HE M ORY AN I A N KIN N PE RA G: LTA

COC CIONS NRICH  US

W Tony Pro (b. 1973) The Publisher (B. Eric Rhoads) 2011, oil on linen, 20 x 16 in., private collection

Chairm Publisher bericrhoads@gmail.com 561.923.8481 facebook.com/eric.rhoads @ericrhoads

hen I was 23, I stopped by the home of my parents’ friends on an errand. In their foyer, several gold-framed historical paintings piqued my curiosity. Not knowing anything about high-quality fine art, I expressed interest and was invited in to view their other artworks.

Never before had I seen a home adorned with paintings that were all original. That pleasant experience led me to visit a small but good gallery nearby, where I was able to browse. I particularly admired a large British painting of a small girl standing before a huge Gothic cathedral. Being so young, I could not aff ff rd it, or anything else on offer. ff Yet that picture has haunted me ever since, and for decades I have wished I’d found a way to buy it then.

On occasion, throughout my life, certain paintings have spoken to me, and now I look back in regret for not buying all of them. On more than one occasion, I went back a few hours or days later to find they had been sold to someone else, but I can still picture them in my mind — the ones that got away.

A series of those experiences strengthened my resolve to someday be able to aff ff rd to collect paintings — original ones. I am fortunate to say that the dream came true. And to this day, I’m impressed by homes and offices filled with quality originals, not only because of the art itself, but also because it makes a statement about the owners’ vision. It’s not about having great wealth: I have met people on modest budgets who have worked hard to develop a good eye, assembling collections of younger artists who later became well-known.

I know schoolteachers, blue-collar workers, and small-business owners with handsome collections, just as I’ve met billionaires with cheap prints on their mansions’ walls. It’s not money that makes a great collection: it’s the forming of good taste through exposure to the best works in museums and top galleries, through attending lectures and visiting studios, through information gleaned from publications like this one, and through guidance from reputable gallerists and advisers.

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I am particularly inspired by the high quality being produced today by hundreds of younger artists, whose skill and vision rival the Old Masters’ because they have fully embraced the possibilities of realism. At the same time, I am worried; many of these artists are underpricing their works because not enough collectors are interested. They are making artworks that will hang in museums someday, yet right now they cannot find homes because we’re not developing educated consumers rapidly enough.

Thankfully, there are super-patrons — very special people who understand the opportunity this moment offers; ff their acquisitions not only grace their walls and demonstrate their refined taste, but also allow some of these artists to eat and pay rent. I applaud those who collect the acknowledged masters of today, and I send extra kudos to those seeking out emerging artists in order to ensure that this rebirth of realism does not disappear.

In this issue, we are proud to profile some of these special people and their collections.

As a reader of Fine Art Connoisseur, you clearly appreciate quality. But if you have not already started your own collection, I encourage you to do so, even if it means buying one small work at a time on a payment plan (which most galleries and artists are happy to arrange).

As you discover the wonder of living with original artworks, your home or office will take on a new character. I know a passionate art lover who has, so far, been able to aff ff rd just one good painting; it hangs near the entrance of his home to delight his visitors, and though his collection may ultimately grow, the pride he takes in that one piece — and the joy it brings him — underscore the transformative power of owning something special.

Almost every month, I hear from a reader who wants to become a collector but does not know where to start. I’m encouraged by their interest, and I happily point them in the right direction when time permits. In the grand scheme of things, this is an ecosystem of artists, collectors, galleries, museums, journalists, advisers, and other parties: when any one party loses interest, the whole system suffers.

That’s why I urge you to consider our shared responsibility to keep it healthy, and especially to encourage new collectors to succeed those who cannot collect any longer. I guarantee that a 30-year-old who buys some of the works illustrated in this issue will see them grow enormously in value within his or her lifetime.

But it’s not just about the money — great artworks are worth far more through the ways they enrich our lives.

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e-mail, and in person — have confirmed our belief that huge energy — not to mention cash — is being expended in support of the ever-growing number of talented realist artists working among us.

In preparing the profiles here, we learned that many of these collectors — sophisticated and well-connected as they are — are not accustomed to being in the spotlight. Knowing how much they value their privacy, we appreciate even more their willingness to speak with us, and we are looking forward to doing the same with a long list of additional collectors who have kindly begun to engage in conversation with us already.

As you will see, the collectors profiled in this issue are relishing their treasures today, but I have recently been reminded of art’s capacity

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to keep inspiring, long after the artist and original owner are gone. Burning up Broadway this season is the hit musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, with Josh Groban leading a talented cast. I actually saw this show in its OffBroadway form several years ago and have been glad to follow its evolving success.

Its plot is based on an episode within Leo Tolstoy’s massive novel War and Peace (1869), which chronicles the impact of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia through the lives of five aristocratic families. I was glad when the show’s director, Rachel Chavkin, declared proudly: “The first thing I do for any project is go to the picture collection at the New York Public Library.… You go up to the wonderful librarians and say, ‘I’m interested in Moscow in 1812. Give me a folder for comets, and … then give me some rock ’n’ roll and Gypsy folders.’”

Exactly! In case you didn’t know, the New York Public Library is America’s greatest walkin museum. Anyone can turn up and ask to see almost any work on paper in the collection — from Rembrandt drawings to tabloid tearsheets.

(These are kept in folders, often by subject rather than by artist.) More importantly, those historical images can — and do — inspire artists like Rachel Chavkin to create new art that speaks to our own time.

Though it is rooted in the 19th century, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 could only have been made now, and I encourage you to catch it. Knowing that its terrific sets, costumes, props, and staging owe much to artworks of the past will only enhance your pleasure.

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

TRIPPI PHOTO: FRANCIS HILLS

BRAING AMRIA’S GRA OORS

WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO

Franz Bergmann (1861–1936) c. 1910, cold-painted bronze, each 9 1/4 in. high Heritage Auctions’ Gentleman Collector Sale (Dallas), January 19, 2017 Estimate: $4,000–$6,000 for the pair

Vice President, Special Collections, Heritage Auctions

o matter how rich a Western gentleman might have been in the early 1900s, the idea of his actually mounting an elephant to hunt tigers was mostly fantasy. Illustrated books and world’s fairs depicted such exotic experiences and the native peoples who lived them, but the possibility of doing this yourself was truly remote. Instead, you could live vicariously by buying these “Vienna bronzes,� a genre named for the city where many leading foundries were located then. This pair depicts a successful hunt for tigers, with armed guides walking alongside the elephants, and it was made in an era when such expeditions were not considered ecologically exploitative. “There’s not anything fundamentally derogatory about these bronzes, but if you were to ask a bourgeois Austrian, British, or American gentleman around 1910, when these were cast, he would likely have seen himself as superior to the people represented here,� says Nick Dawes, vice president of special collections at Heritage Auctions, which is featuring the pair in its next Gentleman Collector Sale. “Does that mean these collectors were racist? No, but the entire Western world was racist in that respect during the era of colonialism. At the same time, these and other objects within what we now call Orientalism represented an homage to the people depicted. There was a fascination in Europe and America with the very different ways of life to be found in the Near and Middle East.�

Many a drawing room in that era’s ďŹ ner homes was decorated with objects like these — expertly articulated sculptures, in this case “cold-painted,â€? which means that many colors are applied after the bronze has been cast and cooled.

Dawes notes that most cold-painted bronzes show signs of chipping and wear, but the vibrancy of the bright hues in this pair is undiminished: look particularly at the men’s belts, the jaws of the slain tigers, and the nuances within their fur.

While Franz Bergmann (1861–1936) is credited as the maker of these bronzes, Dawes points out that Bergmann actually owned the Vienna foundry where these were made: he was not the sculptor: “That would have been some

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anonymous artisan, while another person, likely a woman, would have applied paint to the details.� Dawes surmises that Bergmann, whose foundry opened in 1900 and closed in 1930, likely attended the Paris and Turin world’s fairs of 1900 and 1902 respectively, where dioramas and even actual native people might have worn authentic costumes and evoked such hunts. “Bergmann was the best-known maker of such bronzes,� says Dawes, “but what’s unusual here is not only that they are a pair, but also their scale — much larger than most produced at the time.� He admits that museums are rarely interested in such pieces because they are more decorative than sculptural. “But there are a lot of individual collectors of Vienna bronzes in America, the Middle East, and throughout Europe. The fact is, everybody seems to like these.�

While the event depicted here is a thing of the past, there are still many collectors on an aesthetic hunt for artworks this ďŹ nely articulated.

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WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO

Founder of her namesake beauty and accessories company

Portrait of Lady Louis Mountbatten, 1939–40 SALVADOR DAL� (1904–1989) Oil on canvas, 25 x 20 1/2 in.

Private collection Photo: David Flint Wood

W

hen Edwina Mountbatten (1901–1960) stepped into a Paris hotel’s elevator in the late 1930s, her fellow passenger turned out to be the famous artist Salvador DalĂ­. As the lift brought them to their desired floor, DalĂ­ became captivated by this wealthy, glamorous, and much-photographed socialite. She was also much-discussed due to rumors about the affairs she conducted outside her marriage to Lord Louis Mountbatten, who later became the British Viceroy of India. “The family story is that DalĂ­ was transfixed by my grandmother’s tiny feet and that his very first memory of her was that detail,â€? says India Hicks. As a former model, second cousin to the Prince of Wales, and owner of her namesake brand of beauty products and accessories, she is nearly as recognizable as her late grandmother once was (minus the scandals). “DalĂ­ was fascinating to my grandmother, and he was fascinated by her. Essentially, my grandmother commissioned the portrait and paid for it, though DalĂ­ approached her with the idea.â€?

The resulting oil-on-canvas portrait of Edwina (her feet are not shown, though the orb of a bare shoulder is) resides in the English home of India’s mother, Lady Pamela Hicks. “I grew up with that picture, seeing it every day of my life in my mother’s bedroom,� says India, “and as a child I was also very frightened by it.�

Indeed, this work is highly characteristic of Dalí’s classic Surrealist works, in which ordinary objects assume nightmarish, often anthropomorphic, forms — think of his melting watches and machines birthing animals. Look closely enough at the spectacles

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in the background and they read as the eyes of a lion. Lady Edwina’s curly black hair becomes a Medusa-like nest of writhing snakes. Her lovely face, with its piercing blue eyes, has a deathly pallor, staring out at us from a landscape that appears primordial. “My mother says that it’s a very good likeness, that DalĂ­ captured her clearly,â€? says Hicks, who was not born by the time her grandmother died in 1960.

Indeed, that ability to capture something real, but rendered in an unreal way, was one of Dalí’s greatest talents. Here we see the face and neck of a decidedly attractive woman residing in an otherworldly setting — though Hicks and her mother think she likely posed in Brook House, the grand London mansion Edwina inherited from her father. (Hicks notes that it was the city’s first private residence with an elevator — though not the one where the painter and sitter met.) Though Edwina sat for the portrait around 1939, it is signed and dated 1940. (The Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation insists on dating it to 1939.)

Whenever Hicks, who lives in the Bahamas with her family, visits her mother in England, she gazes at this portrait of her grandmother, at once disturbing and familiar. The work has always remained in the family and has never been loaned. “I think it’s a perfect example of DalĂ­ at his best,â€? says Hicks. “It’s so deeply imaginative. The colors are incredibly beautiful. I’m fascinated by DalĂ­,â€? she says, “but I don’t think I’d invest in one of his works.â€?

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Master the figure.

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Order today at StreamlineArtVideo.com or call 561.655.8778 SECRETS OF CLASSICAL PAINTING WITH JULIETTE ARISTIDES™ ©/TM STREAMLINE PUBLISHING, INC. 2015. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HOME USE LICENSE ONLY: DO NOT COPY, DISTRIBUTE, RENT, OR PERFORM. FOR LICENSING INFORMATION, CONTACT 561-655-8778 OR LICENSING@STREAMLINEPUBLISHING.COM.

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ja n ua ry 13 –15 , 2 01 7 • washingtonwintershow.org 40+ outstanding dealers • guided walks & dealer talks • special events

friday lecture a conversation with lela rose book signing to follow

loan exhibit • american premiere coco chanel: a new portrait by marion pike, paris 1967–1971

Mary Garrish Merritt Island, Flor

Rising to the Heavens 48 x 48 in., oil on linen marygarrish@aol.com MaryGarrishFineArt.com 321.698.4431 JM Stringer Gallery, Vero Beach, Florida Stellers Gallery, Jacksonville, Florida Reinert Fine Art, Charleston, South Carolina

Jen Starwalt Brevard, North Carolina

He Who Guards the Flock 30 x 24 in., soft pastel on sanded paper info@jenstarwalt.com JenStarwalt.com RedWolf Gallery, Brevard, North Carolina Gallery43, Roswell, Georgia Four Corners Gallery at the Tucson Desert Art Museum, Tucson, Arizona

Stefan Savides Klamath Falls, Oregon

Garden Warrior Revisited 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 23 1/2 in., bronze stefan@savidessculpture.com SavidesSculpture.com 541.885.2912 Collectors Covey, Dallas, Texas Broadmoor Gallery, Colorado Springs, Colorado Dick Idol Signature Gallery, Whitefish, Montana

Patricia A. Griffin Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania

Wing Man 40 x 30 in., oil on linen patricia@patriciaagriffin.com PatriciaAGriffin.com 570.656.2335 Brickworks, Atlanta, Georgia Goldenstein, Sedona, Arizona Going to the Sun, Whitefish, Montana RARE, Jackson, Wyoming

Ken Wallin St. Simons, Georgia

Elephant and Butterflies 40 x 40 in., oil on canvas kendoesart@aol.com WallinGallery.com 912.222.6073 Redbird Gallery, Santa Rosa Beach, Florida JJ Gillespie Gallery, McMurray, Pennsylvania Parker Gallery, Saint Simons, Georgia Fine Art at Baxters, New Bern, North Carolina

MUSEUMALLEY Strictly speaking, a museum is a place dedicated to the muses — the nine (female) divinities of the arts, history, science, and literature who were revered by the ancient Greeks. Though most of us don’t worship those goddesses anymore, the subjects they symbolized live on and are still brought to life daily in the vast array of museums found all over the world. Like so many good things, museums emerged during the Italian Renaissance, specifically in 1471, when Pope Sixtus IV opened the Capitoline Museums in Rome to show off the ancient sculptures he owned. His successor Julius II launched what we know as the Vatican Museums in 1506, but it must be noted that only invited guests — usually of the higher and artistic classes — could enter such venues until the Enlightenment of the late 18th century.

That’s when new institutions such as London’s British Museum (opened 1759), Florence’s Uffizi Gallery (1769), and Paris’s Louvre (1793) began permitting less privileged people to come have a look.

Chartered by the U.S. Congress in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution inherited that democratic notion thanks largely to its benefactor, James Smithson (1765–1829), a British scientist who never actually visited America. Having grown up in Washington, D.C., I was fortunate to visit the Smithsonian and the capital’s other great museums from a very young age. They have always felt like places to relax and learn in safe, comfortable settings;

the exhibits are high in quality and there is no pressure to buy anything, except perhaps a snack or souvenir.

What no one could have predicted during my boyhood, however, was how popular museums would become; the American Alliance of Museums reports that 850 million visits now occur annually. That statistic is astonishing, yet it does not capture how central museums have become in our civic life; they are no longer just places to learn, but also places to gather, celebrate, mourn, and have fun. That accessibility is key: the more often we bring our kids to museums to — say — attend a festival, the more likely they are to return as adults to enjoy the collections and exhibitions inside. And speaking of collections, museums deserve enormous credit for working hard to catalogue and post their collections online; they hold these treasures on behalf of the public, and now we have an ever-clearer idea of what they are.

This section of Fine Art Connoisseur — our first ever devoted to museums, and from now on an annual affair — highlights the tremendous quality and public-spiritedness of art museums across North America. We thank our museum colleagues for all they do on the public’s behalf, and we wish them much continued success. Finally, if you know of a museum that should be included in the future, please let us know. We are always grateful for your feedback.

BRUCE MUSEUM

Greenwich, Connecticut

Alfred Sisley (1839–1899): Impressionist Master

Alfred Sisley (French, 1839–1899) Une Cour a Chaville, 1879 Oil on canvas Private Collection

January 21–May 21, 2017 The exhibition was organized by the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut and Culturespaces, France.

ALFRED SISLEY (1839-1899): IMPRESSIONIST MASTER Opening January 21

STREET SMART: PHOTOGRAPHS OF NEW YORK CITY, 1945–1980 Opening February 18

MORNING ART LECTURE ON IMPRESSIONISM February 13, 10:00–11:00 a.m.

The ďŹ rst retrospective of this major Impressionist in the United States: 50 paintings from private collections and major museums worldwide.

Major works by photographers like Winogrand provide a glimpse of post-war New York and street-savvy New Yorkers.

By Alison Hokanson (Assistant Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art) will speak about the works by Sisley in the Met.

EVENING ART LECTURE: REFLECTIONS ON MONET’S WATER LILIES Wednesday, January 25, 6:00–8:00 p.m.

MORNING ART LECTURE ON IMPRESSIONISM February 27, 10:00–11:00 a.m.

By Dr. Paul Hayes Tucker, University of Massachusetts, examining intricacies of these remarkable works and their many levels of meaning.

By Laura Dickey Corey (Institute Fine Arts, NYU) will speak about Mary Cassatt’s ties to the United States in her art and life.

TOWARDS ABSTRACTION, 1940-1985: BRETT WESTON PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE BRUCE MUSEUM COLLECTION Until February 9 Brett Weston was obsessed with reality captured by long telephoto lenses, diminishing the depth of the ďŹ eld, attening the image.

EVENING ART LECTURE Thursday February 2, 6:00–8:00 p.m.

CANVAS AND CAST: HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE BRUCE MUSEUM’S ART COLLECTION Opening February 11 A stunning range of paintings and sculptures created by European and American artists from the 16th to the 20th centuries.

By Dr. Erica E. Hirshler, Croll Senior Curator of American Paintings, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

NATIONAL COWBOY & WESTERN HERITAGE MUSEUM Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Monday – Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Sunday, Noon – 5:00 p.m.

Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day

1700 Northeast 63rd Street Oklahoma City, OK (405) 478-2250 www.nationalcowboymuseum.org Museum Partners Devon Energy Corp.

E.L. & Thelma Gaylord Foundation

THE ARTISTRY OF THE WESTERN PAPERBACK, February 3–May 14, 2017 Come see 1940s and 1950s dynamic and engaging paperback book covers for Western tales of cowboys, villains, duels, and danger.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE AMERICAN WEST February 3–May 14, 2017 Candid, intimate, and raw, these photographs by John R. Hamilton showcase private access to the greatest movie stars, musicians, and directors of all time.

A YARD OF TURKEY RED: THE WESTERN BANDANNA February 3–May 14, 2017 A rare collection of period bandannas once used by young horsemen on the range and later popularized in Western ďŹ ction.

PRIX DE WEST June 8–10, 2017

THE ART OF JEROME TIGER August 25, 2017–January 7, 2018

A prestigious invitational art exhibition of more than 300 paintings and sculptures by the ďŹ nest Western artists in the nation.

August 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of celebrated Oklahoma artist Jerome Tiger’s passing (1941 – 1967).

WE THE PEOPLE: A PORTRAIT OF EARLY OKLAHOMA August 19–October 22, 2017 A selection of Henry M. Wantland’s 19th-century photography from the Museum’s Dickinson Research Center’s Robert E. Cunningham Oklahoma History Collection.

COWBOY CROSSINGS OPENING WEEKEND October 5–7, 2017 Featuring: Cowboy Artists of America 52nd Annual Sale & Exhibition and Traditional Cowboy Arts Association 19th Annual Exhibition & Sale.

SMALL WORKS, GREAT WONDERS November 10, 2017 Featuring a fusion of traditional and contemporary sculptures and paintings at aordable prices.

THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

DESTINATION 2017: THE MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS

Come visit a world-class Museum Final drawing for the wall painting at the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York: The Triumph of Music, (detail) 1966. Private collection. © SODRAC & ADAGP 2016, Chagall®. © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris

CHAGALL: COLOUR AND MUSIC January 28–June 11, 2017 This major exhibition features 400 works: paintings, sculptures, maquettes, gouaches, stained glass windows, photographs, films, costumes and puppets, as well as the monumental decorations Chagall created for the Jewish Chamber Theatre, which are being exhibited in Canada for the first time.

An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Initiated by the Philharmonie de Paris–Musée de la musique and La Piscine–Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, Roubaix, with the support of the Chagall Estate.

LOVE IS LOVE BY JEAN PAUL GAULTIER May 27–October 9, 2017 As a fitting conclusion to the phenomenal world tour by The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk, the MMFA is wrapping it up in style, just like Gaultier would do in a fashion show, with the final bouquet:

wedding gowns. Featuring some thirty creations – several of which are being displayed for the first time – this celebration of marriage brings together straight, gay, intercultural and interracial unions to celebrate love and diversity.

An exhibition produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Maison Jean Paul Gaultier.

REVOLUTION: “YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION” June 17–October 9, 2017 This immersive exhibition explores the ideals of the late 1960s as expressed in music, film, fashion and design, as well as through activism. It explores the context for the transformations in Western society, driven by young people with a deep desire for change and freedom.

An exhibition organized by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

ONCE UPON A TIME... THE WESTERN: A NEW FRONTIER IN ART AND FILM October 14, 2017–January 28, 2018

The first exhibition to consider the Western and its attendant myths in the context of painting, photography, literature and film from the mid-1800s to the present, in the United States and in Canada. It establishes a dialogue between film and the fine arts through 450 paintings, sculptures, installations, photos and numerous film excerpts.

An exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Denver Art Museum.

THE NEW MICHAL AND RENATA HORNSTEIN PAVILION FOR PEACE This fifth building on the Museum campus has made possible the major reinstallation over four floors of some 750 works from the MMFA collection of international fine arts, running from Old Masters to contemporary art. Two floors of the new pavilion house the new Michel de la Chenelière International Atelier for Education and Art Therapy, the largest educational complex in an art museum in North America.

HOCKADAY MUSEUM OF ART

“Sunrise at Saint Mary” by Wanda Mumm

Kalispell, Montana

Detail from “Pack Night” by Julie Jeppsen

Artistic Gateway to Glacier National Park • 302 Second Avenue East • Kalispell, Montana 59901 • 406.755.5268 hockadaymuseum.org • facebook.com/hockadaymuseum • twitter: @hockadaymuseum

TEN DAYS January 26–February 18, 2017

MANEL ALVAREZ: STEP BY STEP June 8–August 5, 2017

Richie Carter and Kenneth Yarus — paintings inspired by 10 days in the Bob Marshall Artist Wilderness Connection Program.

Renowned artist Alvarez will present a masterful sculpture exhibition featuring selected past works and newly created, Northwest Montana-inspired sculptures.

FLATHEAD ON CANVAS: COUNTRYSIDE CHARM TO CITY SPLENDOR February 23–April 29, 2017

GLACIER GALS June 29–September 9, 2017

Plein air painters B. Rex Stewart and Jeff Troupe depict the uniqueness of Montana’s Flathead Valley through landscapes and city views.

Glacier National Park’s living legacies — women artists who painted the park for over 50 years, inspiring the next generation.

WILD IMPRESSIONS: WANDA MUMM April 27–June 24, 2017

2017 A TIMELESS LEGACY: WOMEN ARTISTS OF GLACIER NATIONAL PARK August 15–September 23, 2017

Mumm highlights her artistic process concentrating on light in her paintings from her time in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Hockaday’s third year of critically acclaimed women artists painting Glacier’s landscapes, wildlife, and history.

Art Event and Sale: August 12.

THE FALCON’S EYE: NATURE PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL SAMPLE September 14–November 4, 2017 Sample captured the essence of Western wildlife and geography through his own adventurous, yet quiet, nature.

Yellowstone Art Museum/MAGDA exhibit.

PLEIN AIR PAINT OUT FALL 2017 October 3–December 2, 2017 Thirty juried artists painting the autumn colors in Flathead and Swan Valleys and Glacier National Park. Sale Event: September 30.

®

The 20th annual Masters of the American West Art Exhibition and Sale returns Saturday, February 11, through Sunday, March 26, 2017 to the Autry Museum in Los Angeles.

The country’s premier Western art show.

AUTRY MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN WEST 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462 TheAutry.org/Masters | Event Contact 323.495.4331

IMAGE: Terri Kelly Moyers, Sunlight and Silk (detail), oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

RICHARD OVERSMITH (b. 1971) paints vibrant, impressionistic landscapes during his travels across the United States, and also in far-ung destinations such as Italy, Cornwall, Bermuda, and Belize.

When his wife and daughter wanted to become more uent in French, the entire family spent six months in Brittany, where Oversmith made hundreds of sparkling seaside scenes.

Although he usually makes small compositional sketches before he starts a landscape painting outdoors, Oversmith must respond to changing conditions of light and weather on a minute-by-minute basis.

He paints outdoors most of the year and, unlike most plein-airists, actually prefers autumn and winter, when the foliage is not so lush and visually overwhelming. Though he occasionally paints outside on canvases as large as 36 x 48 inches, Oversmith is more likely to develop them back in the studio, working from his own oil sketches and reference photographs. Using his studio’s north-facing window, he has also earned a reputation for luminous still lifes, usually of owers.

Oversmith came to plein air painting in an unusual way. While earning his B.F.A. from Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he spent a summer at London’s Royal College of Art, and it was there that he learned more about the long, proud heritage of painting outdoors. Long committed to painting alla prima (wet-on-wet), he has turned for inspiration to such historic masters as Nicolai Fechin, Isaak Levitan, Willard Metcalf, Claude Monet, John Singer Sargent, Joaquín Sorolla, Tom Thomson, and Nikolai Timkov, and also to contemporary ones like T. Allen

Lawson. Toward the beginning of his career, he received wise counsel from his fellow Michigander Ken Cadwallader, a former student of Richard Schmid.

Today Oversmith thrives in Asheville, in western North Carolina. Having explored much of the U.S. in search of a place to settle, he and his wife landed here thanks to its natural beauty, four-season climate, quality of life, and abundance of kindred spirits working in the arts and crafts.

Not surprisingly, three galleries represent Oversmith in North Carolina: Grand Bohemian Gallery (Asheville), City Art Gallery (Greenville), and The Art Cellar (Banner Elk). He is also represented by Virginia’s Warm Springs Gallery, and in Vero Beach, Florida, by J. M. Stringer Gallery of Fine Art, which is mounting Oversmith’s next two-person show this winter (February 16–March 11).

RICHARD OVERSMITH (b. 1971), Beach Breeze, 2016, oil on linen, 12 x 12 in., on view at J. M. Stringer Gallery of Fine Art, Vero Beach, FL (February 16–March 11)

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LAUREN MILLS (b. 1957), Dryad, 2011, bronze, 17 x 14 x 16 in., Marshall

Gallery

of

Fine

Art

(Scottsdale) and White Square Fine Books & Art (Easthampton, MA)

LAUREN MILLS (b. 1957) ) expresses her creativity in many ways, most visibly as a writer and illustrator of children’s books and novels, but also as a sculptor, painter, and draftsman. In all of these forms, she seeks to make something “beautiful, to elicit compassion, or to lift the spirit.”

Mills grew up drawing in Connecticut, Oregon, and Minnesota, then earned her B.F.A. in drawing and painting from the University of California at Santa Barbara. Book illustration intrigued her, so she took an M.A. in that specialty at San Jose State University, where she met her husband, the illustrator Dennis Nolan. They have collaborated on several projects, most notably their daughter Genevieve, and now live in western Massachusetts. When the girl was born, Mills was enjoying success painting small, detailed illustrations for fairy tales, but Genevieve’s arrival inspired her to begin sculpting doll heads in oven-baked clay. Her husband suggested she study sculpture at Connecticut’s Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts, where she proceeded to spend two years doing so with its founder, Elizabeth Gordon Chandler, and with Don Gale.

Alas, Mills had many book contracts to fulfill, but she resumed sculpting several years later, again at Lyme with Don Gale and Pablo Eduardo. Inspired by traditional atelier methods, she next studied drawing and painting at New York City’s Grand Central Atelier and California’s Bay Area Classical Art Atelier, as well as egg tempera painting in both Europe and the U.S.

Aesthetically, Mills has long admired 19th-century Romantic art, especially the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists for their focus on the mysterious, interconnecting wonders of nature, myth, and legend. The ethereal, foggy visions of the English book illustrator Arthur Rackham (1867–1939) particularly spring to mind while admiring her whimsical, delicately drawn fairies and other figures.

Not surprisingly, the drawings that Mills makes as separate works of art — in graphite or charcoal — are superb, and she has also mastered the sculpting of life-size portrait heads, be they idealized women, wrinkled elderly people, or even President Barack Obama. Returning to her roots in sculpture, she is now finishing a life-size sleeping infant.

In the idyllic composition illustrated here, Mills has depicted a “young naked tree spirit lamenting the passing of her protective home, the oak.

I used the interwoven roots of the tree to visually echo her crossed legs, making her one with the tree.... portraying the interconnectedness and oneness of living beings.”

Mills is represented by Chemers Gallery (Tustin, CA), which focuses on her two-dimensional artworks; the Charleston and Birmingham (Alabama) locations of Grand Bohemian Gallery; Scottsdale’s Marshall Gallery of Fine Art; and White Square Fine Books & Art (Easthampton, MA).

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ULRICH GLEITER (b. 1977) is a citizen of the world. Born in Saarbrücken, Germany, he pursued his undergraduate studies at Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he learned to paint with the bold, colorful strokes handed down from the early 20th-century German expressionists. Students there prioritized their individuality — no one but you could have made this picture, they were told.

Gleiter then absorbed a different view of artistry during his exchange year at Moscow’s Surikov Institute, followed by six more years at the Repin Institute in St. Petersburg. Russian training emphasizes mastery of the process of drawing and painting the nude — not as precisely as in U.S. ateliers, but with more emphasis on how relative value is established by the play of light and shadow. Despite the international renown of their country’s naturalist landscapists, Russian professors do not actually teach plein air painting, instead encouraging students to make a picture outdoors every day if possible. Gleiter was glad to do so, relying heavily on such historical forerunners as Isaak Levitan.

Today Gleiter divides time between Germany, Russia, and the United States, where he has become much admired among plein-airists in such scenic places as Colorado, California, and Wyoming. Wherever he goes, Gleiter paints in all kinds of weather, with a special fondness for woodlands and meadows. The painting illustrated here was made last summer in Russia’s Caucasus mountains, though he could

just as readily have made it in the Republic of Georgia, Greece, Italy, or even Crimea, with its Mediterranean climate. In our era of diplomatic tensions, when Crimea and Russia appear regularly in the headlines, Gleiter feels a renewed appreciation for nature’s timelessness — for its inspiring capacity to rise above the ins-and-outs of man-made problems. Today, he says, “I often think about the history of an area where I am painting, about how many troubles and beautiful things may have happened there. Most importantly, I am humbled to observe how natural forces never stop moving.”

Gleiter turns his searching eye not only to wilderness, but also to the banalities of urban life — to parked cars, the glinting sprawl of an automobile dealer’s lot, retail stores, and even cargo ships. There, too — as in his portraits, nudes, and still lifes — he manages to find abstracted beauty and emotional significance in the interactions of light, color, and air.

Gleiter is represented by Gallery 1261 in Denver, Charleston’s Hagan Fine Art Gallery & Studio, and Berlin’s Gallery LEO.COPPI. January will mark his sixth participation in Denver’s annual Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale (see page 67). In February, his works will be presented at Germany’s artKarlsruhe fair on the stand of Gallery LEO. COPPI. In March, he will have a solo exhibition at the Russian Academy of Arts (St. Petersburg), early next summer a solo show at Gallery LEO.COPPI, and then a two-person show at Gallery 1261.

ULRICH GLEITER (b. 1977), Apricot Orchard, 2016, oil on linen, 20 x 24 in., on view at the 2017 Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale, Denver

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BY CORA HOLLEMA

H I S T O R I C M A S T E R S

CAR WIINK:

MAGICA RAIS n the early 1920s, when painting untethered itself from academic tradition, the young Dutch artist Carel Willink (1900–1983) became a fervent devotee of the new ways, producing his own abstract paintings and collages. From 1928, however, he felt a growing attraction to figuration and Old Master techniques. During the 1930s, this

Willink remains of interest today not only impulse corresponded well enough to the international taste for surrealism, but after the Sec- for his fascinating art, but also because he was ond World War Willink’s distinctive brand of so at odds with his contemporaries that he felt hyper-realism went completely against the grain obliged to explain himself in words. In 1950 of the prevailing fashion for abstraction and then conceptualism. After languishing largely in obscurity for decades, he enjoyed a surprising Late Visitors, Pompeii, 1931, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 56 in., burst of popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam hailed as a leading exponent of “magical realism.”

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(LEFT) The Rose Garden, 1928, oil on canvas, 33 1/2 x 28 1/4 in., Museum MORE, Gorssel (BELOW) Self-Portrait as St. John the Baptist, 1937–38, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 26 3/4 in., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

he published an eloquent pamphlet setting out his position as a painter.

Its ideas are extremely relevant now, when realist art and historic techniques are enjoying a kind of renaissance — perhaps more so in the United States than in Europe.

In his pamphlet, Painting at a Critical Junction1, Willink outlined his development against the background of art history and his own era, wielding his erudition to mock the abstractionists lionized after the war.

“In the world of painting,” he wrote, “professional knowledge and above all professional skill are reviled. It is here that we see most clearly the emerging shape of what is called ‘liberation’ and ‘a new beginning,’ but what I would venture to call ‘dissolution.’”2 Not surprisingly, this pamphlet triggered a lively debate. One of Willink’s kindred spirits, the writer Willem Frederik Hermans (1921–1995), who was known for scathing attacks on the establishment, observed in 1951: “Anyone who dares to criticize modern painting finds himself instantly lumped with fascists, newspaper diarists and grocers as someone whose views are irrelevant, who is of less account than a foul odor.”3 Willink generally expressed himself in more nuanced terms. In 1931 he had contributed an essay to Palette: A Book Dedicated to Present-Day Dutch Painting, compiled by the painter Paul Citroen (1896–1983).4 He reflected on his own recent shift from abstraction to realism: “What do I really have to say? I had not given the matter much serious thought up to then.”5 Trying to define his own position, he named the Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) as one of the artists with whom he felt affinity. (This can be seen in Willink’s Late Visitors, Pompeii of 1931, illustrated here.) He also admired, with some embarrassment, such Old Masters as Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Leonardo da Vinci. “I feel a sense of guilt for having participated in a revolution, within the limits of my abilities, in spite of belonging to a country in which every postrevolutionary reflection is all too easily accepted as clear evidence that in reality nothing will change. An Amsterdam painter once said to me: ‘All that abstract and impressionist stuff, I’m not going to sully my paintbrushes with it.’ But to anyone whose body was born in Holland and F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

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Composition: Closed, 1922, collage, 10 3/4 x 13 in., Centraal Museum, Utrecht

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(LEFT) Double Portrait of Women [Wilma Willink and the American dancer Estella Reed], 1937, oil on canvas, 55 x 39 1/4 in., Museum MORE, Gorssel

(BELOW) Simeon

the Stylite, 1939, oil on canvas, 22 1/2 x 29 1/2 in., Gemeentemuseum, The Hague

whose spirit was born in Germany, France or Italy (maybe all at once), certainty of that kind provides little comfort.”6 The debate never truly abated. Willink continued to speak out with some regularity against the modernist Zeitgeist. In 1961 he wrote an article to accompany his exhibition at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. There his paintings were not dismissed, yet they were clearly out of step: “Modern art criticism,” he wrote, “does not accept any art other than the non-figurative. And since the museum directors and influential critics (and naturally the art trade) have accepted this opinion as dogma, the young artist has to choose between following the prescribed path or resigning himself to voluntary poverty, official indifference and oblivion.”7 In 1975 Willink contributed to a publication about eight realist painters, including himself. At that “postmodern” moment, he could discern the co-existence of several accepted “styles, or perhaps we should say fashions, within visual art. These recognized forms include Pop Art, zero art, anti-art, abstract art, new figurative art, neo-realism, superrealism or hyperrealism, serial art, and so on.” Indeed, realism had recently begun its comeback, but Willink wondered: “Does this miraculous reversal give me a feeling of satisfaction of having been proved right? Has painting been placed on firm foundations again?”

Essentially, the answer was no: “In our times, an ‘ism’ scarcely survives for a generation, and it is generally sustained by a single great figure.... We have now reached the stage at which a painter may find people looking at him with some concern if he adheres to a single style throughout his life.”8 And that was precisely what Willink had been doing since 1928: “[then] I made my first, which we should call now hyper-realist, The Rose Garden” (illustrated here). He had previously experimented with various “isms” before reaching a clear sense of the style that suited him. “But those years of experimenting really taught me something: about arrangement. I added realistic elements to other realistic elements, which earned me the label of ‘magical realist.’ Why are people so eager to label a painter? Perhaps it comes from the need to create order, now that art is being created in so many bewildering ways.”9 In the 1930s, when he visited the Rijksmuseum often, Willink created several seminude self-portraits. (Illustrated here is one of them, showing the artist as St. John the Bap-

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Camel in the Park at Versailles, 1956, oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 33 1/2 in., Museum MORE, Gorssel

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tist.) He recalled creating these pictures during “a kind of urge to see how I measured up.

I wanted to know if I was capable of painting flesh in the same way as those seventeenthcentury artists.... When I thought I had mastered it, I went on to something else…”10 By 1981, when some kinds of realism had been further restored to respectability, the time was right for a reprint of Willink’s 1950 pamphlet. Once again, it hit its target. Aged 81, he wrote a new epilogue for it: “Everything changes and comes round again. I’ve been lucky enough to grow old and to see my work come back into appreciation. So I might cry: ‘What an amazing thing to see!’ but I won’t, since I’ve always believed in my work.”11

Willink started drawing at an early age.

His father was a successful car dealer, and also a keen amateur painter who brought his son along to art galleries. In 1914, when Carel was 14, they visited an exhibition featuring Picabia, Chagall, Archipenko, Van Dongen, Kandinsky, and Rivera: “The shock it gave me to see these marvelous paintings was a revelation … and planted the seed in me of wanting to make things that could produce a similar shock, in

myself and in viewers.”12 A few years later, a Cézanne exhibition took his breath away: “Whereas my father had laughed heartily at the cubists, along with most of the visitors, thinking it all highly entertaining, these paintings made him really angry … and he turned his fury on me too.”13 Carel went to university, where he studied medicine briefly before switching to architecture, producing modernist paintings in his free time. Two years into his studies, he changed his mind again. He wrote his parents: “I’m going to be a painter, not an architect, and now I’m asking you if you would be willing to continue to support me for a few more years in this occupation…. You know my strange view of life, life is truly of little value to me, I would feel quite unperturbed about bidding it farewell.”14 Carel’s shocked parents agreed, but as a professed modernist, he refused to study at Amsterdam’s Academy of Art. He would have preferred Paris, but since the economic malaise in Germany had left his father with a surplus of German currency, Carel was persuaded to go to Berlin instead. From 1920 he attended classes there at a free international art school, painted abstractions, experimented with collage, visited avant-garde exhibitions, and encountered J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

Towards the Future, 1965, oil on canvas, 54 3/4 x 70 in., Museum MORE, Gorssel

such innovators as Kandinsky, Chagall, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Klee, and the Dadaists. Berlin was then not only a center of creativity, but also a vortex of economic crisis, unemployment, and threats of war. This atmosphere of uncertainty later became the key characteristic of Willink’s art.

In 1924 he returned to Amsterdam, having persuaded his father, with some difficulty, to underwrite the transportation of his cuttingedge paintings home from Berlin. (An example from 1922, Compostion: Closed, appears here.)

An exhibition of them in Amsterdam met with a lukewarm reception, but over the next few years, Willink remained active in international modernist circles. In 1924 he met the Dutch writer and critic Eddy du Perron (1899–1940) in Antwerp; together they published absurdist poetry and abstract paintings in avant-garde journals, including one as far away as Belgrade.

Yet Du Perron was soon put off by the dogmatic approach of the new school, which rejected all writings not sufficiently “modern” and all 2 0 1 7

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1970s. In 1973 a large retrospective appeared at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, when he was 73. Then came the Stedelijk exhibition in 1980, so popular that it had to be extended. The tide crested in 1980–81 with the massive exhibition of inter-war realism from Europe and America, shown at Paris’s Centre Pompidou under the title Les Realismes 1919–1939: Between Revolution and Reaction. To his delight, Willink was represented there with five paintings.17 He died not long afterward, in 1983, celebrated as a leading exponent of “magical realism.” Willink himself preferred “fantastic realism,” if one had to label his art at all. In the end, he was glad he had listened to his comrade Eddy du Perron, who decisively pushed him toward realism in the late 1920s: “Willink ... why add all those artificial attributes? Just paint what you see, won’t you? That will be quite crazy enough.”18 Cora Hollema holds a master’s degree in sociology, specializing in the social history of art, and has curated numerous exhibitions, including a Carel Willink show at Zeist Castle (1988). She works as a freelance writer, and her article on the Dutch portraitist Thérèse Schwartze appeared in the February 2016 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. She thanks Beverley Jackson for translating this article from Dutch into English.

All images © Sylvia Willink-Quiël Endnotes 1.

Carel Willink, De schilderkunst in een kritiek stadium, Amsterdam, 1950, republished 1981.

2.

Op. cit. note 1, 14.

3.

Ibid.

4.

Citroen, Paul, Palet: een boek gewijd aan de Hedendaagsche Nederlandse Schilderkunst, Amsterdam 1931.

5.

Op. cit. note 4, 140–143.

6.

Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Mededelingen nos. 23/24,

7.

De Telegraaf daily newspaper, 22 April 1961.

8.

Redeker, Hans et al.; 8 Realisten, Haarlem 1975, 21–24.

9.

Op. cit. note 8, 21–24.

September 1978, 14.

peerless technique ... but I was absolutely sure that I myself would paint very differently.” “My Portrait of Her Majesty Queen Juliana, 1976, oil on canvas, ambition to make paintings that were technically 19 3/4 x 15 3/4 in., Royal Collection Huis ten Bosch, The finished to such a degree of perfection that that Hague they would last a very long time was born from a highly pessimistic self-awareness … They were paintings insufficiently “abstract.” Willink’s the only real objects amid all the uncertainties.”16 This would become Willink’s central faith also wavered, so he gradually introduced realistic elements. “I resolutely jettisoned the creed, applicable to much of his oeuvre. An whole kit and caboodle of constructivist ele- ominous mood of alienation clings to his landments and in 1927 I made a portrait of a young scapes and cityscapes, where humans and woman sitting on a stone ledge. The pleasure animals frequently look out of place. Some with which I painted fur, lace, stone and so on works are devoid of life altogether: ruins and … made me suspicious. I was still too caught up damaged sculptures beneath menacing skies in all sorts of art theories to be able to devote banish all hope. Even Willink’s commissioned portraits often hint at impending disillusionmyself fully to reality.”15 At this point, Willink’s obvious lack of ment, largely through their dramatic, cloudy craftsmanship became an urgent problem: he skies — one of his signature motifs. had never been trained to paint properly. From 1927 through 1930, therefore, he embarked on

Willink’s career was not easy and he was a self-study program involving textbooks and museum visits: “I envied [the Old Masters] their elderly when he finally achieved success in the F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

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10. Op. cit. note 6, 24.

11.

Op. cit. note 1, 99.

12. Op. cit. note 1, 41.

13. Op. cit. note 1, 42.

14. Sylvia Willink and Vincent Vlasblom (eds), Een eeuw Willink (1900–1983), Unique International NV, 2000, 22.

15. Op. cit. note 1, 47.

16. Op. cit. note 1, 51.

17.

Op. cit. note 1, 97.

18. Op. cit. note 1, 94.

BY THOMAS CONNORS

H I D D E N C O L L E C T I O N

A ROAD LSS RAVLD: H ROBBINS COLLCION

The

acquisitive impulse is a strange thing — for those who don’t possess it. Even among those who do, the way some folks go about amassing material can be as curious as serious collecting is to people who prefer downsizing. While there are innumerable things to collect and countless ways to create a collection, Sam and Sheila Robbins stand if not alone, then surely among the few, when it comes to the singularity of their passionate pursuit.

Longtime devotees of 19th- and early 20thcentury New England art, particularly images produced by painters in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Robbins spent six decades poking through attics and cellars (and the occasional commercial gallery) to acquire approximately 1,000 works, which they have promised to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts. Renowned for its Asian export and maritime holdings, the museum has in recent years worked to enhance its stake in American fine art, while mounting such popular exhibitions as American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals (with the North Carolina Museum of Art).

“The American art collection here is largely portraits, and while we had a few landscapes and J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

still lifes, there was no real effort to build it until after the success of Painting Summer in New England, which was organized by independent curator Trevor Fairbrother,” explains Dean Lahikainen, the museum’s curator of American decorative art. That 2006 exhibition contained works by an array of artists, from Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent to Stuart Davis and Alex Katz. “In the last few years we have revisited our collecting goals and assessed our opportunities,” says Lahikainen, whose portfolio included American fine art when he first met the Robbins in 2010. “Obviously we can never rival the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. But when it comes to presenting regional artists and others who passed through New England, the Robbins collection helps us define that mission.”

Sam and Sheila Robbins reside in suburban Boston, in a home with a decidedly livedin look conveyed not so much by its books and well-worn furniture, or by Sheila’s four grand pianos (she’s been teaching music since adolescence), as by the eye-blinding panoply of paintings. Although 70 of these have already moved to Salem, the house remains chock-a-block with pictures. (One bedroom contains hundreds of canvases stacked in rows across the floor.) After 2 0 1 7

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( T H I S P A G E T O P ) ELIZABETH HAMILTON THAYER HUNTINGTON ( 1 8 7 8 – 1 9 6 3 ) , The New Hat, 1 9 0 7 , o i l o n c a n v a s , 1 6 x 1 4 i n . , 2 0 1 5 . 4 4 . 2 4 ( T H I S P A G E , A T R I G H T ) ROBERT SPEAR DUNNING (1829–1905), Still Life with Green and Purple Grapes, a Peach, and a Pear, 1896, oil on canvas, 18 1/2 x 20 1/2 in., 2015.44.15

(OPPOSITE) HARRISON BIRD BROWN (1831–1915),

View from Crawford Notch, 1880, oil on canvas, 27 7/8 x 23 3/4 in., 2015.44.5

(TOP LEFT) E. AMBROSE WEBSTER (1869– 1935), Webster House, Provincetown, 1931, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 20 in., 2015.44.66 (TOP RIGHT) ERNEST LEE MAJOR (1864– 1950), Wonalancet Brook, Tamworth, e a r l y 2 0 t h c e n t u r y, o i l o n c a n v a s , 30 x 32 in., 2015.44.39

(Bottom left)

BENJAMIN CHAMPNEY

(1817–1907),

Peace and Harmony, Mount Washington from the Intervale, North Conway, 1865, oil on canvas, 35 x 49 1/4 in., 2015.44.9

MARGUERITE STUBER PEARSON (1898–1978), Self-Portrait, 1921, oil on canvas, 21 x 17 1/4 in, 2015.44.50

that ďŹ rst group of paintings departed, the couple didn’t look far to ďŹ nd something to ďŹ ll the newly emptied walls. “There was an Elizabeth Hamilton Thayer there,â€? says Sheila, pointing above a bookcase. “So I had to have something similar, a woman artist. I found this upstairs. It’s by Amy Otis. She was the head of the art department at Wheaton College.â€?

Only a Wheaton alumna could be expected to remember Otis, who taught at that Massachusetts school from 1914 to 1932, and even Thayer (later Elizabeth Hamilton Thayer Huntington) is no household name. Yet both signify the Robbins’ determination to collect what they like, regardless of market value or critical status. “We take in all these orphans,� Sheila says.

“You have to understand, this whole thing started by accident,â€? explains Sam, who, at 93, has yet to fully retire from his career as an investment adviser. “I came out of the army in April 1946 wearing heavy, G.I. woolen pants. Wonderful, but not in the hot spring. So by the time I went back to Harvard to ďŹ nish my education, I said, it’s time to buy a pair of pants. Khaki. So I went to the Harvard Coop. They were $3 a pair. When I had left there in 1941, they cost just a dollar.â€?

When a buddy steered him to a usedclothing store, Sam not only got his trousers (two pairs at $1.50 each), but the collecting bug as well. While changing clothes, he spotted two pictures hanging on the wall, scenes of the New Hampshire countryside he knew from summers spent in the White Mountains.

He struck a deal to buy the pair for $50, with $5 down from the $60 per month he received through the G.I. Bill.

Sheila also had a connection to the White Mountains, having waitressed at a hotel there the summer after her senior year in high school.

After they married in 1957, the couple bought a farm near North Conway, New Hampshire, and together began to grow the collection. “We would ďŹ nd one painting here, one there. And it just blossomed,â€? Sheila recalls. “We didn’t look for big names, just for beautiful paintings.â€? Although Hudson River School masters Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt had painted the White Mountains, most of the artists who did so extensively are not nearly as well known.

One of the bigger names in the Robbins trove is Benjamin Champney (1817–1907), a New Hampshire native who trained as a lithographer in Boston and painted in Paris before returning to the White Mountains in 1850. His Peace and Harmony, Mount Washington from the Intervale, North Conway (1865) was one of the ďŹ rst major pictures the couple acquired. “The way we tend to tier artists based on reputation and canon is not necessarily arbitrary, but is deeply connected to dominant narratives in art history,â€? notes PEM’s American art curator, Austen Barron Bailly. “And when you have an artist working in the same mode with the same kind of subject matter and producing copious amounts of this work for sale, that doesn’t mean F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

they are terrible works. It just means there’s lot of them. I worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art before coming here, and there are a lot of artists in California who fall into the exact same category, like William Keith, who churned out pictures of Yosemite for the tourist trade. The Robbins didn’t ďŹ ll their collection with 75 works by Champney. They’ve picked three outstanding examples of his art, representing a very select part of a much larger whole.â€?

Time and again, paintings came to the Robbins in curious ways. Once, while attending a lecture on railroads in Jackson, New Hampshire, a random conversation led them to a cache of pastels by Mabel Williams (1870–1944), who, in the 1920s, sold her work to tourists stopping at the town’s Christmas Farm Inn. These pictures were in the basement of the artist’s daughterin-law, covered in dirt and spider webs. But the Robbins were enchanted and scooped them up, for $10 apiece.

On another occasion, Sheila trailed a woman who had just failed to sell a painting to a resale shop. It was by Ellen Robbins (1828–1905), a Massachusetts artist (no relation to the Robbins) who painted on the Isles of Shoals, between New Hampshire and Maine. “She wanted $60 for it. I said ďŹ ne,â€? recalls Sheila. “I had $58 and no check, so I said, ‘Give me your address and I’ll bring the other $2.’ She said, ‘Forget it. Take it. I’m glad to get rid of it. I found it in the attic of a house I just bought.’ My $60 Ellen Robbins has hung on a wall with Childe Hassams in a show that Prof. William Gerdts organized called Down Garden Paths, which traveled to the Terra Museum in Chicago and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.â€? (The Robbins lend artworks regularly and have organized shows of their own holdings at numerous regional museums.) “Their methods were unconventional and idiosyncratic, in some respects, which I ďŹ nd quite refreshing,â€? Bailly observes. “They were looking opportunistically, in the best sense of the word, looking for overlooked artists or overlooked works that had a little bit of damage or were very dirty. This appreciation for alternative canons, building a core group of works by artists who were not necessarily ďŹ rst-tier in the eyes of blue-chip galleries, looking for values, using pickers, going into attics — that’s all very different than walking up and down Madison Avenue and talking to the experts.â€?

While landscapes by Alfred Thompson Bricher, John Ross Key, and Harrison Bird Brown represent the initial impulse of the Robbins’ collecting, the couple cast a wider net as time went by. “I must say, Sheila was the intellectual leader of the collection, she was way ahead from the beginning,� says Sam. “We had collected only White Mountain pictures and one day she said to me, ‘I just read Benjamin Champney’s book [Sixty Years’ Memories of Art and Artists], and he painted still lifes as well, when he got old.’ Then she said — I’ll never forget — ‘A woman can’t live by landscapes alone.’�

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But traditional still lifes by Champney and the Fall River artist Robert Spear Dunning (1829–1905), among others, weren’t the only works to broaden the Robbins’ holdings. “They had, over time, begun to collect modern works, Provincetown School artists,â€? relates Bailly. “Webster House, Provincetown, by E. Ambrose Webster, perfectly epitomizes a modernist engagement with traditions of art making and regional traditions. So you see this nude ďŹ gure, you see this New England house, you have very bold colors, the space is quite attened. This to me is one of the outstanding works in the collection.â€?

The Robbins radar — set to identify the overlooked or under-appreciated — pinged appreciably on women artists, too. “One I had never heard of,� admits Bailly, “is Marguerite Stuber Pearson [1898–1978], who had polio and was wheelchair-bound, but attended the Boston Museum School and became an active member of the Rockport Art Association. Also Olga Sears.

Sadly, we know very little about her. She did this rather modernist cubistic view of Portuguese Hill in Gloucester. We think it’s from the 1940s or ’50s. It’s almost fauvist in expression. So we have these sort of sub-histories in the larger story of New England art. It’s very important to understand these histories when the balance has been so tipped toward their male counterparts, to see the ways in which women were able to make careers, and to appreciate the quality of work they did.�

Walking through her canvas-lined home, icking on lamps here and there to better illuminate the couple’s treasures, Sheila says, “Nobody wanted these paintings. They were worthless.

This was a hobby. It was an excitement. It was our excitement. And to be in the Peabody Essex — for two little people like us — is pretty damn good.�

Note: We are saddened to report that Sam Robbins passed away in August 2016, while this article was being prepared. Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur extends our deepest condolences to Sheila Robbins and her family.

Information: Peabody Essex Museum, 161 Essex Street, Salem, MA 01970, 978.745.9500, pem.org. A three-minute ďŹ lm about the Robbins’ generous gift can be viewed at pem.org/collections/2-american_art.

Thomas Connors is a Chicago-based arts writer with a special interest in New England. He reported on Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum in the April 2016 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur.

All the artworks illustrated here are from the Peabody Essex Museum’s Sheila W. and Samuel M. Robbins Collection and were accessioned by the museum in 2015. Š Photos by Kathy Tarantola and Allison White

BY PETER TRIPPI

I N S I D E T R A C K

ABBY ADRICH ROCKR:

A New York Collector’s egacy volves in Virginia urely all fans of American history have heard of — and probably visited — Colonial Williamsburg, which preserves, restores, and operates Virginia’s 18th-century capital.

Located roughly halfway between Richmond and Norfolk, this sprawling site of more than 600 restored or reconstructed buildings immerses families, students, teachers, and other visitors in the dramatic story of this country’s founding during the American Revolution, reminding them why that era still matters today.

Complementing visitors’ experiences of chatting with costumed interpreters about their 18th-century “lives” is the pleasure of exploring the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. In fact, this is one building that contains two major museums. The younger one is the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum, opened 31 years ago with a generous $200 million endowment from Lila and DeWitt Wallace, the founders of Reader’s Digest.

Today it stewards a trove of 70,000 British and American decorative artworks dating from 1670 to 1840.

Of keener interest this season is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM), which will celebrate its 60th anniversary on March 15, 2017. It is named for the remarkable woman who contributed to American society in many ways. Abigail Greene Aldrich (1874–1948) was the beloved daughter of a powerful U.S. Senator from Rhode Island, Nelson W. Aldrich. Her 1901 marriage — before a thousand guests at her family’s summer estate — to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (1874–1960) crystallized the Gilded Age’s merging of cultured New England patricians with hard-driving Midwestern industrialists. The only son of America’s richest man — John D. Rockefeller, Sr. of Cleveland — “Junior” was rigid, reclusive, and by disposition uninterested in the arts and culture.

He met Abby in her native Providence when he was a sophomore at Brown University, and their courtship lasted five years.

ROBERT BRACKMAN (1898–1980), Portrait of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (Abby Greene Aldrich), 1941, oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 32 in., private collection

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(AT LEFT) The Morning Room at Bassett Hall; photo: Jason Copes Portrait

of

(BELOW) ASA AMES (1823–1851), Amanda

Clayanna

Armstrong,

1847,

polychromed yellow poplar, 38 1/2 x 14 x 10 in., Gift of Barbara Rice in memory of her grandfather, Arthur T. White, and her mother, Eleanor Rice, 2009.701.1

All of this was occurring as Junior created an equally significant institution.2 In 1926, he, Abby, and their five sons visited Williamsburg at the invitation of Rev. Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, who had supervised the restoration of his 18th-century Bruton Parish Church.

A 1930 film made by Harvard University shows how decrepit the town’s main thoroughfare, Duke of Gloucester Street, had become; in an era when millions of recently immigrated Americans had scant understanding of the philosophical, historical, and patriotic contexts of the colonial and revolutionary periods, Goodwin believed the nation would become more cohesive if this once-grand capital could be restored to its original appearance. Though it took

By all accounts, they adored each other: outgoing, curious, and well-traveled, she softened him, opening his eyes to the world beyond productivity, profit, and piety. In addition to raising six extraordinary children (five sons and one daughter), Abby supported a range of progressive causes, from the YWCA to Planned Parenthood to housing for her husband’s oil refinery workers. Because she did not come to the marriage with a fortune, receiving only an allowance from her husband, Abby assisted these programs by convincing Junior to donate the necessary funds, or by using her wide-ranging connections to stimulate gifts from others.

In 1925, Abby began collecting European and American modern art, including (relatively inexpensive) paintings by Degas, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, and Picasso. Her husband hated them, and indeed relatively few Americans appreciated them, even though some of these artworks were already 40 years old. Abby’s biographer Bernice Kert explains that she “was attracted by the unusual, adventurous, inner-directed art… She liked experimentation, she was open to new ideas…”1 This attraction helped Abby find the courage in 1929 to cofound, with two other women, her most famous creation, New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The year before, in her grand Manhattan mansion nearby, she had created a suite of fashionably Art Deco rooms where she organized changing exhibitions of her growing collection. Invited visitors — the cream of society and culture — took an elevator directly to the house’s seventh floor to see them, and other discerning collectors began to follow her lead in 1931, when she started acquiring American folk artworks to mix in with the modern ones. Her folk purchases were guided by an array of Northeastern dealers, collectors, and scholars, including Edith Gregor Halpert (1900– 1970), Holger Cahill (1893–1960), Isabel Carleton Wilde (1877– 1951), and the modernist sculptor Elie Nadelman (1882–1946).

All of them relished the visual and “inner-directed” correspondences between modern and folk art, which ultimately inspired MoMA’s dynamic director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., to mount a 1932 exhibition, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750–1900. All but one of its objects were drawn (anonymously) from Abby’s collection.

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(AT LEFT) CAPTAIN JAMES SMITH (1762–1818), Portrait of the Smith Family, c. 1807, oil on canvas, 38 1/8 x 29 in., Museum Purchase, 2011.100.1

(ABOVE) EDWARD HICKS

(1780–1849), The Residence of David Twining, 1845–47, oil on canvas, 26 1/2 x 31 9/16 in., Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Collection; Gift of David Rockefeller, 1933.101.1

(BELOW) TIM

LEWIS (b. 1952), Fox, 1993, carved sandstone, 10 x 26 x 4 1/2 in., Gift of Ellin and Baron Gordon, 1999.907.1

him a while to commit to underwriting the massive project, Junior purchased his first property there later that year, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (hereafter “CW”) was chartered in 1928. That was the same year the foundation made its first purchase of an artwork (to help furnish a property); by 1934, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inaugurated the new/old Duke of Gloucester Street, it was virtually unrecognizable to the town’s natives.

The Rockefellers visited Williamsburg at least twice per year, so they acquired a house where they could enjoy privacy and the comforts of home. Built in the 1750s and ’60s, Bassett Hall was named for Martha Washington’s nephew Burwell Bassett, who had bought it in 1800. Abby and Junior loved their two-week stays there every spring and fall, primarily because they could live like “normal” people away from the international spotlight, enjoying their garden and welcoming neighborhood children for refreshments. In 1979 their descendants donated the house to CW, and in 2003 its fully intact contents were rearranged slightly to better reflect a newly discovered probate inventory. Today this charming home can be visited on guided tours; though large, it is not overwhelming like Kykuit, the Rockefellers’ estate north of New York City. Importantly, we can see how comfortably the couple’s historical American paintings, folk art, and decorative arts blend to create a serene, even beautiful, environment.

In 1935, Abby loaned some of her folk art for public display in a historic house on Duke of Gloucester Street, where the items remained for more than 20 years. Interestingly, her acquiring of folk art lasted little more than a decade; she was pursuing new passions by 1939, when she donated the first tranche of her folk collection to CW. Ultimately most of it arrived there by March 15, 1957, when the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum opened in its own building. Alas, she had died nine years before, but her 83-year-old husband attended the ceremony.

Now marking its 60th anniversary, AARFAM is America’s oldest continuously operating cultural institution dedicated solely to the collection, exhibition, and preservation of American folk art. It is helpful to put this distinction into historical context: New York City’s American Folk Art Museum was founded four years later, in 1961;

and it was not until 2012 that the Smithsonian American Art Museum named its first dedicated curator of “folk and untaught art,” though it had been collecting in this area for decades. It has been primarily female collectors, scholars, and dealers who took the lead in promoting folk art in America, partly because their male counterparts were dominating more canonical areas of research, and partly because its “inner-directed” aspects intrigued them. A key forerunner of AARFAM is the Shelburne Museum in western Vermont, founded by the New York philanthropist Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), whom Abby Rockefeller knew. Webb had begun collecting folk art in 1908 and her museum opened in 1947, though from the start it has covered an array of interests in addition to folk art. From 1937, Bostonian Nina Fletcher Little (1903–1993) filled with folk art the home she shared at Essex, Massachusetts, with her husband, Bertram K. Little (Cogswell’s Grant), ultimately transferring it to what

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(ABOVE) Attributed to JOHN ROSE (1752/53–1820), The Old Plantation, 1785–90, watercolor on paper, 11 11/16 x 17 7/8 in., Gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 1935.301.3

(RIGHT) Attributed to

THE WILKINSON LIMNER (active c. 1824–30), Portrait of Mrs. Seth Wilkinson, 1827–1830, oil on yellow poplar panel, 30 x 25 1/2 in., Museum Purchase, 1960.100.2

is now Historic New England in 1984. And in 1995 the collector Rebecca Hoffberger opened Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum with a decidedly non-traditional (“outsider art”) emphasis.

Today AARFAM is home to more than 7,000 objects dating from the 1720s to the present: ceramics, sculpture, drawings, paintings, furniture, weathervanes, needlework, quilts, toys, metalwork, and an array of utilitarian objects. It defines folk art as objects created and used by everyday people that also make strong aesthetic statements. (Much ink has been spilled over the years about exactly where the boundary falls between “everyday” and “professional” makers, a border that may never be clarified entirely.) AARFAM mounts two to three new exhibitions each year; all run at least one year, some as long as five. This means that, over the past 60 years, the museum has presented more than 340 shows, many accompanied by authoritative publications. Impressive as these accomplishments are, one might fairly ask: why show folk art in Williamsburg at all? The answer: as capital of one of the wealthiest colonies in British America, the town certainly had many “high-style” works of fine and decorative art, yet most residents were “everyday people” who likely used objects that we now classify as folk.

AARFAM’s 60th-anniversary year kicks off this month with a display of 51 collection highlights mounted front and center at the Winter Antiques Show in New York City’s Park Avenue Armory (January 20–29). This leading art, antiques, and design fair is only three years older than the museum itself, and will again bring to Manhattan more than 70 top exhibitors from around the world. Touchingly, this loan exhibition will appear only four blocks from 740 Park Avenue, where the Rockefellers spent their final years in a luxurious three-floor apartment, and where Abby died in 1948.

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Attributed to JOSÉ FRANCISCO XAVIER DE SALAZAR Y MENDOZA (1750–1802), Portrait of Captain William Preston Smith, 1800–01, oil on canvas, 38 x 30 1/8 in., Museum Purchase: Mr. and Mrs. Donald Bogus, Robert Brent and Cynthia Reddick, Judy and John Herdeg, Ms. Beatrice Gibbons and Dr. Karl Kilgore, Barbara R. Luck, Stewart Shillito Maxwell, Carolyn J. Weekley, The Decorative Arts Society of Cincinnati, The Gladys and Franklin Clark Foundation, The Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund, and an Anonymous Donor, 2012-74

Distilling a collection of 7,000 objects down to just 51 was the challenge undertaken by a committee of AARFAM curators: Laura Pass Barry (who supervises the museum’s holdings of paintings, drawings, and sculptures), Tara Gleason Chicirda (furniture), and Suzanne Findlen Hood (ceramics and glass). This team has titled their project Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum: Revolution and Evolution because their selections underscore several key moments in the ever-changing history of folk art collecting. As noted above, the 1930s witnessed connoisseurs’ inter-association of folk and modern art; in the 1950s, scholars and collectors worked together to promote the study of American art — including folk art — throughout the country, not only in the Northeast. Then, thanks to preparations for the 1976 Bicentennial, interest in “Americana� blossomed in the 1970s, and now — here in the 21st century — folk art scholars are pushing the boundaries of region and period even further.

The New York display will encompass not only iconic works from Mrs. Rockefeller’s original gift, but also recent accessions. In the former category are the beloved Baby in Red Chair (an oil painting by an anonymous Pennsylvania artist) and the imagined scene of Washington and Lafayette at Yorktown, painted c. 1860–80 by Ruben Law Reed, whose own ancestors had fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill. Acquired in 2009 is the surprisingly spontaneous-looking wooden sculpture of young Amanda Clayanna Armstrong, carved just south of Buffalo by Asa Ames in 1847, when he was barely 23.

The Winter Antiques Show loan exhibition is only the beginning of AARFAM’s busy anniversary year. Back in Williamsburg, Laura Barry is putting the finishing

touches on her new exhibition, We the People: America’s Folk Portraits, which will open on May 6 featuring approximately 40 works from the collection. She says that — in addition to bringing us face-to-face with a wide array of sitters — it will address a host of misconceptions, such as “nobody smiles in these portraits,� “the artists used the same costumes for different sitters,� “the heads were painted onto pre-painted bodies,� or “the men always have one hand tucked into their waistcoat.� This project will highlight recent accessions like John James Trumbull Arnold’s portrait of Mary Mattingly, made in Maryland in 1850; William Anderson Roberts’s portrait of the Russell sisters with their cat (North Carolina, 1868); Jefferson Gauntt’s portrait of the Jennison Family (New York, 1838); and Capt. James Smith’s affectionate portrait of his family (Richmond, c. 1807).

Soon after the portrait show opens, it will be time to unveil — on July 1 — the museum’s new orientation area, America’s Folk Art. This will offer a video and timeline introducing Abby Rockefeller’s life and interest in folk art, surrounded by more than 30 pieces suggesting the collection’s scope. Pennsylvanian visitors may be especially pleased to learn that AARFAM holds the world’s largest collection of paintings by the Quaker Edward Hicks (1780–1849), who will be represented here by one of his many beloved Peaceable Kingdom scenes of harmonious animals. On view nearby — just for example — will be an early-20th-century duck decoy (Illinois); a Pennsylvania painted chest (1769); a fox carved of sandstone by Kentuckian Tim Lewis in 1993; a walking stick carved by Thomas Purkins (Virginia, 1847); and an iconic weathervane shaped like Lady Liberty (probably New York, 1900–10).

Laura Barry says that two more painting exhibitions are on the horizon. The first will focus on portraits made during the Federal period (1789–1825), with some emphasis on the Chesapeake region and on the flow of settlers moving westward. The second will examine the painter John Durand (active 1765–82), who is represented in the collection because he worked in Virginia for at least several years.

As in any field, scholars of folk art evolve in their research interests — yet another reason for the New York loan show’s subtitle, Revolution and Evolution. In keeping with social historians’ growing focus on people of color, AARFAM seeks out artworks depicting and made by Native Americans and African-Americans. Abby Rockefeller was ahead of her time in this regard: she and her husband were early advocates of African-American civil rights, and it is revealing that within her 1935 donation to CW was the watercolor The Old Plantation, which shows a group of slaves dancing. This is believed to have been painted in the late 1780s by John Rose, who owned these slaves and was fascinated by their customs. Equally revealing are several prints hanging at Bassett Hall made by Agostino Brunias (c. 1730–1796), an Italian who carefully recorded the lives of Black and Creole people he met while working in the West Indies.

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JAMES ALEXANDER SIMPSON (1805–1880), Portrait of William King, Jr., 1841, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 29 3/8 in., Museum Purchase, Elaine and Don Bogus, Jerry Dalton, Elizabeth T. Gessley, Mary and Clinton Gilliland, Robert F. Grossman, Philip LeDuc, Marcia and Lawrence Long, Margaret Mathews, Margaret Beck Pritchard, Mark and Loretta Roman, and Community Foundation for Northern Virginia/The MOTSTA Fund, 2015-245

archaeological artifacts, weapons, numismatics, and a host of other materials that are now too rarely seen.”

The project will also provide a new entrance, replacing what is currently a circuitous route that makes it difficult for visitors to grasp which museum they are actually in. In the new incarnation, visitors will immediately have the opportunity to choose whether they want to see folk art or decorative arts first, and will also enjoy an enhanced cafe, shop, parking, and directional signage as they walk from Duke of Gloucester Street.

Ronald L. Hurst is CW’s chief curator and vice president for collections, conservation, and museums. He notes that scholars’ Northeastern bias against arts of the American South (the perception that they were substandard) has been fading slowly since the 1970s; both AARFAM and the DeWitt Wallace are making up for lost time by acquiring superb examples from the South, and are looking westward to the Mountain South and even Louisiana. Two recent exhibitions underscore this trend: in 2013–14, the now-retired curator Carolyn Weekley broke new ground with Painters and Paintings of the Early American South, and on view now is Hurst’s A Rich and Varied Culture: The Material World of the Early South, which is supplemented by numerous loans because the museums are still developing their holdings. Three recent accessions demonstrate this effort: a darkly Spanish-looking oil portrait of Captain William Preston Smith, thought to be painted by José Francisco Xavier de Salazar when the sitter, a U.S. naval officer, was posted in New Orleans; the oil portrait of Elizabeth Allen attributed to Jeremiah Theus, who probably made it in Charleston around 1759; and an 1841 oil portrait of the Washington, D.C., artisan William King, Jr., captured at his desk by the painter James Alexander Simpson.

Happily, attendance at the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg has risen to approximately 250,000 visitors annually. CW is eager to serve them better, and so will break ground this April on a two-year-long, $40 million expansion that will not require the complex to close. It will increase exhibition space by 22 percent (from 27,400 to 33,400 square feet), including what Hurst calls “dedicated gallery spaces for fine art, costumes, F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

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CW offers art lovers various opportunities to enjoy its art collections beyond museum visits. Particularly appealing is membership in the Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections, which was founded in 2000 with 15 members and has grown to 312. The Friends meet every September in Williamsburg to hear curators present their latest research and to explore the collections behind the scenes, then spend a day visiting private homes and sites. Compelling in a different way is the Colonial Williamsburg Antiques Forum, at which curators, scholars, and collectors of decorative arts share recent findings and attend hands-on workshops. Scheduled for February 24–28, 2017, the 69th annual Forum has the theme Early American Craftsmanship: Influence and Innovation, highlighting the impact of British, German, French, and African artisans and consumers from Maine to Louisiana.

Finally, as you plan your visit to Williamsburg, be sure to pre-book a guided tour of CW’s Bruton Heights Collections and Conservation Building. This state-of-the-art facility is where a world-class team of conservators stabilize, clean, and repair artworks in many mediums. (Just for example, many of the Art Museums’ paintings have benefitted from the attention of conservator Shelley Svoboda.) Surely Abby Aldrich Rockefeller would be pleased that the folk artworks she loved — both her own objects and ones acquired after her death — are well cared for, and compellingly exhibited, today.

Information: 325 Francis Street, Williamsburg, VA 23185, 757.220.7724, colonialwilliamsburg.com/do/art-museums; Winter Antiques Show, 643 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065, 718.292.7392, winterantiquesshow.com; for the Friends, visit history. org/foundation/development/societies/friends; for the Forum, colonialwilliamsburg. org/conted; for the Art Museums’ building project, history.org/expansion.

Endnote 1. Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family, New York: Random House, 1993.

2. Junior was busy creating still more institutions such as Riverside Church, International House (for students), and Rockefeller Center — all in Manhattan.

Peter Trippi is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.

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E X H I B I T I O N P R E V I E W

ELDRIDGE HARDIE (b. 1940), Homeward, 2014, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in., collection of Robert Goodyear

ELDRIDGE HARDIE: ART OF A LIFE IN SPORT El Paso Museum of Art 1 Arts Festival Plaza El Paso, TX 79901 915.212.0300, elpasoartmuseum.org October 20–March 5

The El Paso Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition of more than 20 oils, watercolors, and drawings created over five decades by Eldridge Hardie (b. 1940). Having grown up in a hunting-and-fishing family resident in El Paso for more than a century, Hardie earned his B.F.A. at Washington University in St. Louis and has lived in Denver ever since.

He has earned an international reputation for capturing humans, animals, decoys, and gear in highly appropriate atmospheres of J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

fresh air, sunlight, and wind. A seasoned sportsman himself, Hardie researches every aspect of his scene — the creatures, weather, vegetation, geology, light, even the speed of moving water — then endows it with the subtle psychological tension necessarily present in every encounter between hunter and prey. He makes his paintings both outdoors and in the studio, and has assisted the museum by lending generously from his own collection and introducing its curators to various private owners.

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ADOLPH MENZEL (1815–1905), Artist’s Model, Seen in Back View, Putting on an Eighteenth-Century Uniform, n.d., chalk on paper, 9 1/4 x 6 1/2 in., Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Mortimer C. Leventritt Fund 1973.21

REUNITING THE MASTERS: EUROPEAN DRAWINGS FROM WEST COAST COLLECTIONS Crocker Art Museum 216 O Street Sacramento, CA 95814 916.808.7000 crockerartmuseum.org November 13–February 5

STEPHANIE REVENNAUGH (b. 1973), Olympia 2 (detail), 2016, bronze, 24 x 9 x 4 in.

CELEBRATION OF FINE ART N. Hayden Road and Loop 101 Scottsdale, AZ 85260 480.443.7695 celebrateart.com January 14–March 26

The 27th annual Celebration of Fine Art is set to draw more than 50,000 visitors for another season of watching and chatting with 100 artists from around the country, all working in their own pop-up studios F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

under a 40,000-square-foot tent. This juried invitational show features exhibitors pursuing a huge range of materials and styles, plus a sculpture garden adorned with nearly 100 pieces and enlivened with regular demonstrations of wood turning, welding, and bronze pouring.

Getting to hear what’s on the artist’s mind is half the fun, so the organizers also host an Art Discovery session every Friday night. This allows invited artists to discuss their ideas informally while audience members enjoy wine and cheese and the occasional art-making demonstration.

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By coincidence or plan, drawings by the same European artist, for the same project, and even from the same sketchbook, have made their ways separately into the West Coast’s leading institutions, including the J. Paul Getty Museum, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts. Now Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum — which has its own outstanding collection — has temporarily reunited 52 drawings that, according to curator William Breazeale, “illuminate not only the artists’ working processes, but also a chapter in American patronage and scholarship that should be better known. West Coasters from E.B. Crocker to Vincent Price and Cary Grant have fallen under the spell of master drawings, and distinguished curators here have furthered their study.�

This show covers Italy, Germany, France, and the Low Countries from the 16th through the 19th centuries, encompassing such masters as Guercino, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and Thomas Couture.

Illustrated as an example here is Adolph Menzel’s Artist’s Model from Stanford, which is displayed alongside his Study for a Tree from San Francisco to highlight this master’s varied strategies.

TODD A. WILLIAMS (b. 1969), Prairie Settlers, 1893, Fillmore County, 2015, oil on board, 24 x 30 in., courtesy Cornerstone Bank of Nebraska

TODD A. WILLIAMS: PAINTING THE LEGACY OF NEBRASKA Nebraska History Museum 131 Centennial Mall North Lincoln, NE 68508 402.471.4754 toddwilliamsfineart.com/ legacy-of-nebraska & ne150.org/events-programs/ painting-the-legacy March 1–June 4

Born and raised in Central City, Nebraska, the artist Todd A. Williams has spent the last ďŹ ve years preparing an exhibition of 120 paintings in celebration of Nebraska’s 150th anniversary of statehood. His objective is to depict historical, geographical, and ďŹ gurative elements from all 93 of the state’s counties, and to achieve this, he has worked with historians and other advisers to identify such themes as the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express, Lewis and Clark’s expedition, Buffalo Bill, and the National Homestead Act. Native Americans ďŹ gure prominently — among them Chiefs Standing Bear and Blackbird — and also geographical icons like the Platte River and Great Plains. Illustrated here is his homage to the settlers who built homes on the prairie. Some scenes have been painted on location, others back in the studio.

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Officially endorsed by the Nebraska 150 Committee, Williams’s ambitious project will open at the Nebraska History Museum on Statehood Day (March 1). It will move on to Grand Island’s Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer (June 17–August 20), then Gallery 1516 in Omaha (September 1–October 15), and ďŹ nally will split into regional subsections to be shown at six venues around the state.

Having earned his B.F.A. at the Kansas City Art Institute, Williams worked for a decade at Hallmark Cards and DaySpring Cards until 2002, when he shifted into ďŹ ne art fulltime. He now splits his time between Nebraska and Arkansas.

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DINAH K. WORMAN (b. 1950), Community, 2016, oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in.

COORS WESTERN ART EXHIBIT & SALE National Western Stock Show 4655 Humboldt Street Denver, CO 80216 303.291.2567 coorswesternart.com January 7–22

Featuring 66 artists from across America, Canada, and Europe, the 24th annual Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale will again tempt collectors with an eclectic mix of contemporary realist artworks capturing the Western way of life. This year’s featured artist is the painter and printmaker Dinah K. Worman, a Coors participant since 2011. Illustrated here is her Signature Work for the event, Community, which has been acquired for the National Western Stock Show’s permanent collection.

(Posters of this snow scene can be purchased online and at the event.)

On January 2, collectors aged 40 and under will gather to launch the Young Guns exhibition of works by 15 emerging artists; the next day features a lecture-luncheon on contemporary photography of the West (held at the History Colorado Center) and then the big show’s red-carpet gala opening celebration that night. On January 4, the Denver Art Museum will host its 11th annual Petrie Institute of Western American Art symposium.

The exhibition’s net proceeds will again support the National Western Scholarship Trust, which helps more than 80 college students pursue their studies in medicine, agriculture, and veterinary medicine.

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QUANG HO (b. 1963), Arrangement with Pansies, 2012, oil on canvas, 13 x 17 in.

10 TH ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

Steamboat Art Museum 801 Lincoln Avenue Steamboat Springs, CO 80487 970.870.1755 steamboatartmuseum.org December 2, 2016–April 8, 2017

Now underway is an exhibition looking back over the Steamboat Art Museum’s successful ďŹ rst decade of programming, which has been experienced by more than 100,000 visitors.

On view are works representing its more than 30 shows, encompassing intaglio prints, bird

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imagery, the American Watercolor Society, the Rocky Mountain Society of Botanical Artists, and an array of plein air events. Among the artists represented are Clyde Aspevig, Ken Carlson, Len Chmiel, Scott Christensen, John Fawcett, “Bill� Gollings, Rod Hanna, Quang Ho, Donna Howell-Sickles, Jim Norton, Jean Perry, David Taylor, Mark Thompson, and Curtis Zabel.

On February 4, the museum will host a gala with many of these artists in attendance, to be followed by a season of lectures, workshops, demos, book signings, curator-led tours, and receptions during the town’s First Friday Art Walks. In April, the museum will celebrate the doubling of its exhibition space and the addition of workshop rooms.

JOHN HOWARD SANDEN (b. 1935), The Black Turban, 2010, oil on canvas, 36 x 24 in., collection of the artist

JOHN HOWARD SANDEN: PORTRAITS AND PAINTINGS Salmagundi Club 47 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003 212.255.7740 salmagundi.org portraitinstitute.com portraitsinc.com January 16–February

RICHARD LOFFLER (b. 1956), Grounded and Coming, 2014, bronze, 20 x 26 x 11 in.

SOUTHEASTERN WILDLIFE EXPOSITION Charleston 843.723.1748 sewe.com February 17–19

The Southeastern Wildlife Exposition (SEWE) is the largest gathering of its kind in America and South Carolina’s single largest annual event. On just one weekend, more than 40,000 nature lovers will attend the 35th edition of this celebration of wildlife and environmental conservation. Held at venues throughout the art-minded city of

Charleston, it provides a platform for more than 500 artists, exhibitors, and wildlife experts from around the world.

Though there will be many events to attend, of particular interest to collectors is the juried show of 95 artists who depict animals and sporting subjects. This year’s featured artist is the painter Ezra Tucker, while the guest artists are both sculptors: Richard Loffler and Van Keuren Marshall.

Also on offer will be exhibitions featuring local artists, decoys, and sporting arms, as well as an anglers’ ďŹ lm festival and lively demonstrations of birds of prey, retrievers, cooking, and art-making for all ages.

Many events require tickets, so check before you go. Available on the website are details on SEWE’s VIP program, which provides privileged access to events starting as early as February 16.

The Salmagundi Club is teaming up with the Portrait Institute and Portraits, Inc. to present a retrospective of work by the Connecticut-based master John Howard Sanden. Over the past 50 years, Sanden has painted a who’s who of sitters, including corporate leaders, university presidents, physicians, philanthropists, cabinet secretaries, senators, the evangelist Billy Graham, and even one President of the United States and his First Lady (George W. and Laura Bush). He has twice been commissioned to travel to Nigeria to paint that country’s hereditary kings. Key examples of Sanden’s portraiture will be on view at the Salmagundi, along with a group of ďŹ gure studies made in 1973, the ďŹ rst year of the artist’s marriage to their sitter, Elizabeth Schneider Sanden.

On January 19, Sanden will offer comments during the opening reception, and on the 22nd he will deliver an illustrated lecture. A week later the organizers will host a “town hall meeting� on Portrait Painting Today, and Tomorrow.

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JANE JONES: GLORIOUS SURVIVORS Bonner David Galleries 7040 Main Street Scottsdale, AZ 85251 480.941.8500 bonnerdavid.com January 19–February 1

Though she ultimately pursued studio art and art history, it is signiďŹ cant that the painter Jane Jones earned her undergraduate degree in biology: “Looking into the lives of cells, plants, and animals,â€? she believes, “gave me a glimpse into the awesome power of living things and an incredible respect for them.â€?

That’s one reason Jones’s still life paintings highlight what she calls the “everyday triumphs of nature� and the “power, beauty, and fragility of life,� none of which should be taken for granted. Indeed, she says, “Every painting is a prayer for our environment and our planet.�

Bonner David Galleries’ show of her latest works conďŹ rms Jones’s gift for banishing extraneous details in order to focus on the elegance of owers, juxtaposing their organic forms with the geometric rigidity of their vases, of the stripes and stones she sometimes includes, and even of the square or rectangular canvas itself. The bright, clear light so evident here is a welcome byproduct of her residence near Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Most of the blooms depicted come from Jones’s own gardens. She stresses that the cultivation of owers so near the Rockies — where temperatures veer from 105 in the summer to -25 in the winter, and where gusty winds and hail are customary — is truly an act of optimism. (Jones and her husband once saved 123 irises from frost by covering them in 123 socks.) Surely that’s another reason this show is titled Glorious Survivors.

JANE JONES (b. 1953), Birds of a Feather, 2016, oil on canvas, 34 x 26 in.

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PAINTING THE SOUTHERN COAST: THE ART OF WEST FRASER Gibbes Museum of Art 135 Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29401 843.722.2706 gibbesmuseum.org January 28–April 30 WEST FRASER (b. 1955), Easy Lady, 2013, oil on linen, 30 x 36 in., collection of John H. Breedlove

A key theme in American art history is the powerful connection that artists often form with the places they live. Although he paints around the world — from the Caribbean and Central America to Scandinavia and Italy — West Fraser has focused his talent and energy on a fascinating region often overlooked by the national “art world.” It encompasses the lushly beautiful coasts, marshes, and settlements between Georgetown, South Carolina, and St. Augustine, Florida, including the socalled Sea Islands (more than 100 tidal and barrier islands). Fraser’s atmospheric scenes J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

vibrate with just the right blend of the beautiful and the ordinary — and with the ongoing push-pull between history and modernity.

This is home ground: born in Savannah and raised in Hinesville and Hilton Head Island, Fraser earned a B.F.A. from the University of Georgia.

On view at the leading museum of the city Fraser has called home since 1984 are approximately 25 paintings, borrowed from collections nationwide. Among them are several studies that offer fascinating insights into his working process.

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HOWARD COOK (1901–1980), Taos Indian, 1927, woodcut on paper, 12 1/16 x 10 in., Albuquerque Museum, gift of the Albuquerque Museum Foundation

THE CARVED LINE: BLOCK PRINTMAKING IN NEW MEXICO Albuquerque Museum 2000 Mountain Road NW Albuquerque, NM 87104 505.243.7255, cabq.gov/museum January 14–April 16

A block of wood or linoleum, a gouging tool (like a knife or chisel), ink, and paper are all you need to create a block print. This technique has long been utilized by artists worldwide, and has proven particularly popular in New Mexico since the 1890s. Art historian Josie Lopez undertook extensive research across this art-minded state and has now guest-curated the exhibition The Carved Line: Block Printmaking in New Mexico.

Borrowing heavily from the Albuquerque Museum’s rich holdings and from collections nationwide, Lopez demonstrates how the beauty and signiďŹ cance of New Mexico’s unique landscape, people, and cultures have impacted artists both local and newly arrived.

Among them are Gustave Baumann, T.C. Cannon, Willard Clark, Ruth Connely, Howard Cook, Nicolai Fechin, Tina Fuentes, Betty Hahn, Margaret Herrera Chavez, Leon Loughridge, Scott Parker, Juan Pino, Fritz Scholder, Yoshiko Shimano, and Richard Tuttle. Accompanying this project is a 200-page book published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.

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MIAN SITU (b. 1953), Trail of Life at Canyon de Chelly, 2016, oil on canvas, 40 x 50 in.

MASTERS OF THE AMERICAN WEST ART EXHIBITION & SALE Autry Museum of the American West 4700 Western Heritage Way Los Angeles, CA 90027 323.667.2000, theautry.org February 11–March 2

The Autry Museum of the American West is set to host its 20th annual Masters of the American West Art Exhibition & Sale. On view

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will be 275 paintings and sculptures by 76 living artists reecting their various contemporary, historical, and mythical takes on the West.

On February 11, ticketholders will enjoy informative presentations by the exhibiting artists John Fawcett and Tammy Garcia, a luncheon culminating with the awards announcement, a festive reception, and — of course — the actual sale. All artworks will be sold at ďŹ xed prices through the drawing of lots. Whether they sell or not, all will remain on public view until March 2. The event’s proceeds beneďŹ t the Autry Museum’s general operations, educational programs, and ongoing conservation of its rich collections.

BY MAX GILLIES

T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S

GO IGUR

veryone 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 here stylistically. We have also put some emphasis on the fact that women artists have (rightly) taken back control of the female body ... it ain’t only men doing the looking and drawing anymore.

Enjoy this diverse array of approaches, and please let us know which figurative artists you are following these days.

Max Gillies is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.

JULIETTE ARISTIDES (b. 1971), Sarah Reclining, 2009, charcoal heightened with white chalk on paper, 18 x 24 in., on view at LeQuire Gallery, Nashville (January 14– February 25)

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MARJORIE ATWOOD (b. 1963), She Likes the Mask, 2016, oil paint, gold leaf, and mixed media on board, 12 x 12 in., M.A. Doran Gallery, Tulsa

JENNIFER BALKAN (b. 1970), Painter of Heads, 2016, oil on aluminum panel, 30 x 30 in., available from the artist

BURL JONES (b. 1941), Earthbound, 2016, bronze, 34 x 19 x 14 in., Creighton Block Gallery, Big Sky, Montana

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CHANTEL LYNN BARBER (b. 1970), Brennen and the Ocean, 2016, acrylic on panel, 8 x 10 in., collection of the artist

RYAN BUFFINGTON (b. 1983), The Wire, 2014, oil on canvas, 72 x 48 in., Seraphin Gallery, Philadelphia

MARY

CHIARAMONTE

(b.

1979),

Beloved of a Falling Song, 2015, acrylic on panel, 8 x 12 in., private collection

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ANGELA MIA DE LA VEGA (b. 1970), Summer (from The Four Seasons series), 2009, bronze, 37 x 13 x 15 in., Mockingbird Gallery, Bend, Oregon

NANCY SEAMONS CROOKSTON (b. 1948), Spettro, 2013, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in., collection of the artist TINA GARRETT (b. 1974), Moment

to

Moment,

2016, oil on cotton duck, 58 x 28 in., available from the artist

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(LEFT) DOUGLAS GIRARD (b. 1969), Procession, 2015, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in., collection of the artist (BELOW) AMAYA GURPIDE (b. 1974), Maryum, 2015, pencil, conté, gouache, and chalk on paper, 47 1/2 x 31 in., private collection courtesy Arcadia Contemporary, Los Angeles

(LEFT) TAKAYUKI HARADA (b. 1965), Natural, 2015, 18 x 14 in., private collection

(ABOVE) STEVE HENDERSON

(b. 1957), The Hairpin, 2016, charcoal on paper, 23 x 19 in., available from the artist

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DAVID HETTINGER (b. 1946), Evening Study, 2016, oil on panel, 11 x 14 in., Rose Renée Fine Art

MICHELLE JADER (b. 1969), Calming Chaos, 2015, oil on 6 acrylic panels, 40 x 36 in., private collection

IRA KORMAN (b. 1962), Redemption, 2009, charcoal on paper, 15 1/4 x 12 1/2 in., private collection

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WILLIAM OBERST (b. 1948), Diner Waitress, 2005, oil on linen, 48 x 50 in., From Russia with Art Gallery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

BILL SAWCZUK (b. 1945), Lane, 2007, conté crayon on

DENTON RIDGE (b. 1956), Braided Hair, 2016, watercolor on paper, 19 x 27 in., Gallery 1401,

newsprint, 24 x 18 in., Trio Fine Art, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

Chattanooga

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SHANE SCRIBNER (b. 1980), Occupied Thoughts, 2014, oil on panel, 12 x 20 in., Mary Martin Gallery, Charleston

(UPPER LEFT) LAUREN TILDEN (b. 1981), September Wind, 2015, oil on panel, 36 x 24 in., Haynes Galleries, Nashville and Thomaston, Maine Bau-Xi Gallery, Toronto

(ABOVE) VICKI SMITH (b. 1958), This Moment, 2016, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in.,

(LEFT) THOMAS WHARTON (b. 1950), The Escape, 2015, oil on linen, 36 x 36 in., RJD

Gallery, Sag Harbor, Long Island

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B Y K E L LY C O M P T O N

D E S T I N A T I O N A R T

SOUHRN CHARMS:

AR IN CHARSON ounded in the 17th century with the support of England’s King Charles II, the picturesque seaport of Charleston, South Carolina, has long been renowned not only for wellpreserved houses, churches, and cobblestone streets, but also for its cultural sophistication. Although it was even more cosmopolitan in the 18th century, when almost every ship trading along the Atlantic coast put in here, today’s Charleston offers art galleries, antique shops, and boutiques well worth exploring. Its inns, bed-and-breakfasts, and cafes are admired for hospitality and quality, with most an easy stroll from the city’s many historical sites.

The most prestigious visual arts institution in town is the Gibbes Museum of Art, opened in 1905 and now possessing more than 10,000 works, most with a connection to South Carolina or the South generally. The permanent collection is arranged to highlight significant people and themes in Charleston’s rich history, including its crucial roles in the American Revolution and Civil War. On view now at the Gibbes are three important temporary exhibitions. The first celebrates the artistry of the local landscapist West Fraser and is explored in detail on page 70. The second is History, Labor, Life: The Prints of Jacob Lawrence, which offers a comprehensive overview of the prints made by this great African-American artist (1917–2000) relatively late in his career (from 1963 onward). Organized and toured by the Savannah College of Art and Design, this project runs from January 28 through April 30. And already underway (through April 23)

is Painting a Nation: Hudson River Landscapes from the Higdon Collection, which features 19thcentury American masterworks assembled by Ann and Lee Higdon. (Lee Higdon was formerly president of the College of Charleston.)

At the Gibbes Museum of Art, ANNA HYATT HUNTINGTON’s bronze Marabou with Fish (1934) stands before two paintings: at left is EDMUND TARBELL’s painting The Sisters (1921), and at right ROBERT HENRI’s The Green Fan (1912).

Photo: MCG Photography

Most of Charleston’s art galleries are located in or near the French Quarter, named for the talented Huguenot community of Protestants who fled Catholic France and contributed significantly to Charleston’s prosperity. Although they offer a range of styles and mediums, the galleries J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

here are aesthetically more traditional than the city’s best-known cultural project, the Spoleto Festival USA mounted annually since 1977.

(Tickets go on sale in January for the 2017 performances, which run May 26 through June 11.)

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ALFRED HUTTY (1877–1954), Old St. Philip’s, c. 1950, watercolor and gouache on paper, 26 3/4 x 20 1/4 in., Charleston Renaissance Gallery

while Ella Walton Richardson Fine Art Gallery features painters like Lindsay Goodwin, Stapleton Kearns, Craig Nelson, and Aleksander and Lyuba Titovets, as well as a unique concentration of modern Dutch masters including Frits Goosen and Frans van der Wal. As mentioned above, impressive scenes of local natural beauty are made by West Fraser, who is represented

by Helena Fox at her eponymous gallery. Fox also champions such national figures as Kenn Backhaus, John Cosby, Julyan Davis, William R. Davis, Donald Demers, Kathleen Dunphy, Mary Erickson, Jeffrey T. Larson, Joseph McGurl, Billyo O’Donnell, and Joe Paquet, as well as the renowned sculptor Kent Ullberg. Reinert Fine Art represents numerous talents, including Jill Basham, Mark Beale, Dan Beck, Mary Gerrish, Calvin Liang, Neil Patterson, William Schneider, and Michele Usibelli.

At Horton Hayes Fine Art, visitors will find impressive paintings by Kathy Anderson, Chris Groves, Marc Hanson, and Mark Kelvin Horton, and still more at Wells Gallery by Junko Ono Rothwell, Karen Larson Turner, and Stephen Scott Young. Principle Gallery offers leading realists like Anthony Ackrill, Michael Lynn Adams, Lynn Boggess, Paige Bradley, Nancy Bush, Rose Frantzen, Greg Gandy, David Hettinger, Jeff Legg, Robert Liberace, Jeremy Mann, Teresa Oaxaca, Sara Linda Poly, Sergio Roffo, John Stobart, and Terry Moore Strickland. Meyer Vogl Gallery displays the paintings of its two namesakes, as well as works by Dan Beck, Anne Blair Brown, Quang Ho, and others.

Similarly, Robert Lange Studios features work Particularly noteworthy among the galleries is Ann Long Fine Art, which represents the classical realist masters Charles Cecil, Daniel Graves, Ben Long, and D. Jeffrey Mims, as well as talents like Jura Bedic, Paul Brown, Kamille Corry, Marc Dalessio, Louise Fenne, Jill Hooper, Elizabeth Leary, Leo Mancini-Hresko, Mario Robinson, Paula Rubino, Jordan Sokol, and Frank Strazzulla. Long also handles superb sculptures by Robert Bodem, as well as the estate of the beloved Charleston painter Alfred Hutty (1877–1954). At the Charleston Renaissance Gallery, visitors find unrivaled depth in Renaissance artists of the 1920s through 1950s. Among the key figures from this period are the aforementioned Alfred Hutty, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Anna Heyward Taylor, Walter W. Thompson, Elizabeth O’Neill Verner, and Bayard Wootten. Be sure to stop by Moore House American Antiques for Charleston Renaissance paintings, drawings, and prints, too.

Corrigan Gallery represents such local standouts as John Hull, Gordon Nicholson, Kristi Ryba, and Sue Simons Wallace,

JULYAN DAVIS (b. 1965), Cypress Gardens, 2016, oil on linen, 20 x 24 in., Helena Fox Fine Art

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PAULA RUBINO (b. 1968), Smyrne Poised under the Glass Ceiling, 2016, oil on linen, 48 x 36 in., Ann Long Fine Art

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(LEFT) MARK BEALE (b. 1962), The Half Shells, oil on canvas, 8 x 10 in., Reinert Fine Art

( B O T T O M ) DAN

KNEPPER (b. 1961), Headed In, 2015, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in., Atelier Gallery

the isolated islands and marshlands stretching from Jacksonville, Florida, north to Wilmington, North Carolina. Dog & Horse Fine Art & Portraiture has everything for devotees of the hunt and kennel, including works by Marty Whaley Adams, Peter Arguimbau, Lese Corrigan, Beth Evans, Joyce Hall, Ian Mason, Nancy Pellatt, Joseph Sulkowski, and Larry Wheeler. Their rival nearby is The Sportsman’s Gallery and Paderewski Fine Art, which handles works by Douglas Aagard, Nelson Boren, Brent Cotton, Mick Doellinger, Jim Eppler, Eldridge Hardie, Ralph Oberg, and Kyle Sims.

by its namesake, plus colleagues including Mia Bergeron, Ali Cavanaugh, and Karin Jurick.

Anglin Smith Fine Art offers the sparkling canvases of Kim English and Shannon Smith Hughes, the observant animal sculptures of Darrell Davis, and the black-and-white photographs of Tripp Smith, who deftly captures the flat, marshy “Lowcountry” along the coast near Charleston. An array of outstanding artworks can be enjoyed at The Sylvan Gallery, including the sculptures of Glenna Goodacre and Richard Loffler, landscapes by William Berra, Roger Dale Brown, Trey Finney, Michael Harrell, and Joseph Orr, and figure paintings by Huihan Liu. At Hagan Fine Art, you’ll find top F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

works by Dee Beard Dean, Tanvi Pathare, Ulrich Gleiter, Daniil Volkov, and the far-flung members of the collective Realism Without Borders.

Mary Martin Gallery of Fine Art offers not only paintings and sculptures, but also a wide range of decorative arts, even muralists who can be commissioned. Nearby, Atelier Gallery offers contemporary paintings and sculptures by such artists as Tony Gill, Paul Hastings, Dan Knepper, Deborah Newman, and Eric Zener.

Several galleries in Charleston have particular specializations. Most intriguing is Gallery Chuma, which features colorful artworks reflecting the Gullah culture that arose in the 19th century when African-Americans settled in

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Charleston’s museums, galleries, and artists work together regularly to engage locals and visitors. The Charleston Gallery Association (CGA) coordinates art walks on the first Friday evening of almost every month, allowing opportunities to explore galleries after regular hours.

A network of downtown businesses will organize the 12th annual Palette and Palate Stroll on a July evening (date not yet set), when galleries open their doors and offer gourmet cuisine prepared by local chefs.

On the weekend of February 17–19, at least 40,000 people will participate in the annual Southeastern Wildlife Exposition, the largest event of its kind in America. Full details appear on page 68. Coming up in March is a wave of activities that kick off the monthlong Festival of Houses and Gardens, during which more than 150 private homes in Charleston’s oldest neighborhoods open their doors to visitors. Also on deck in March is the 9th annual Charleston Antiques Show featuring more than 30 dealers. If you are seeking bargains, keep an eye on the sale schedules of Charleston Auction House and Charleston Estate Auctions, where intriguing antiques and occasionally fine art can surface.

Whenever you visit Charleston, there is bound to be a cultural happening on the docket.

Just be sure to leave enough time to wander the city’s atmospheric streets and shoreline: losing track of time is a key reason to visit this seemingly timeless place.

KELLY COMPTON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.

Information: For details, contact the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, 423 King Street, Charleston, SC 29403, 800.774.0006, charleston cvb.com

ALAN BROCK

C O L L E C T O R P R O F I L E

Alan Brock

paints plein air landscapes in Cambridge, Maryland, surrounded and inspired by more than 150 works made by living artists he admires. Most are small to mediumsized oils depicting an array of subjects — from landscapes and marines to cityscapes, interiors, and still lifes — though some are works on paper, glass, or textiles. Incredibly, most of this trove has been assembled since 2014, so rapidly that Brock is considering hanging portions of it elsewhere in town.

Roughly half of the artists hail from Maryland, with the rest from almost 20 U.S. states and even Canada, Slovakia, and Peru. They are Trisha Adams, Michael Albrechtsen, Kathy Anderson, Jill Basham, Beth Bathe, Tim Bell, Suchitra Bhosle, Bruce Bingham, Eric Bowman, Brenda Boylan, John Brady, Steve Brehm, Carolyn Bunch, Michelle Byrne, Maggie Cao, Chris Carter, John Michael Carter, Jill Carver, Hiu Lai Chong, Janice Cline, Sherrill Cooper, Rita Curtis, Denise Dumont, Louis Escobedo, Patsy Evins, Lynn Ferris, Nathan Fred, Armand Freyte, Martha Gilbert, Erin Pryor Gill, Gavin Glakas, Greg Glowka, R.C. Gorman, Terri Griffin, Jacqueline Hamilton, Marc Hanson, Don Hildebrandt, Janice Yow Hindes, Marcia Holmes, Hai-Ou Hou, Carla Huber, Charlie Hunter, Barbara Jaenicke, Ken Karlic, Shelby Keefe, Tim Kelly, Michael King, Barbara Kiwak, Kathy Kopec, Lindsey Kustusch, Mark Lague, Maureen Leavenworth, Camilla Lewis, Linda Lesperance, David Lloyd, Jeremy Mann, Karen Margulies, Maria Marino, Abigail McBride, Kirk McBride, Jennifer McChristian, Patrick Meehan, Lou Messa, Crystal Moll, Larry Moore, Chris Morrell, Ted Mueller, Brian Murphy, Tibor Nagy, Sara Linda Poly, Anette Power, Ray Roberts, Julia Rogers, Stuart Roper, Cynthia Rosen, John Brandon Sills, D.G. Smith, Richard Sneary, Dan Stouffer, Nancy Tankersley, Carol Lee Thompson, W. Robert Tolley, Thomas Valenti, Stewart White, Nancy Zawacki, and LuAnn Zimmerman.

Creativity has always featured in Brock’s life. An avid draftsman from age 6, he spent his early adolescence in Venezuela, where he relished private classes in oil painting taught by a chain-smoking Ukrainian émigré. It was around then he decided to become an architect, so Brock ignored painting until about 10 years ago, when he bought the necessary supplies but could not manage to restart. The breakthrough came in 2013 while studying with John Brandon Sills, who, like all of Brock’s workshop instructors ever since, is represented in the collection today.

Before 2014, Brock’s collecting was occasional. In 1986, tired of decorating their San Francisco home with posters, he convinced his wife to “empty our (meager) retirement account” and buy limited-edition lithographs by the Navajo artist R. C. Gorman (1931–2005). The focus remained

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on Western and Southwestern art until their move east to South Carolina, then Georgia, and finally Maryland.

Purchases occurred perhaps once or twice per year, usually while traveling or after spotting an artist in an article or online.

Brock’s collecting took on a new energy “about five years ago when I made a concerted effort, becoming a ‘regular’ at a few local galleries.” The best gallerists, he notes, are invaluable resources who educate their clients, and he has special praise for Cynthia McBride (McBride Gallery, Annapolis), from whom he first purchased in 2008.

Brock also buys directly from artists, and at nonprofit fundraisers, plein air festivals, and graduate exhibitions (including Zoll Studios in Lutherville and the Dorchester Center for the Arts, where he sits on the board of directors).

Today Brock keeps a close eye on art magazines, gallery websites, and

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artists’ Facebook pages, sometimes targeting specific talents: “I knew I wanted a work by Jill Carver, but it took me two years before I bought one”; now he has two, and the same applies to Charlie Hunter. “I’m always looking,” Brock admits. “A while ago I was searching online for Southwestern landscapes and came across the Atlanta artist Karen Margulis. Now I have three of her pastels. I started reading her blog and one day she linked to Barbara Jaenicke of Oregon.

I now have two of her oils. I especially like to learn which artists are collected by the artists I admire. For example, [the painter] Nancy Tankersley and her husband, Carl, have a terrific collection.” Brock thinks so highly of this couple that he recently purchased the charming South Street Art Gallery they operate in Easton, Maryland, only 17 miles from his home.

It’s not all work, of course; Brock truly enjoys meeting fellow artists at events, usually just by introducing himself and saying how much he admires them: “Voilà! Instant friendships.” As for collector role models, Brock recently met Tim Newton, chairman of New York City’s Salmagundi Club and the subject of previous profiles in this magazine. Like Newton, he would like to own more historical works, though he wonders “if I’ve already collected the next Joaquín Sorolla or Edgar Payne.... But then I realize I may never know!”

Brock is optimistic about the kind of art shown in Fine Art Connoisseur, preferring to call it “representational” or “figurative” because “realist” suggests “an almost photographic rendering, technically compelling but perhaps lacking soul.” He continues, “I see today’s representational artists pushing the boundaries, experimenting with unique perspectives and techniques, where texture and movement are as important as subject. In some cases, this leads to a degree of abstraction, or perhaps minimalism.

Lindsey Kustusch and Mark Lague are examples of what I mean.”

Asked to advise a new collector, Brock offers constructive advice: “Do your homework, know what you can spend before you attend the opening or show, and when your ‘gut’ tells you to act, then act!”

(OPP OSITE) (THIS

NANCY TANKERSLEY (b. 1949), Heading for Big Water, 2015, oil on linen, 24 x 24 in.

P A G E ) JOHN BRANDON SILLS (b. 1960), Nocturne Reflections, 2014, oil on linen, 16 x 12 in.

SHARON & MIKîŒŁ COîŒŚîŒŁ

C O L L E C T O R P R O F I L E

Sharon Cole

Mike Cole

(O P P O S IT E PAG E , TO P) JASHI GIEORGI (lifedates unknown), Portrait of Girl Holding

Thread,

1981,

oil on linen, 38 x 28 in.

(OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM) ILYA YATSENKO (b. 1975), Small Town, 2013, oil on panel, 20 x 27 in.

are high school sweethearts from rural Ohio, the state where they still live.

Growing up, they had no exposure to visual art, and it was only when they reached Ohio State University that Sharon discovered Russian culture during what she expected would be an “easy Aâ€? course. Having gotten “hooked,â€? she took more electives on every aspect of Russia that would ďŹ t into her crowded pre-med schedule.

Life got busy after graduation: marriage, medical school, three children, and a successful oncology practice.

(Mike became a writer.) The couple had no time to decorate their home with art (an uncle called her “Plain Wall Sharonâ€?), and even when the couple ďŹ nally made it to Russia in 1995, they did not concentrate on its art.

Everything changed in 2013. During a break from Sharon’s medical conference in Washington, D.C., the Coles explored the Hillwood Estate, Museum, and Gardens, the palatial mansion of the General Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887– 1973). Initially enticed by the fact that the museum holds the most comprehensive collection of Russian artworks outside of Russia, they were astonished by the monumental canvas A Boyar Wedding Feast in the Seventeenth Century, painted in 1883 by Konstantin Makovsky (1839–1915). (For details on this 13-foot-wide masterwork, see the February 2016 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur.) Sharon was transďŹ xed by its evocation of traditional Russian life, while Mike marveled at the realism of its details, including costumes, jewelry, even the cooked swan the guests are about to devour. During their visit, they returned twice to marvel at it, just “wanting to absorb it into our souls.â€?

As soon as they got home, Mike drove to Cleveland to buy books about Makovsky and the Wanderers, his circle of 19th-century Russian realist painters so named for sending art-

works on touring exhibitions. (They are often called the Itinerants for the same reason.) Within a few months, Sharon and Mike were visiting Moscow and St. Petersburg with private guides, spending most of the day in museums and most of the night reading their newly purchased books on Russian art.

Having decided they must own a Russian painting, the Coles headed south in October 2013 to spend three days with John and Kathy Wurdeman, who run Lazare Gallery in Charles City, Virginia — between Richmond and Williamsburg. (Mike had learned online that Lazare is a leading purveyor of the Moscow school of realist painters.) Together the quartet set goals, with Sharon concluding that she wanted only paintings that have “cousinsâ€? in Russia’s museums. John agreed, adding, “You should never buy an artwork you don’t want to look at every day.â€? On that ďŹ rst visit, the Coles purchased three museum-quality pictures: the Wanderer Aleksei Stepanovich Stepanov’s charming scene of two kerchiefed women driving a sleigh through snow (c. 1910), Nikita Fedosov’s view of a village’s outskirts in golden sunlight (1979), and the noble portrait of a young Georgian woman painted by Jashi Gieorgi in 1981 (illustrated here). Recalling the moment they ďŹ rst saw their purchases hanging at home, the Coles admit “our lives have never been the same since then.â€?

A few months later, in January 2014, the Coles joined the Wurdemans on a buying trip to Moscow; though the temperature hovered around zero, Sharon and Mike’s hearts were warmed when they spotted “cousins� of their paintings in the museums of Moscow.

There they visited the Surikov Institute (see page 45), the famous Kugach family of painters, the widow of the great Vyacheslav Zabelin (1935–2001), and Nikolai Kozlov (b. 1948), who was still living with his elderly mother in J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

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a tiny apartment. Their guide for this adventure was the realist painter Ilya Yatsenko, who invited them to dine at home with his young family and brought them to his own exhibition.

Later in 2014, the Coles acquired (from Lazare) Yatsenko’s ethereal scene illustrated here, which shows the view from his front window, and also a striking portrait of a schoolboy painted by Arkadi Alexandrovich Plastov in the late 1950s. Despite that rare visit to Zabelin’s home, Mike never quite “got� that recently deceased master; this changed in 2015, however, when his large, luminous scene of women relaxing on a summer evening impressed Mike with its “powerful presence.�

This 1985 work now hangs in the Coles’ home, too.

Not all of the Coles’s treasures are from Lazare. In December 2015, they opened a catalogue from MacDougall’s — a London-based auctioneer that specializes in Russian art — to ďŹ nd Makovsky’s portrait of his daughter Olga. Though they could not inspect it, they knew the ďŹ rm is reputable, so they slept by their phone, surrounded

by Makovsky books. At ďŹ ve in the morning (ten in London), they began bidding by telephone and were thrilled to get Olga quickly. No sooner had she arrived than the Coles learned that Hillwood would soon mount a Makovsky exhibition. Although its checklist had been ďŹ nalized, Olga’s portrait charmed the curators, who asked to add it. Undeterred by nighttime driving on icy roads, the Coles brought her to Washington, where she hung in glory for six months.

Sharing their enthusiasm comes naturally to the Coles; this January they will lend their Plastov to Minneapolis’s Museum of Russian Art for its exhibition of Soviet paintings of children. “We love our paintings,� Sharon explains. “They have truly enriched our lives, and that’s why we want them to be enjoyed by others, too.�

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George Fraise

(O P P O S I T E PAG E , TO P) MORGAN WEISTLING (b.

1964), Snake Oil Salesman, 2015, oil on linen, 36 x 56 in.

(OPPOSITE

PAGE, BOTTOM) DANIEL GERHARTZ (b. 1965), From the Garden, 2012 , oil on linen, 40 x 30 in.

GORG RAIS drew and painted from a young age, and, though he realized he had no particular technical skill, he always appreciated the fact that artworks can convey stories compellingly. Ultimately he became an investment manager in Connecticut, and his admiration for the storytelling that artists do through their compositions endures.

“I seek out stories that move me,” Fraise notes, “depicted in paintings that enhance the quality of my life.”

This impulse has resulted in a collection with three focuses: contemporary scenes of the American West, glimpsed in both the past and present; mid-20th-century Soviet socialist realism; and European impressionism (19th- and 20th-century). Evident across these categories is Fraise’s interest in children and people living in the countryside.

It was roughly 25 years ago that Fraise became able to afford paintings: his first purchase was a Saharan scene by the French Orientalist Charles-Théodore Frère (1814–1888), and the others were mostly contemporary. Yet he sold or gave away all of them within the next seven years: “I did not quite understand what my own taste was,” he explains, “or even the process of collecting. I enjoyed those pictures, but they were so eclectic that they could not hold together on the same wall.”

Before “getting back in the game,” Fraise decided to learn all he could about different artists and movements, reading widely and visiting museums. These were enjoyable, inexpensive ways to train his eye and mind, providing the vocabulary he needed to chat with experts like curators and dealers. Once he felt clear about his own tastes, Fraise started building relationships with dealers who handled the artists he admired. Among the standouts have been InSight Galleries (Fredericksburg, TX), “who have transcended the merely commercial.” Fraise has generally avoided auctions and fairs because they are overtly commercial, oriented to neither education nor relaxed conversation.

The contemporary Western portion of his collection features a wide range of artists. Probably the largest group (roughly a dozen) was made by Morgan Weistling, who is now a personal friend. Fraise relishes the compositional and narrative complexity of such large scenes as Snake Oil Salesman (illustrated here) and Prairie Church. He notes, for example, that a figure in one painting may appear obliquely in another, underscoring Weistling’s desire to evoke the continuity of a community, not just isolated episodes.

Also represented in depth is the painter Daniel Gerhartz, with whom Fraise has chatted and corresponded extensively. No matter how he has acquired a painting, he always enjoys learning directly from the artists about the motivations underlying their compositions, the steps in their technical process, etc. Both Weistling and Gerhartz, Fraise believes, “transcend the Western genre. When you acquire another painting by one of them, it’s never

redundant; it only adds to the breadth of the greater vision they are conveying.”

Equally sophisticated compositions appear in Fraise’s paintings by Mian Situ, best known for multi-figure scenes of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. Particularly captivating is Situ’s large A Short Respite, Central Pacific Railroad, Sierra Nevada 1867, which underscores the sacrifices made by Chinese workers building the Transcontinental Railroad. In 2015, Fraise loaned this masterwork to the Nevada Museum of Art for its exhibition Tahoe: A Visual History, and was pleased that others could enjoy it there. Working in a similar mode is Jie Wei Zhou, whom Fraise commissioned to paint a very large scene. Artist and patron considered several subjects, including a public announcement in late 19th-century Chinatown (which would entail depicting a mix of races and ages), but Zhou ultimately landed upon the innovative motif of a Chinese puppet show being enjoyed by delighted children and adults of different backgrounds.

Still another favorite in the collection, and its only wildlife artist, is Dustin Van Wechel, who has also created a work on commission. Fraise admires his gift for capturing light and his reluctance to glorify animals and beautiful landscapes for their own sake; rather, Van Wechel presents them in context, conveying the raw power and even ferocity of nature. Other talents represented — too numerous to detail here — are Carla D’Aguanno, Jim Daly, Steve Hanks, G. Harvey, Mark Haworth, Damian Lechozest, Michael Malm, JoAnn Peralta, Alfredo Rodriguez, and Brittany Weistling.

Fraise says that he always enjoys reading about other collectors, recognizing that “someday, someone else will look over my collection as a whole, seeing it as representing one individual’s passion and worldview.” In this regard, collecting is a creative act, one that allows the collector to share insights with onlookers. “When they hear I have contemporary art, my peers expect it be ‘New York Modern,’” Fraise muses. “So when they find these living storyteller-artists interspersed with much earlier, and very comparable, Russian and European painters, they are surprised. Fortunately, the accessibility of these works makes it easy to get into interesting conversations, once the surprise has worn off.”

When he is studying a possible acquisition, Fraise’s heart (his emotion) and head (his intellect and his budget) must align: “Believe me, I often regret the ones that got away. In those situations, the heart said yes, but the head said no.” Happily, many artworks made it through, and he now displays roughly 95 percent of them in his two homes, though open wall space is becoming scarce. Most importantly, Fraise, his wife, and their children live with their artworks, never buying for investment or to hold in storage.

Their enjoyment comes shining through in the way Fraise discusses his treasures, which he intends to keep for a very long time to come.

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DON B. HUNY Don B. Huntley

(O P P O S I T E PAG E , TO P) D. EDWARD KUCERA (b.

1961), To Live and Dance, 2008, oil on canvas , 40 x 60 in.

grew up in California’s San Gabriel Valley, an only child raised by a widowed mother who had been struck by polio earlier in life. In this challenging yet nurturing scenario, Huntley developed no interest in art, but instead a reverence for the romance of the Old West. Ultimately he became a successful farmer in the San Joaquin Valley, which provides 25 percent of America’s food supply, and he became particularly well known for his innovative growing of both pistachios and cherries.

He has also excelled as an investor in biotechnology and as a real estate agent in agricultural property, though he maintains he is just “a cowboy at heart,” happiest while traveling throughout the West admiring its landscapes and people.

Huntley first came to collect artworks, then, for their Western subject matter. Two decades ago, he made his first major acquisition at a Nevada gallery, where he stumbled upon a dramatic scene of a storm over Yosemite painted by the Texas artist Larry Dyke. He has gone on to assemble a trove of roughly 100 paintings depicting Western animals, Southwestern landscapes, and the people of the West — including its Anglo, Native, Asian, and Hispanic residents.

Huntley also collects relevant objects such as saddles and pipes, as well as

minerals and gemstones tied to his lifelong fascination with mining.

Among the artists represented in the Huntley Collection are Roy Andersen, Bill Anton, Greg Beecham, Gordon Brown, Bruce Cheever, Michael Coleman, Nicholas Coleman, Brent Cotton, David Dalton, Ewoud De Groot, Andrew Denman, Dennis Doheny, Kelly Donovan, Larry Dyke, Mark Eberhard, Lori Forest, Lanny Grant, Logan Maxwell Hagege, Matthew Hillier, David Jonason, Clark Kelly Price, D. Edward Kucera, Mehl Lawson, Bonnie Marris, Buck McCain, Tom Murray, Ralph Oberg, Doug Oliver, Roger Ore, Robert Peters, Williams S. Phillips, Donald “Putt” Putman, Chris Rankin, Kyle Sims, Mian Situ, Daniel Smith, Michael Stack, Richard D. Thomas, Dustin Van Wechel, Lynn Wade, Curt Walters, Jeffrey Watts, Robert Weibel, and David Yorke.

Huntley says that he has purchased most of these artworks from Trailside Galleries in Jackson, Wyoming, though he has also been an enthusiastic patron of the Masters of the American West exhibition and sale. Created 21 years ago by his late friend John Geraghty (profiled in the February 2015 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur), that annual event benefits Los Angeles’s Autry Museum of the American West, where Huntley sits on the board of trustees.

Huntley relishes the fact that he has met almost all of the artists represented in his collection, and he observes that the field seems to be shifting away from scenes of cowboys and Indians toward landscapes, animals, and other genre scenes. Most of his artworks have already been donated or promised to the newly created Huntley Art Gallery at his beloved alma mater, Cal Poly Pomona, part of the California State University system. Originally thinking he would go into cattle ranching, Huntley studied animal husbandry here, and has ever since been a generous supporter of its college of agriculture, which has been renamed for him. (The Huntley Art Gallery is operated by Cal Poly’s college of environmental design.)

Huntley’s desire to possess images of the Western region he loves reminds us that art collecting is never strictly about form, color, composition, or execution. Knowledgeable as Huntley has become about those aesthetic matters, it is clearly the spirit and truthfulness of his artworks that excite him the most. Surely Cal Poly Pomona students and faculty do — and will continue to — appreciate the unique opportunity to share in his pleasure for many years to come.

(OPPOSITE

PAGE, BOTTOM) BONNIE MARRIS (b. 1951), Her Power and Her Glory, n.d., oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in.

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PAGE,

CHRISTOPHER

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neighborhood. Moreover, their owners are invaluable sources of information and advice, especially when it comes to emerging artists to keep an eye on: “Suddenly,” he laughs, “you find yourself in the backseat of a car headed to see an artist’s studio.... It is a wonderful community that way.” Over the past decade, McIntyre has noticed a trend toward looser, “more forgiving” techniques and compositions, a development that is broadening our general conception of figuration.

McIntyre enjoys meeting “the artists we collect, who are usually very interesting people,” and he emphasizes the satisfaction he feels in supporting younger artists and watching them succeed. A particularly close friendship has been formed with the marine painter Christopher James Ward: “When Chris decided to sell the house he grew up in, in New Castle, New Hampshire, along with the studio where he created many of his paintings, including two of the five we own, he asked us to buy it. We did. His studio is now where I write my novels. I love that, on any given day, I can look down at the wooden floors and see the paint that dropped from his brush.” McIntyre has connected with

yet another New Castle artist, Kim Massaro. When she learned that he did not like her landscape paintings, she brought him some of her charcoal drawings: “When she started unrolling them, I said, ‘Now these are real works, full of your emotion and energy.’”

Today he owns six of them and is collaborating with Massaro to create a children’s book.

McIntyre admits that all available wall space has now been filled, so some artworks are being rotated — “a great problem to have.” He adds, “My favorite piece today will not be the same a few weeks from now. Artworks can influence you differently ff over time; that’s one of the things I love about collecting.” And then there is the occasional regret: about 16 years ago, he would often swing by Principle Gallery (Alexandria, Virginia) to admire Martin Poole’s painting of a young woman. It was priced higher than McIntyre had previously paid for an artwork, and so he just could not decide whether to buy it. One day, however, he discovered it had been sold: “I have never forgotten that feeling of loss, which has guided me ever since. If a piece moves us and is within our budget, we buy it.”

has always enjoyed visiting art museums, and was predisposed to the idea of art collecting thanks to his parents: his father bought Western prints and limited-edition sculptural casts, while his mother adorned their home with antiques. He grew more interested after graduating from law school and moving to Richmond, where a friend introduced him to the local art scene. One day they visited the studio of Christus Murphy, who was painting a female nude with a head derived from one of the famous standing figures on Easter Island.

McIntyre was intrigued and bought the study, and later the final version. It was then he “caught the bug,” and fortunately his wife caught it, too.

Since then, they have built a collection that includes paintings by Carole Bolsey, Joseph Cave, Louise C. Fenne, Douglas Fryer, Philip Geiger, Heidi Groonwald, Sheep Jones, Jeremy Mann, Kim Massaro, Michele Montalbano, Christus Murphy, Daniel Ochoa, Ann Piper, Martin Poole, Roger Preston, Joyce Stratton, and Cassie Taggart. Almost all have been acquired from galleries, and indeed McIntyre believes that supporting local galleries is crucial to the vibrancy of a city or

Chuck McIntyre

(OPPOSITE

CHUCK Mc McI

TOP) JAMES

WARD (b. 1968), Building Seas, 2011, oil on linen, 18 x 36 in.

(OPPOSITE PAGE,

BOTTOM) JEREMY MANN (b. 1979), Evening in Green, 2012, oil on panel, 36 x 36 in.

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DAVID & VIRGINIA MULLINS

Virginia Mullins

David Mullins

(O P P O S I T E PA G E , T O P) ROBERT GRIFFING (b.

1940), Passing through the Gorge, 2004, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in.

(OPPOSITE

PAG E , B OT TO M) C R A I G TENNANT (b. 1946), Don’t Even Breathe, 2008, oil on linen, 40 x 60 in.

live in San Antonio, where he once practiced pediatrics and neonatology.

They made their first art purchase together during their 1964 honeymoon, when — as “virtually penniless” students — they stumbled upon the artists exhibiting around Jackson Square in New Orleans. “We decided to buy a pair of paintings for the princely sum of $35–$50, rather than eat at a nice restaurant,” they laugh. “We had them in our living room for many years, but now they are relegated to the attic.”

Fourteen years later, the couple grew interested in Western and Native American art when they moved into a house with an empty brick wall above its fireplace. ”While looking for something to fill it, we wandered into a gallery on San Antonio’s Riverwalk and were immediately drawn to the ‘cowboys and Indians’ pieces.” Since then, the Mullins’ tastes “have progressed to wildlife and landscapes, with some Civil War scenes thrown in,” but they remain keen collectors of Native American pottery, rugs, baskets, and beadwork, as well as child-related objects such as cradles, dolls, and umbilical fetishes.

The Mullins explain that San Antonio still lacks a gallery with good Western and Native American art, and until 2013 did not have a museum devoted to this field either.

This means they could buy art only when they went out of town; during their working years, that usually coincided with medical conferences. Early on, therefore, “We bought a lot at local and regional charity events such as the rodeo Kiwanis art show (mainly Texas artists), fairs, and auctions.

But as we became more sophisticated — and had more money — we began visiting more galleries in other cities and attending the better benefit shows.” Covered regularly in Fine Art Connoisseur, the latter are operated by such leading institutions as the Autry Museum of the American West, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, Gilcrease Museum, and Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians & Western Art. There, the Mullins note, “We were able to see and buy a broader range of more accomplished artists.”

Buying only after they have thoroughly discussed the piece, Virginia and David now own paintings by many artists of national stature, including John Buxton, Bruce Cheever, Don Crowley, Loren Entz, John Fawcett, Robert Griffing, Logan Maxwell Hagege, David Halbach, George Hallmark, G. Harvey, Karin Hollebeke, Terry Isaac, Mort Künstler, Bonnie Marris, Krystii Melaine, Denis Milhomme, Gary Niblett, Ann Osenga, Robert Peters, Heide Presse, Daniel Smith, Don Spaulding, Oleg Stavrowsky, Robert Summers, Craig Tennant, Sonya Terpening, Jack Terry, Andy Thomas,

Richard Thomas, Joseph Velazquez, Curt Walters, and David Wright. Their sculptures have been made by Gerald Balciar, Juan Dell, Glenna Goodacre, Bob Grieves, Oreland Joe, Ken Payne, Jo Saylor, and Lowell Talashoma.

Among their artists better known regionally are Garnet Buster, James Eddleman, Steve Forbis, Sherry Gribbons, Bob Guelich, Armando Hinojosa, Tony Jackson, Glen Lyles, Bruce Marshall, J. Rangel Morales, Willard Morin, Dennis Schmidt, Martha Spurlock, Donald Vann, Ralph Wall, Richard Weers, Jack White, K. White Whitley, and Donald Yena.

Today, the Mullins cannot bring themselves to sell an artwork, even though collector friends have urged them to so that they can purchase more. In fact, finding sufficient wall space and getting the lighting right are “always huge challenges, but then so is having deep enough pockets.”

Choosing favorite works is also difficult. When pressed, Virginia and David point to their four canvases by Robert Griffing, to Craig Tennant’s hunting scene Don’t Even Breathe (“which makes you want to whisper”), to Don Spaulding’s The Rescue, and to Loren Entz’s A Gift from Grandpa’s Heart. They have especially fond memories of acquiring G. Harvey’s Civil War scene Lee and Longstreet: “We dropped by Trailside Galleries in Jackson Hole and put our absentee bid into the draw. Three weeks later, we got a call saying we had won it — the most expensive painting we had ever pursued! After the shock wore off, we asked if there had even been any other bids in the box. We were assured it was full and that many people had been disappointed when our name was called.”

Surveying the field now, David and Virginia feel that landscape and wildlife are as prevalent as “cowboys and Indians,” though some people question whether the former can fairly be described as “Western.” (The Mullins think “yes.”)

Much of the fun, they add, has been getting to know the artists, some of whom “we have entertained in our home, and many of whom we would gladly visit if we had the time to.” They have also enjoyed meeting other collectors, and particularly admire two fellow patrons: Betsy Harvey and Wayne Rumley, whose “marvelous” collections have been displayed at the Eiteljorg and Gilcrease, respectively.

In order to control their collecting “addiction,” the Mullins now limit themselves to attending the museum shows and the occasional gallery show. The art on offer at the museum events is top-notch, and through them the Mullins have developed a circle of friends and kindred spirits they are always happy to see again.

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BOB & JUDI NWMAN Judi Newman

Bob Newman

(O P P O S I T E

PA G E ,

T O P ) Z V O N I M I R M I H A N O V I Ć (b . 1 9 4 6 ) , Generations

Together,

2012, oil on linen, 32 x 39 1/2 in.

(OPPOSITE

PAG E , B OT TO M) K A R E N LAMONTE (b. 1967), Ojigi Bowing, 2010, bronze, 51 x 23 x 16 1/2 in. (overall); both photos: Martin Polak

have been married for 48 years and are devoted residents of Denver, where they are admired for their generous support of local institutions, including the University of Denver’s performing arts center, which bears their names. In 1997, Bob’s successful application software firm went public, and now he owns a venture capital firm.

Bob explains, “Our parents had no art and never visited museums, and before 1997 we owned only a few lithographs and decorative pieces.” After the public offering, however, they decided to learn more about art, so a contact at JP Morgan recommended a consultant specializing in European art ranging from the Old Masters to modernism: that turned out to be Deborah Gage in London. “Debo Gage has been a key resource ever since,” Judi says, “helping us to identify and refine our interests and brokering our first acquisition, Cristoforo Munari’s A Still Life with Fruit and Musical Instruments [c. 1720].” Although the Newmans glean ideas from other collectors and from the museums they support (especially the Denver Art Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum), “We buy only what appeals to us, regardless of style, and we both must like a work in order to buy it.”

The Newmans acquire more at art fairs than anywhere else, “mostly because we can see a variety of works, talk to knowledgeable people, and comparison-shop. Although we have bought at several auction houses, they have been lax on the service end, offering little or no advice.” The couple has also bought through Deborah Gage, of course, from galleries, and directly from artists. Bob notes that they are particularly friendly with the Croatian painter Zvonimir Mihanović, who has visited them in America and who kindly showed them around his homeland several years ago.

Today the Newmans own approximately 400 artworks in various media, with a significant number made of glass.

Their historical paintings and sculptures range from the 14th through the 20th centuries, including such starry names as David Teniers, Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Stuart Davis, Hans Hofmann, and George Rickey.

As for living artists, it’s a remarkably diverse group, encompassing both realism and abstraction. Represented are Xie Aige, Craig Alan, Peter Anton, Rafael Barrios, David Bennett, Guy Buffet, Dale Chihuly, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jeremy Dickinson, Jim Dine, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Angela Ellsworth, Juan Genovés, Red Grooms, Jacob Hashimoto, Charles Hinman, Patrick Hughes, Victor Issa, Paul Jauregui, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, Karen LaMonte, Stephen LeBlanc, Tom McKinley, Zvonimir Mihanović, Takashi Murakami, Desmond O’Hagan, Hisashi Otsuka, Tom Otterness, Evan Penny, Rotraut, Lino Tagliapietra, Wayne Thiebaud, Boaz Vaadia, Luciano Ventrone, and Yang Yanping. Hovering between past and present are the recently deceased painters Claudio Bravo and Joellyn Duesberry.

Helping the Newmans manage this trove are a part-time curator, various freelance art advisers (including Gage), and a contract conservator who steps in when a new acquisition needs stabilization. As in any serious pursuit, there have been regrets: “A few times,” Judi recalls, “we have been advised not to buy a particular piece because it is overpriced, of poor quality, or inferior to other examples available elsewhere. In all of those instances, we have kicked ourselves later for not following our instincts, because we never found anything appropriate later. All in all, though, our collecting experience has been fun, educational, and rewarding.”

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JORDAN D. SCHNIîŒ¨îŒŠîŒŁR

muses that, for him, “waking up without art would be like waking up without the sun.

When you live with art around you, your mind and soul are ďŹ lled with the beauty of life and the creativity of the human spirit.â€? Schnitzer’s passion for art came from his mother, Arlene, who in 1961 opened the ďŹ rst gallery of contemporary art in Portland, Oregon. Among her achievements was mounting the ďŹ rst show devoted to the now-renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly, and turning her son on to modern art. When he was in the third grade, Jordan admired a “funny-lookingâ€? box with drawers containing prints. In one of those drawers, he saw a print by the boundary-pushing British modernist Stanley William Hayter. Jordan’s mother asked him if he liked it. He said yes, so she purchased it for her son. At 14, he acquired his ďŹ rst painting by the revered Portland artist Louis Bunce; his mother discounted the $75 list price to $60, and she collected a monthly payment of $5 until it was fully paid for. Since then, Schnitzer has sustained his family’s legacy of support-

Jordan D. Schnitzer

(THIS

PAGE)

ing PaciďŹ c Northwest artists, and he encourages his friends and neighbors to do the same.

After earning an undergraduate degree in literature and then a law degree, Schnitzer became president of Harsch Investment Properties, his family’s real estate investment and development company, which is active in six Western states. Over time, he had acquired one of the largest collections of contemporary PaciďŹ c Northwest artists, and in 1988 he began buying prints in earnest. Today his collection — and that of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation — constitute the largest private holding of prints and multiples made in America after 1945. They number 8,000 strong, and are complemented by a further 2,000 works not on paper: the latter include paintings, sculptures, glass, and other items, especially from the Northwest. In total, approximately 250 artists are represented, including such icons as Andy Warhol, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jasper Johns. Readers of Fine Art Connoisseur are more likely to admire such talents as Rob-

ert Bechtle, Larry Bell, Vija Celmins, Chuck Close, John Currin, Peter Doig, Richard Estes, Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Red Grooms, David Hockney, Julia Jacquette, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Kerry James Marshall, Elizabeth Peyton, Wayne Thiebaud, Mickalene Thomas, and Sherrie Wolf. This trove is supervised by a professional staff of four who work with Schnitzer to facilitate the exhibitions he organizes.

Owning such a large and important collection only to keep it in storage would be a shame: Schnitzer asks rhetorically, “What could be worse than writing and publishing a book and then having one person purchase all of the copies and store them in a basement somewhere, unread?� His solution was to create what is essentially a lending library; his team allows museum professionals to pull from his collection to create exhibitions that travel to regional museums and university galleries. Since the late 1990s, more than 100 such shows have appeared at 100 venues nationwide, highlighting individual artists and an array of themes.

ALEX

KATZ (b. 1927), Orange Hat, 1990, screenprint in 24 colors on paper, 18 1/4 x 36 1/8 in. Š Alex Katz, 1990 (OPP OSITE

PAG E)

SHERRIE WOLF (b. 1952), Self-Portrait

with

My

Museum, 2014, oil on linen, 90 x 60 in, Š Sherrie Wolf, 2014

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Many have appeared at institutions in the heartland that could not otherwise afford or access such high quality. Schnitzer’s family foundation also underwrites these venues’ distribution of free brochures, transportation of schoolchildren for field trips, lectures by artists or scholars, and other community events.

Through these offerings, Schnitzer has seen how powerfully the art of our time resonates. Viewers are intrigued by the currency of its themes, and also by the excitingly innovative techniques that arise when artists and printmakers collaborate. Schnitzer himself admires how such leading-edge workshops as Tamarind, Gemini GEL, and Crown Point Press continue to push the envelope, helping artists make prints that hardly resemble those Rembrandt or Dürer created. He adds that the relative accessibility of prints (compared with unique paintings) has made it possible for him to offer large retrospectives of modern masters; just for example, he could not afford more than a few original paintings by Chuck Close, yet he now owns virtually every print from every phase of that artist’s career.

Schnitzer has been a generous donor and trustee across the Pacific Northwest, and especially in Oregon, which is thriving thanks to its many charms, and because young transplants from such states as California and Washington find Oregon more affordable. He notes, “Every person, but especially young people, must have the opportunity to experience the arts. What better place to further that goal than our college campuses?” That’s why Schnitzer has made major naming contributions to the art museums at the University of Oregon (his alma mater) and Washington State University, and why he underwrites activities at Pacific Northwest College of Art and Oregon College of Art and Craft.

Within the relatively small field of American printmaking, Schnitzer is much admired for the activities described above, and also for underwriting the publication of artists’ catalogue raisonnés and other volumes devoted to such bold-faced names as Warhol, Stella, Kelly, and Baldessari. Though he buys regularly from galleries, auctions, and artists, he is particularly fond of the superb fair organized in New York City every November by the International Fine Print Dealers of America. There he underwrites its annual lecture by a leading artist, and he can usually be found wandering its stands exercising his eye. When he spies something new, he asks exhibitors what drew them to that work, and he encourages all collectors — regardless of their budget — to dig deeper, too.

Engaging in such conversations is the part of the journey Schnitzer most relishes: he is passionate about art and about sharing it. One easy way to share the joy of your collecting journey, he suggests, is to stop giving your colleagues pens and watches for their milestones (like anniversaries): instead, commission a local artist (as Schnitzer did recently with Tom Cramer) to create unique works that the recipients will cherish forever.

C O L L E C T O R P R O F I L E

BOB & SHARMAN WILSON Bob Wilson

Sharman Wilson

(O P P O S I T E PAG E , TO P) BART WALKER (b. 1959), Early

Summer

Moonrise,

2015, oil on linen, 24 x 36 in..

(OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM)

PRISCILLA

enjoy the diversity of America’s natural beauty by splitting their time among three scenic homes: an Idaho ranch near the Grand Tetons (complete with an 18-hole golf course), another ranch in Northern California, and a beachfront getaway on Florida’s Sugarloaf Key. Brought up in California, Bob learned about artistry from his mother, who painted landscapes when she was not helping to run their family grocery store. Her son became an attorney, and as soon as he could afford to, he bought an amateur painter’s scene of the California ghost town of Bodie. Bob hung it proudly in his law office, but was startled to discover a few months later that it had been quietly replaced by a thief — with a better painting.

Bob Wilson went on to become a member of the California State Assembly and then the Senate; during the latter period he sat on the board of the California Arts Council.

While working in the State Capitol, he came to love its large wilderness scenes painted by Granville Redmond (1871–1935), and soon sought out similar examples by the “Early California” artists at the Oakland Museum. Eventually Bob was making regular visits to San Francisco’s Maxwell Galleries, which handled landscapes by such talents as Percy Gray, Edgar Payne, and James Everett Stuart. These historic masters were deeply out of fashion in the 1970s, so, in just one year, Bob bought 20 can-

vases, partly because they reminded him of the countryside he had known as a boy. Eventually he began painting his own landscapes en plein air, and he continues this successful pursuit today as Robert Jewell Wilson. Bob and his wife, Sharman, sold some of their early 20th-century masterworks during the process of buying several ranches in Idaho and building their home there, though they still hold a significant collection of Early California art.

Bob’s own passion for painting led naturally to buying landscapes by other living artists. He and Sharman agree on every acquisition, buying only what they like, never with an eye on investment value. The couple visits galleries together, and once a purchase is made, they often receive photographs of new works by the same artists for their consideration.

Not surprisingly, a particular strength of the Wilson Collection is landscapes of the American West, undergirded by a library of almost 400 books on this subject. Bob has commissioned Idaho’s Bart Walker to paint every hole of his golf course; that series closes with Walker’s selfportrait and a portrait of the course designer, David Druzisky. Other landscapists represented here are Josh Clare, Carroll Collier, Anita Hampton, Kevin Macpherson, Jim McVicker, Jay Moore, Bruce Park, Greg Scheibel, Matt Smith, Kathryn Stats, Jim Wilcox (with whom Bob studied briefly), and Kathy Wipfler. Bob confides that

he is eager to complement this trove with paintings by Montana’s Clyde Aspevig and England’s Trevor Chamberlain.

When they reach Florida every winter, Bob and Sharman refocus on that region’s many talents. They own 20 luminous paintings by Mike Rooney, plus fine examples by Priscilla Coote (with whom Bob has studied), Margaret Caldwell Brown, James Kerr, David Klein, William North, Frank Sadera, Jim Salem, John Allston Sargent III, and Peter Vey. Bob also owns a painting by Mike Stidham; though he hails from Utah, Stidham paints fish swimming in clear waters that might easily be Floridian. Figures are not absent from the Wilson Collection either, as seen in the works of Nancy Guzik and Gregg Kreutz.

The Wilsons enjoy meeting artists and buying directly from them when possible, and Bob especially benefits from these friendships, sometimes paying homage in his own paintings. The couple’s homes are now filled with art, not all of it catalogued yet; some has even been consigned to storage because it just won’t fit. They have already given several pieces to their grown children and plan more such gifts. One Father’s Day, however, that flow reversed course: the Wilsons’ daughter, Sharman, presented Bob with a landscape that she had painted herself. Ever the proud parent, he maintains this is now the best painting in the collection.

COOTE (b. 1956), Pink Sail, 2012, oil on linen, 30 x 40 in.

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Lisa Wirthlin

Bill Wirthlin

(OPPOSITE DANIEL (b.

PAGE, W.

1952),

TOP)

PINKHAM

Vapors,

2012,

oil on canvas, 40 x 40 in.

(OPPOSITE

PAGE,

BOTTOM) T. ALLEN LAWSON (b. 1963), Christmas Dinner, 2014, oil on linen, 30 x 30 in.

ISA & BI WIRHIN

see their art collecting as a “fascinating and fun journey.” Lisa was fortunate to grow up in Kaysville, Utah, where her mother was an active collector and patron, and where she and the other ladies of this small community formed an art club that still exists. After Lisa married Bill, they visited her family’s neighbor LeConte Stewart (1891–1990), the gifted painter renowned nationally for his luminous scenes of barns and fields under cultivation, many of them surrounding Kaysville. Inviting them into his studio, Stewart shared amusing stories from his past, as well as profound insights into his artistry. (“He was a character,” Lisa laughs.) He also made it easy for this couple, still in their early 20s, to purchase their first painting together — one of the landscapes for which he was noted — and of course they cherish it today.

After just a few more purchases, it became clear that the guiding theme of the Wirthlins’ collection was the “Agrarian West,” one that still resonates deeply for them both. “The paintings in our home have a conversation,” Lisa says. “They speak to each other about the beauty of nature and of work outdoors.” Today, in addition to Stewart, the collection encompasses such historical artists as E. Irving Couse, Lee Deffebach, Gerald Delano, Maynard Dixon, Don Olson, Joseph Henry Sharp, Doug Snow, Minerva Teichert, and — acquired most recently — Andy Warhol. As for living artists, they include Len Chmiel, Mark Eberhard, Logan Maxwell Hagege, T. Allen Lawson, John Nieto, Daniel W. Pinkham, Bonnie Posselli, Billy Schenck, Fritz Scholder, Tony Smith, and Theodore Waddell.

Stylistically, the Wirthlins observe, all of these artists use “the inherently modern architecture of Western landscape to explore modern forms of

expression.” And thematically, we see numerous barns and farmhouses, as well as people tending livestock. Not surprisingly, the work Lisa and Bill both love the most depicts a shepherd herding his flock, painted by Conrad Buff II (1886–1975) in Utah’s Zion Canyon, with an iconic red cliff and characteristic contrast of sunlight and shade. Bill’s personal favorite is Billy Schenck’s graphically powerful scene of Navajo women watching their sheep, while Lisa’s is T. Allen Lawson’s Christmas Dinner, an unusual overhead view of chickens pecking at their feed in a tub. (“It draws you in,” she says. “You can feel the crisp chill of winter.”)

Lawson’s picture spurs the Wirthlins to point out the growing tendency of artists to narrow their perspective, to make large pictures “of the micro rather than the macro, where context is bypassed in favor of intimacy.” Another fine example of this trend is Daniel W. Pinkham’s Vapors, which depicts the Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone National Park up close: “There is no context or scale for the spring,” Lisa notes, “but through this painting’s expressive style, we know it is hot and mysterious and mesmerizing.”

Assisted by various advisers and on their own, the Wirthlins spend a lot of time looking at art together, browsing galleries and auction catalogues throughout the West, sometimes buying at selling exhibitions that benefit the museums they admire. Chief among the latter is the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, where Lisa is a trustee and sits on the advisory board of its Whitney Western Art Museum. Through this and other volunteer activities, she has come to admire other patrons, especially Forrest Fenn of Santa Fe (“a consummate and discriminating collector”) and Philip Anschutz, whose spectacular collection is now accessible to the J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

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public as Denver’s American Museum of Western Art. Lisa and Bill have also befriended many artists: “Each time we renew our acquaintances, either through a purchase or a social occasion, our mutual appreciation grows. They get support and understanding from us, and we come to admire even more their character and determination, even as we gain a richer appreciation of our pieces.” It makes sense, then, that the Wirthlins have never regretted any purchase, “but we have regretted the few things that got away!” If there is any complaint, it’s to do with the current challenge of enhancing their in-home lighting without making distracting changes to the ceilings above the artworks being illuminated.

Unusually, the Wirthlins have a completely different collecting interest that runs parallel to that of fine art: Neolithic and traditional artforms from Africa, Egypt, Mexico India, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Japan. This originated through Bill’s long-standing interest in archeology and anthropology, expressed most clearly through his service as a trustee and president emeritus of the Leakey Foundation, which funds scientific research on human evolution.

Together Lisa and Bill have explored many prehistoric sites, and when they visited the Chauvet and Lascaux caves in France — adorned with paintings of predators and prey thought to be at least 30,000 and 17,000 years old, respectively — they agreed with Picasso’s famous observation about Lascaux that “we have invented nothing new.”

Indeed, they say, “understanding the earliest roots of artistic expression has added an important context to our collecting adventure.”

In this regard, the Wirthlins are right to call themselves “perpetual students — always seeking to learn and understand more.”

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

O F F T H E W A L L S

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The National Sculpture Society recently established a Southern California chapter, and now 23 of its members have been juried into an exhibition at Sparks Gallery. The jury consisted of Amy Kann, Marc Mellon, and Sandy Scott, and the participants are Mark Edward Adams, Richard Becker, Marsha Brook, Dean ButterďŹ eld, Mary Buckman, Lynn Christopher, Deanna Cummins-Montero, Eugene Daub, D.L. Engle, Victor Fisher, Kevin Garceau, Anne Geiler, Sergei Iourov, Adam Matano, Dave MehafďŹ e, Maidy Morhous, Barbara Postelnek, Tanya Ragir, Brandon Roy, Jean Schleiniger, Linda Serrao, Sandra Shaw, and Monica Wyatt.

On February 25, the chapter will convene a symposium about ďŹ gurative sculpture featuring representatives of the San Diego Museum of Art, NSS members Richard Becker and Adam Matano, and Fine Art Connoisseur West Coast editor Vanessa Rothe.

530 Sixth Avenue, San Diego, CA 92101, 619.696.1416, sparksgallery.com/exhibitions/exhibitionsouthern-ca-sculpture-a-group-show $ -- $ 3,,(-1 .-2$0. !

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Glenna Goodacre (b. 1939), the New Mexico-based sculptor best known for her Vietnam Women’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., and for the Sacagawea dollar coin, has announced that she will retire. Before doing so, she joined with Mary and Elizabeth Hulings, heirs to the estate of the realist painter Clark Hulings (1922–2011), to produce a nine-inch-high bronze bas-relief inspired by Hulings’s dynamic pen-and-ink drawing Helping to Push. “Signed� by both artists and handsomely framed, this limited edition of 25 sculptures has been made for exclusive use by the Clark Hulings Fund for Visual Artists (CHF), which will offer them as thank-you gifts to individuals donating $15,000 or more.

The title and subject of Helping to Push capture the essence of CHF, which helps professional visual artists compete in the marketplace by providing them with strategic business training and support. “My father was always interested in images of people working together, and with their animals,� says Elizabeth Hulings. “He had a great passion for collaborating with peers. He wasn’t a teacher, but he still wanted to help other artists — which is the reason we started CHF. Glenna Goodacre and my father were good friends, so my mother and I were thrilled when she agreed to do this. It’s so inspiring to see another top-tier artist giving back to the artistic community.�

214.632.2711, clarkhulingsfund.org/relief

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For its 63rd year, the Winter Antiques Show will again anchor New York’s Americana Week. More than 70 exhibitors will offer top examples of American, English, European, and Asian ďŹ ne and decorative arts — ranging from antiquity through the 1960s. The fair’s loan show will present highlights from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (see page 61 for details).

Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at East 67th Street, New York, NY 10065, 718.292.7392, winterantiquesshow.com

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Plus One Gallery specializes in hyperrealism and is using its winter show to demonstrate the range and versatility of the 42 artists on its roster.

Owner-founders Maggie Bollaert and Colin Pettit believe that hyperrealism’s prestige will grow even larger in the near future, so now is the time to get in on it.

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B & C Trafalgar House, Juniper Drive, Battersea Reach, York Road, London SW18 1GY, England, UK, 44.207.730.7656, plusonegallery.com

Perhaps more relevant than ever is the handsome 192-page volume The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents. Introduced by the historian David McCullough, it features watercolor paintings by the New York-based artist (and trained architect) Adam Van Doren depicting 15 presidential houses he visited over a three-year period.

Van Doren adorned his handwritten letters to McCullough with lively sketches, all conveying his impressions of such landmarks as Washington’s Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello (illustrated here), the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port, and even George W. Bush’s Prairie Chapel Ranch in Texas. Published by David R. Godine (godine.com), the book closes with a painted peek inside the White House and brief biographies of all 44 presidents with small sketches of their residences.

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

The Italian Cultural Institute and curator Marco Bertoli are co-presenting Memories of Serenissima: Nineteenth-Century Artists in Venice, an exhibition that dovetails perfectly with a related series of concerts at Carnegie Hall (Music and Arts from the Venetian Republic). This show features paintings of Venice borrowed from private col- 3!$-1 -2.0. 9 lections across Italy, many

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before. Already familiar are (- /0(4 2$ ".++$"2(.- 2 +7 the romantic canal scenes of Rubens Santoro and Guglielmo Ciardi, but our appreciation of this unique city will grow through genre scenes, portraits, and landscapes made by such other talents as Eugene de Blaas, Ettore Tito, and Federico Zandomeneghi.

686 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065, 212.879.4242, iicnewyork.esteri.it/iic_newyork/en 2 0 1 7

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During the past decade, the explorer-artist Cory TrĂŠpanier has made four painting expeditions to the Canadian Arctic — hiking, canoeing, and camping with the Inuit people who live there, experiencing nature’s wonder on a visceral and emotional level. There he has obtained an “overwhelming sense of humility ‌ and a realization of how tiny I am.â€? Now the Canadian Embassy in Washington is exhibiting more than 60 of his oil paintings, many depicting landscapes not documented before, and all but one loaned by their private owners. Titled Into the Arctic, this project centers on TrĂŠpanier’s 15-foot-wide canvas Great Glacier, possibly the largest Arctic landscape ever painted in Canada. Accompanied by ďŹ lms and photographs of the artist at work, this show will depart Washington for a two-year, six-museum tour of the U.S. (schedule to be announced soon). The scene illustrated here shows Wilberforce Falls on the Hood River, west of Bathurst Inlet in Nunavut.

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For centuries, the Muslim harem has evoked images of beauty, sensuality, and wealth. This subject especially captured the imaginations of Gilded Age artists and collectors, including the Standard Oil magnate and Florida real estate developer Henry Flagler, who owned at least six harem paintings. His former mansion, now the Flagler Museum, is the ideal setting for the exhibition Harem: Unveiling the Mystery of Orientalist Art, which explores the West’s fascination with this subject through approximately 50 paintings, drawings, sculptures, books, photographs, prints, and ephemera loaned by public and private collections. Among the artists featured are Jean-LÊon GÊrôme, ThÊodore ChasseriÊau, and Rudolf Ernst. On February 21, chief curator Tracy Kamerer will give a gallery talk, for which reservations are necessary.

1 Whitehall Way, Palm Beach, FL 33480, 561.655.2833, aglermuseum.us

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*- */ 0 * " In celebration of the museum’s 75th anniversary, each of the Swope Art Museum’s 2017 exhibitions will highlight a key painting from its founding collection. Two simultaneous shows will focus on what is probably the Swope’s best-known work, Edward Hopper’s 1941 oil Route 6, Eastham.

The more historic of the two is The Road to Route 6, Eastham: Edward Hopper’s Preparatory Drawings from the Whitney, including a special loan from New York City’s Whitney Museum of American Art of seven drawings that Hopper made on location. Also on offer will be Light and Shadow: Paintings and Drawings by Philip Koch from Edward Hopper’s Studio; this presents interior views Koch made during his 16 residencies in Hopper’s Massachusetts studio, as well as landscapes of the surrounding area.

25 South 7th Street, Terre Haute, IN 47807, 812.238.1676, swope.org

501 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20001, 202.682.1740, intothearctic.ca/exhibitiontour

. (*$ #,/ Quite unexpectedly, New York is rediscovering a long-forgotten Baroque painter thanks to three innovative venues on the Upper East Side. Born in Romagna, Guido Cagnacci (1601–1663) was trained in Bologna and Rome

by Ludovico Carracci and Guercino, then worked in his native province before moving to Venice and ďŹ nally Vienna. Living almost as fast a life as his Baroque forerunner, Caravaggio, had, Cagnacci painted religious and mythic subjects in a captivatingly eccentric and unsettlingly erotic air. Rediscovered by Italian scholars in the 1950s, he is suddenly the toast of Manhattan.

On view at the Frick Collection through January 22 (then at London’s National Gallery February 15–May 21) is Cagnacci’s large masterpiece, The Repentant Magdalene, on loan from the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. This highly theatrical scene is particularly interesting because it is so unusual; the artist was better known for his half-length ďŹ gures, such as the one acquired just this year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Death of Cleopatra. Cagnaccis are rare in U.S. collections; there is one at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and another at South Carolina’s Columbia Museum of Art. The Met’s version is on view indeďŹ nitely, and now perfectly complemented at the Italian Cultural Institute nearby by its even more sensual “sister,â€? The Dying Cleopatra, on loan from Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera until January 19. Her welcome visit has been arranged by the Foundation for Italian Art and Culture.

Fortunately, this rare moment will live on through two new publications: the Frick Collection’s Xavier F. Salomon has published a catalogue for his exhibition, while the Brera has partnered with Skira on an engaging little volume containing essays by novelist Lisa Hilton and art historian Letizia Lodi.

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Now is the season to enjoy great Victorian paintings in northern Europe.

On view at the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden (The Netherlands) is a fresh look at this city’s native son Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912). It explores his fascination with the representation of domestic life in antiquity and how this interest was expressed through the two remarkable studio houses he created in London with his wife and two daughters. Alma-Tadema did much to ďŹ x ideas in the popular imagination of what life in the ancient past “looked likeâ€? — images that were taken up on stage and in ďŹ lm and that remain with us today. This exhibition runs through February 7, then opens at Vienna’s Belvedere (February 23–June 18), and ďŹ nally at London’s Leighton House Museum (July 7–October 29).

Only a 30-minute drive eastward is Eelde, where the Museum De Buitenplaats is presenting the ďŹ rst modern exhibition devoted to Albert Moore (1841–1893). Born in York, he spent most of his career in London painting young women draped in richly colored, diaphanous garments, arranged with props either Japanese or Greek in style. Because he created “art for art’s sake,â€? Moore worked for a while alongside the Aesthetic Movement’s best-known champion, James Whistler. This exhibition closes on March 19 and then moves to the York Art Gallery.

And in London, Leighton House Museum has welcomed home (until April 2) the iconic painting made by Frederic Leighton himself, Flaming June. This masterwork was completed in 1895 right here, where it has been reunited with other works Leighton submitted to the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition that year

friesmuseum.nl, museumdebuitenplaats.nl, leightonhouse.co.uk

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In October, co-producers Tony Fusco and Robert Four mounted their 20th annual Boston International Fine Art Show (BIFAS). Forty leading galleries from across the U.S. offered more than 3,000 works of art ranging from prints priced at a few hundred dollars to museum-quality paintings priced in the millions. The gala preview beneďŹ tted the Boston Athenaeum. Photos: Tara Carvalho

In September, 200 marine artists, curators, and collectors gathered in Williamsburg, Virginia, for the ďŹ rst-ever National Marine Arts Conference (NMAC), sponsored by the American Society of Marine Artists (ASMA). Organized by ASMA president Kim Shaklee and chaired by member Len Tantillo, the program featured demos, lectures, panel discussions, and opportunities to paint outdoors. ASMA’s 17th National Exhibition was inaugurated at the College of William & Mary’s Muscarelle Museum of Art by its director Aaron De Groft; this

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J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

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In December, Sirona Fine Art (Hallandale Beach, Florida) opened the group exhibition Chèvere, which showcased new works inspired by the Romance languages of Latin America.

Curated by Didi Menendez and Sergio Gomez, the checklist encompassed 39 ďŹ gurative painters, two abstractionists, two sculptors, and two photographers. The project was organized in collaboration with PoetsArtists Magazine, and was accompanied by a publication containing an essay by commentator John Seed and verses by seven poets. "**&. *! -/4 (" .+* -/% & % -!.+* - & +."

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In October, the Florence Academy of Art (FAA) inaugurated its new building with a weekend of festivities. Founded 25 years ago by the American painter Daniel Graves, the FAA has now brought all 100 of its students together into a single building offering more than 35,000 square feet, with natural light in every studio. Built in the mid-19th century as a customs house, this once-crumbling building has been, according to Fine Art Connoisseur publisher Eric Rhoads, â&#x20AC;&#x153;brought to life again." He said, "Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s much like interest in classical realism, which was thriving, then died, and has now come back to life.â&#x20AC;? Graves noted, â&#x20AC;&#x153;This is the result of over two decades of dreaming that a school teaching realism could one day have a facility which rivals the best of the best.â&#x20AC;? The facility also contains a library, gallery, bookshop, cafe, and two apartments to house visiting artists.

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

2 0 1 7

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JASON DRAKE Treasure time alone.

Expanding gallery representation.

Inquiries welcome.

JasonDrakeStudio.com facebook.com/JasonDrakeStudio Evening Solitude , oil on linen, 26 x 40 inches - Available, contact the artist

William A. Schneider Revealing the Soul AISM, OPA, PSA-MP

Thirty Years on the Road Crew 20 x 16 Oil on Linen “Set ‘em up; tear ‘em down.

Then on to the next show.”

Please see website for blog and workshop infor mation www.SchneiderArt.com

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MARC R. HANSON OPAM

Gold Medal Winner Master Division, 2016 OPA Eastern Regional Exhibition

Silence oil on linen, 24 x 30 (currently available through the artist)

Pontotoc, MS Gallery Inquiries Welcome View more of Marcâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work at www.marchansonart.com marc@marchansonart.com

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

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www.patriciahynespainter.com

110

No Words Needed 24” X 36” oil on canvas

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

pjhynes@verizon.net 973-763-2384

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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

Linda Harris Reynolds Fine Art Portraiture

German Short-haired Pointer, oil on linen, 30” x 30” For additional information regarding commissions, classes, and workshops visit:

lindaharrisreynolds.com | 302.655.6970 | lhrportraits@aol.com

Paula B. Holtzclaw AWAM, WAOWM, ASMA, AIS, NOAPS, PAP-SE

The American Society of Marine Artists 17th National Exhibition at the Academy Art Museum and the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum December 10, 2016-April 2, 2017

paulabholtzclawfineart.com The Inlet 24 x 24 Oil

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Blue 24 x 34 Oil on canvas

w w w.jrussellwells.com Please call or email Jeff Wells 847-361-5124 or jrw@jrussellwells.com for more information on this and other works of fine art.

Studio located at:

117 E Northwest Highway • Barrington, IL 60010 • 847-361-5124

Marian Fortunati One Lucky Artist

Between Heaven and Earth PAC6 Paints the Sierras 3.4.2017–7.4.2017 Reception: 3.4.2017 4:00–6:00 pm

Santa Paula Art Museum Santa Paula, California

www.marianfortunati.com

Mountain Heather Calls Us

112

24x36 J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

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FINE ARTIST

Rosalia oil and gold leaf 72x48â&#x20AC;?

Clytie Looking For Apollo oil and gold leaf 60x48â&#x20AC;?

Janet A. Cook Represented by DaciaGallery.com HavenArtGallery.com

JanetAcook.com JC@janetAcook.com 917 747 6565 Wilderness, 48x24, oil on panel

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

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Nationally-a Nationall ly-acclaimed a tists capture naturall artists beauty, eautty, character characte and local culture in the Plein Air tra tradition

www.Greatpaintout.com 114

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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

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Gallery Representation SAGA FINE ART

Monrovia, CA NANCY DODDS GALLERY

Carmel, CA LEE YOUNGMAN GALLERIES

Napa Valley, CA

California Art Club Artist Member American Society of Marine Artists Signature Member Laguna Plein Air Painters Association Signature Member California Plein Air Painters Signature Member California Watercolor Association Signature Member

San Gabriels Sunset

Watercolor

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R ¡ C O M

11â&#x20AC;? x 14â&#x20AC;?

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BARBARA JAENICKE

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www.barbarajaenicke.com 118

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120

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Heather ArenasÂ

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Fieldtrip to the Museumâ&#x20AC;?, 14x18, oil on birch Available at Reinert Fine Art

www.heatherarenas.com

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â&#x201E;˘

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Inspired by the classics, Diana â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Huntressâ&#x20AC;? is known for her unmistakeable beauty, athletic grace and hunting skill as guardian of the vulnerable.

She is strength, purity and grace SHUVRQLĂ&#x20AC;HG

www.victorissa.com 1-800-720-4772 m: 1-970-227-3624 info@victorissa.com

122

Š Victor Issa Studios 2017

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The Huntressâ&#x20AC;?

Life-size, edition of 12.

Also available as a nude and as a table-top.

subscribe today | Ă° QHDUWFRQQRLVVHXU FRP |

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

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SHERI FARABAUGH Eleven Garlic Scapes 18”x18” Oil on Hardboard 7KLV SDLQWLQJ ZLOO EH LQFOXGHG LQ WKH ÀUVW International Guild of Realism Salon at Marshall Gallery of Fine Art, 7106 Main Street, Scottsdale, AZ. The exhibit runs from January 16 to February 13, 2017.

www.SheriFarabaugh.com SLFarabaugh@hotmail.com

Carol Strock Wasson Oil and Pastel Paintings

Winter Barn, 24x30, pastel To view a gallery of original works in oil and pastel, visit:

www.carolstrockwasson.com | 937.459.6492 | carol@strockwasson.com

124

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For the g to master p in the landscape.

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Collectors: Join us for the Insiders ArtShow at the Plein Air Convention

JEREMY LIPKING

RYAN S. BROWN

JAMES GURNEY

QUANG HO

KARL DEMPWOLF

DEBRA HUSE

SCOTT W. PRIOR

LORI PUTNAM

APRIL 25-26, 2017

•

SHERATON SAN DIEGO HOTEL & MARINA

The 6th Annual Plein Air Convention & Expo will take place next spring in San Diego. Original paintings by over 200 nationally known faculty and attendees will be available for purchase. As a collector, you’re invited to attend and take advan[HNL VM [OPZ PKLHS VWWVY[\UP[` [V V^U ZVTL VM [OL Ä ULZ[ WHPU[PUNZ ILPUN THKL today, as well as to meet those who created them.

LEARN MORE AT PLEINAIRCONVENTION.COM

The Art of George Gallo A Contemporary American Artist

Simi Valley Pickers 40x60

www.GalloCollection.com

Ernie Baber Still Waiting oil on board 10 x 8 in.

www.erniebaber.com erniebaber@gmail.com 831.620.5400 Carmel by the Sea

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

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Master the portrait.

Starting with a simple charcoal sketch, Patricia Watwood shares with you her secrets for L_LJ\[PUN H Ä UPZOLK WHPU[LK WVY[YHP[ @V\»SS SLHYU [LJOUPX\LZ MVY YLUKLYPUN HJJ\YH[LS` [OL structural form behind human face, color and value relationships, and much more.

Order today at StreamlineArtVideo.com or call 561.655.8778

CHANTEL LYNN BARBER Small Works

Enriching Hearts and Lives Through Art Rising Above 5x5 in, acrylic on panel The Portrait in Acrylic Workshops May 20 & 21 | Watkinsville, GA June 23, 24, & 25 | Oregon City, OR October 20, 21, & 22 | Calgary, AB, Canada

For workshop details and to view more of Chantel’s work:

www.chantelsoriginals.com | 901.438.2420

DIR E C T ORY OF A DV ERT ISI NG Anderson, Kathy.................................... 119

Griffin, Patricia A. .................................. 35

Reynolds, Linda Harris .......................... 111

Arenas, Heather .................................... 121

Groesser, Debra Joy .............................. 123

Rich Timmons Fine Art Gallery ............. 127

Atwood, Marjorie................................... 113

Hanson, Marc R. .................................... 109

RJD Gallery ............................................ 21

Autry National Center ........................... 42

Hockaday Museum of Art ..................... 40

Roper, Stuart ......................................... 115

Baber, Ernie ........................................... 127

Holtzclaw, Paula .................................... 111

Rose Red Fine Art.................................. 120

Balkan, Jennifer..................................... 19

Hunt, Jane ............................................. 117

Roux and Cyr International Fine Art Gallery

Barber, Chantel ..................................... 129

Hynes, Patricia ...................................... 110

Santiago, Roseta ................................... 116

Bonner David Galleries ......................... 115

Illume Gallery of Fine Art ...................... 17

Savides, Stefan ..................................... 35

Booth Western Art Museum.................. 31

Jaenicke, Barbara.................................. 118

Schneider, William A. ............................ 108

Bruce Museum ...................................... 37

Keefe, Shelby ........................................ 114

Smith, Matt............................................ 9

Burrough, Joseph.................................. 121

La Herreria Art Studio, LLC ................... 18

Sneary, Richard ..................................... 118

Byrne, Michele ...................................... 125

Lopez, Leah ........................................... 119

Southeastern Wildlife Exposition.......... 33

California Museum of Fine Art .............. 4

Lotton Gallery ....................................... 11

Starwalt, Jen.......................................... 34

Cannon, Larry........................................ 117

Lynn, Susan ........................................... 118

Steamboat Art Museum........................ 41

Celebration of Fine Art.......................... Poster

M.S. Rau Antiques, LLC ......................... 2

Strock-Wasson, Carol............................ 124

Cook, Janet ........................................... 113

Melaine, Krystii...................................... 24

Susiehyer Studio ................................... 120

Corcilius, Cat......................................... 110

Mihanovic International ........................ 131

Terry, David ........................................... 6

Creighton Block Gallery........................ 13

National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum 38

The Legacy Gallery ............................... 132

Drake, Jason .......................................... 108

National Sculpture Society ................... 32

The Montreal Museum of Fine Art ........ 39

Dunn, Pem ............................................. 123

Nygren, Carrie....................................... 116

Velazquez, Joe....................................... 5

Farabaugh, Sheri................................... 124

Out West Art Show and Sale................. 23

Victor Issa Studio .................................. 122

Forgotten Coast Cultural Coalition....... 114

Palm Beach Show Group ...................... 27

Wallin, Ken............................................. 35

Fortunati, Marian................................... 112

Peninsula School of Art......................... 10

Washington Winter Show ..................... 30

Galbraith, Katherine.............................. 14

Peralta, JoAnn ....................................... 15

Wells, J. Russell ..................................... 112

Gambrill, Carmen.................................. 8

Putnam, Lori .......................................... 109

Wilson, J. Michael .................................. 29

Garrish, Mary ......................................... 34

R Alexander Gallery............................... 7

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

2 0 1 7

28

129

C L A S S I C

LINDA LU CAS HARDY (B. Saturday Afternoon 2014, oil on canvas panel, 18 x Available from the

J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y

2 0 1 7

1947) Demo 24 in. artist

F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

Zvonimir Mihanovic

Always Ready 27 ½” x 27 ½” Oil on Linen

View more of Zvonimir’s work at www.mihanovic.com Mihanovic International Kert Koski • kert@mihanovic.com • 970-404-2131

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