Fine Art Connoisseur March/April 2018

THE GR EAT INDOOR S | MICHELLE JUNG | WAY NE THIEBAUD | JANE PETER SON | GAR IN BAK ER

A PR IL 2 018

the

Coeur d’Alene Art Auction Fine Western & American Art

The 2017 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction realized over $16 million in sales at the single largest event in the field of classic Western and American Art.

We are now accepting quality consignments for our 2018 sale to be held July 28 in Reno, Nevada.

Visit our website at www.cdaartauction.com THE COEUR D’ALENE ART AUCTION tel. 208-772-9009 info@cdaartauction.com

Howard Terpning (b. 1927), Dust of Many Pony Soldiers (detail), oil on canvas, 38 × 56 in., Estimate: $800,000-1,200,000

Grant Wood (1891–1942), The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931, oil on composition board, 30 x 40 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1950 © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham / Licensed by VAGA, New York; image © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, courtesy Art Resource, NY. On view at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition Grant Wood: American Gothic and Other Fables (March 2–June 10).

I realized that all the really good ideas I’d ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa.

— Grant Wood (1891–1942)

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

FAC Front Piece Mar/Apr18 (right page).indd 3

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

003

2/13/18 9:58 AM

Two Tibetans 40" x 40"

OIL ON CANVAS

Dali Higa

Dali Higa Tibet A People Reaching Up To The Sky The Himalayas Mountains Bending Water Down Below Two Tibetans Toiling Frozen In Time God Made Them Both

Nourishment For All Feeding China, India and Pakistan It Flows Water Discriminates Not By Race Or Creed Men Discriminate With Hate And Greed Two Tibetans--Peace--An Example Take Heed

CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF FINE ART www.californiamuseumoffineart.com

Fine art | Sculpture | cowboy & indian collectibleS

Gordon Coutts (1868-1937) The Escape 30" x 40" oil on canvas $25,000-35,000

Birger Sandzen (1871-1954) Autumn 36" x 48" oil on board $60,000-80,000

MANITOU GALLERIES & THE COEUR D’ALENE ART AUCTION PROUDLY ANNOUNCE THEIR 31ST ANNUAL MARCH

IN MONTANA EVENT.

~FEATURING THE BOKELMAN COLLECTION, 100 WEAVINGS, CAA AND MONTANA ARTWORK~

2018 auction schedule Thursday, March 15 Boutique Dealer Show & Auction Preview: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Friday & Saturday, March 16 & 17 Boutique Dealer Show & Auction Preview: 9 a.m.-5 p.m.

Auction: Noon

Please join us at the Elks Lodge, #214, at 500 1st Ave. South in Great Falls, MT, March 15-17.

Order a catalog at www.MarchInMontana.com.

Visit iCollector.com to view lots online.

Live, Internet, Phone and Absentee bidding available.

All events are free and open to the public.

Manitou auctions | 1715 carey ave, cheyenne Wy 82001 | 307.635.0019 | info@MarchinMontana.coM

Jill Banks

PUBLISHER

B. Er ic Rhoads bericrhoads@gmail.com Tw i t t e r : @ e r i c r h o a d s f a c e b o ok . c o m /e r ic . rh o a d s

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Peter Tr ippi peter.trippi@gmail.com 9 17.9 6 8 . 4 4 76

MANAGING EDITOR

Br ida Connolly brida.connolly@gmail.com 702 . 29 9.0 417

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Matthias A nderson Max Gillies Chuck Neustifter Charles Raskob Robinson

Kelly Compton David Masello Louise Nicholson Vanessa Françoise Rothe (West Coast Editor)

C R E AT I V E D I R EC TO R

A lf onso Jones alfonsostreamline@gmail.com 5 61 . 3 2 7. 6 0 3 3

ART DIRECTOR

Kenneth W hitne y k en net h.wh it ne y @g ma i l .com 561.655. 8778

DIRECTOR OF SALES

Jason Kelle y jkelley @streamlinepublishing.com 8 0 2 -57 9 -10 5 8

ART DIVISION DIRECTOR

A nne Weiler-Brow n zionartist@gmail.com 435.772.0504

N AT I O N A L M A R K E T I N G M A N AG E R

Yvonne Van Wechel y vonnevanwechel@gmail.com 6 02 .810. 3518

REGIONAL MARKETING MANAGERS

Kr ystal A llen We s t C o a s t krystalallen2@gmail.com 5 4 1 . 4 4 7. 4 7 8 7

Around Town oil on linen 40 x 30 Available through the artist: Jill@JillBanks.com studio: Great Falls VA 703.403.7435

A n n e We i l e r-B r o w n We s t e r n zionartist@gmail.com 435.772.0504 Trace y Nor vell M id-At la nt ic /S out hea st tenwriter@gmail.com 918 . 519. 0141 Gina Ward Central gwardart@gmail.com 9 2 0 .743 . 2 4 0 5 Mar y G reen Northeast & International mgreen@streamlinepublishing.com 508. 230.9928

Fiddlin’ Around oil 12 x 16 RS Hanna Gallery Fredericksburg TX 830.307.3074 Flower Power oil 30 x 24 Ellis-Nicholson Gallery Charleston SC 843.722.5353

006

FACMar-April18Mastheads (both).indd 6

Enrich your collection

JillBanks.com M A R C H / A P R I L

D I G I TA L A D M A N AG E R

S arah Webb swebb.art@gmail.com 630.4 45.9182

DATA C O N T R O L M A N AG E R

Faith Frykman fa it hma r ian1@g ma i l.com 92 0.559.0 685

E D I TO R , F I N E A R T TO DAY

Cher ie Haas cheriehaas@streamlinepublishing.com

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 12:06 PM

Adagio Art Co. 44 x 34 Oil on Canvas

michellejungstudios.com

P H O T O G R A P H E D I N N E W Y O R K B Y P E T E T H O M P S O N , 2 017

ARTIST OIL DEMO AT THE WELLESLEY FREE LIBRARY Co-hosted by The Wellesley Society of Artists and the Needham Art Association Thursday, April 12, 2018 from 6:30-9pm wellesleysocietyofartists.org

THE GUILD OF BOSTON ARTISTS ANNUAL MEMBERS EXHIBITION May 5 – May 26, 2018 Reception May 5th, 3-5pm guildofbostonartists.org

CALIFORNIA ART CLUB'S 107TH ANNUAL GOLD MEDAL EXHIBITION June 10 – July 1, 2018 Reception June 9th Exposition Park at the National History Museum of Los Angeles californiaartclub.org

P H O T O G R A P H E D I N N E W Y O R K B Y P E T E T H O M P S O N , 2 017

SOLO SHOW October 6 – October 31, 2018 Reception October 6th, 3-5pm The Guild of Boston Artists Gallery guildofbostonartists.org

michelle@michellejungstudios.com

michellejungstudios.com

508.513.8686

331 SE Mizner Blvd.

Boca Raton, FL 33432 Ph: 561.655.8778 • Fa x: 561.655.616 4 CHAIRMAN/PUBLISHER/CEO B. Eric Rhoads

bericrhoads@gmail.com

f a c e b o ok .c om /e r ic . rho a d s .

Tw i t t e r : @ e r i c r h o a d s

E X E C U T I V E V I C E P R E S I D E N T/ C H I E F O P E R AT I N G O F F I C E R Tom Elmo

thomaselmo@gmail.com PRODUCTION DIRECTOR

Nicolynn Kuper

kuper.nicoly nn@gmail.com DIRECTOR OF FINANCE

Laura Iserman

laura.iserman@gmail.com ACCOUNTING

Jaime Osetek

jaimestrm@gmail.com C I R C U L AT I O N C O O R D I N ATO R Sue Henr y

suehenrystreamline@gmail.com C U S TO M E R S E R V I C E C O O R D I N ATO R Nia R ae f ord

niaraestreamline@gmail.com

C R E AT I V E D I R EC TO R , A DV E R T I S I N G Stephen Parker

parkerstreamline@gmail.com A S S I S TA N T TO T H E C H A I R M A N

Ali Cr uickshank alicruickshankspi@gmail.com

Subscriptions:800.610.5771 Also 561.655.8778 or www.fineartconnoisseur.com One-year, 6-issue subscription within the United States: $39.98 (International, 6 issues, $76.98).

Two-year, 12-issue subscription within the United States: $59.98 (International, 12 issues, $106.98).

Attention retailers: If you would like to carry Fine Art Connoisseur in your store, please contact Tom Elmo at 561.655.8778.

Copyright ©2017 Streamline Publishing Inc. Fine Art Connoisseur is a registered trademark of Streamline Publishing; Historic Masters, Today’s Masters, Collector Savvy, Hidden Collection, and Classic Moment are trademarks of Streamline Publishing. All rights reserved.

Fine Art Connoisseur is published by Streamline Publishing Inc. Any reproduction of this publication, whole or in part, is prohibited without the express written consent of the publisher. Contact Streamline Publishing Inc. at address below.

Fine Art Connoisseur is published six times annually (ISSN 1932-4995) for $39.99 per year in U.S.A. (two years $59.99); Canada and Europe $69.99 per year (two years $99.99) by Streamline Publishing Inc., 331 SE Mizner Blvd., Boca Raton, FL 33432. Periodicals postage paid at Boca Raton, FL, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Fine Art Connoisseur, 331 SE Mizner Blvd., Boca Raton, FL 33432.Copying done for other than personal or internal reference without the express permission of Fine Art Connoisseur is prohibited. Address requests for special permission to the Managing Editor. Reprints and back issues available upon request. Printed in the United States. • Canadian publication agreement # 40028399. Canada Post: Publications Mail Agreement #40612608; Canada returns to be sent to Bleuchip International, P.O. Box 25542, London, ON N6C 6B2.

010

FACMar-April18Mastheads (both).indd 10

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 12:10 PM

13 t h A n n u a l

Art from the Other Half of the West Invitational Exhibition & Sale Opening Weekend O n l yMarch a t 23-25, 2018 On view March 23 – May 13, 2018 Tickets on sale now at westernmuseum.org Only at the

Artists: Maura Allen; Suzanne Baker; Heather Beary; Nancy Boren; Shawn Cameron; Jennifer Cavan; Sonja Caywood; Rox Corbett; Sheila Cottrell; Lisa Danielle; Judith Durr; Joni Falk; Sheri Farabaugh; Deborah Copenhaver Fellows; Jessica Garrett; Jessica Gilbert; Linda Glover Gooch; Lisa Gordon; Lindsey Bittner Graham; Sandy Graves;Ann Hanson; Erin Hanson; Stephanie Hartshorn; Ann Huston; Peggy Judy; Shelby Keefe; Susan Kliewer; Sue Krzyston; Laurie J. Lee; Jan Mapes; Sharon Markwardt; Deanne Lawrence McKeown; Barbara Meikle; Krystii Melaine; Marcia Molnar; Mejo Okon; Karen Petrovich; Martha Pettigrew; Heide Presse; Hadley Rampton; Stephanie Revennaugh; Cynthia Rigden; Gladys Roldan-de-Moras; Sherry Salari Sander; Samantha Sherry; Jill Soukup; Sharon Standridge; Sherry Blanchard Stuart; Gail Jones Sundell; Carol Swinney; Karmel Timmons; Rebecca Tobey; V….Vaughan; Liz Wolf; Dinah Worman

21 North Frontier Street Wickenburg, AZ 85390 928.684.2272 • westernmuseum.org ©2017 DCWM Boot illustration © Tim Zeltner/i2iart.com

F I N E

A R T

A PR I L

003

Frontispiece: Grant Wood

016

Publisher’s Letter

020

Editor’s Note

025

Favorite: André Aciman on Raoul Dufy, by David Masello

118

Off the Walls

146

Classic Moment: Charles Iarrobino

053

2 018

C O N N O I S S E U R

•

ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: THREE TO WATCH Allison Malafronte describes the talents of Nancy Boren, Richie Carter, and Lee Hutt.

056

WAYNE THIEBAUD'S MOST CRUCIAL DECADE

By Sheryl Nonnenberg

060

HOW MICHELLE JUNG FOUND HER VOICE

By Charles Raskob Robinson

066

JAMES McELHINNEY'S JOURNAL PAINTINGS: WHEN INTIMATE VISIONS GO DIGITAL

By Peter Trippi

ON THE COVER

VO LU M E 15 , I S S U E 2

070

28 BLOCKS: GARIN BAKER'S FRESH LOOK AT AN AMERICAN ICON

By Matthias Anderson

074

BRYAN MARK TAYLOR'S VANISHING LANDSCAPES

By Micah Christensen

078 086

LOOKING INSIDE

By Kelly Compton

094

THOMAS COLE IN A NEW LIGHT

By Jennifer Sauer

098

THE PASTON TREASURE: A MYSTERIOUS PAINTING REVEALS ITS SECRETS

104

By Louise Nicholson

A EUROPEAN TAKE ON AMERICAN REALISM

By Peter Trippi

REDISCOVERING JANE PETERSON

By Max Gillies

090

MYSTERY MAN: HOW A 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN PORTRAIT BROKE NEW GROUND

112

GREAT ART WORLDWIDE

We survey 10 top-notch projects this season

117

DUCK, DUCK, GOOSE

By David Masello

By Cordula Grewe

JENNIFER STOTTLE TAYLOR (b. 1967) Chateau Living (detail), 2017, oil on board, 16 x 16 in., available from the artist; for details, please see page 81.

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

012

FAC TOC March-April 18 (left page).indd 12

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 3:08 PM

MILES GLYNN

“IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK”- WALLFLOWERS SERIES

Horse No. 21 26 x 39 Archival Print on Belgian Linen

CREIGHTONBLOCKGALLERY.COM 406-993-9400 | Located in Town Center, Big Sky, MT

S O U T H S T R E E T A R T G A L L E R Y P R O U D LY P R E S E N T S

Jill Basham

Morning Mist oil on linen 10x8

Landscapes of Emotion Opening reception: April 6th • 5 to 8 pm Exhibit continues through April 29th The House Filled with Fine Art • 5 South Street, Easton, MD • 410.598.1666 • southstreetartgallery.com

P U B L I S H E R ' S

PRSONAY INVSD

W Adrian Gottlieb (b. 1975) Publisher B. Eric Rhoads 2008, oil on canvas, 21 x 16 in. courtesy of the artist

B. ERIC RHOADS Chairman/Publisher bericrhoads@gmail.com 512.607.6423 facebook.com/eric.rhoads @ericrhoads

016

FAC Publisher's Letter Mar/Apr 18 (left page).indd 16

henever I can, I encourage art lovers to visit a commercial gallery to exercise their eyes and see what’s out there.

Galleries are essential to a healthy art world, and they also contribute a great deal to the communities where they do business. Moreover, the best galleries are eager to help visitors understand what they are looking at, to learn about artists and techniques, to see behind and around the artworks. It’s not about one fast sale — it’s about relationships and sharing the passion for art, all of which usually lead to ongoing sales over many years.

These are just some of the reasons I was so pleased to read the following note from proprietors Stephen and Elizabeth Harris in the Spring 2018 newsletter of InSight Gallery (Fredericksburg, Texas), a terrific firm we have covered editorially for a long time. They have given me permission to reprint their entire text here. Why? Because it hits the nail right on the head.

Recently, we read somewhere, “When you buy something from a small or local business, an actual person does a happy dance.” This made us laugh because if you follow us on Instagram, then you’ve probably seen some videos of us doing those happy dances. But more than just a silly Instagram post, there is something very true about how personal the relationship between vendor, product, retailer, and customer can be. We feel fortunate to own a small business and have the opportunity, not just to be personally invested in what we are selling, but to be both personally invested in the people who have created it, as well as the people who get to enjoy it. It’s a dream to get to live daily with all of the art on the gallery walls, but we celebrate each time a piece finds a home. We absolutely love seeing clients connect with the art. When a piece goes to one of your homes or places of business, it’s our hope that it will bring you great joy for years to come. Pablo Picasso once said, “The

M A R C H / A P R I L

L E T T E R

purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” Wow. How true is this? No wonder we find ourselves doing happy dances around here. Thank you. Thank you for sharing our love of art. Thank you for your patronage. Thank you for your friendship. Thank you for being part of our lives and allowing InSight Gallery to be part of yours. We look forward to seeing you in 2018.

“Personally invested.” Think about that phrase the Harrises use here — twice. Of course, running a gallery requires a huge investment of resources, time, and energy, but it’s more than that. It’s that desire to bring someone into the fold, to show them the pleasures of being around great art, and of growing as a person through both knowledge and empathy.

The elephant in the room, of course, is online buying. Unfortunately, I could share countless horror stories of fraud and people getting burned through online-only art businesses. Just this week I learned of seemingly legitimate artists selling Photoshopped prints as original oil paintings; their true nature was discoverable only after the clients had received delivery. A trusted gallery would never let this occur and would make a refund right away if such a deceit were discovered.

There is, in my mind, no substitute for working with a reputable gallerist to build your collection. As our society feels ever more pressure to trade online, I see more need than ever for trustworthy dealers who stand behind their art and their claims for it. I particularly encourage readers to get to know our gallery-advertisers, whom we vet carefully.

Just this month, in fact, we declined an advertiser because our researcher uncovered some fraudulent practices.

No matter how seasoned we are as collectors, most of us benefit from a trusted third party with deeper knowledge who keeps us informed and bypasses expensive mistakes we might otherwise make. That third party may be a museum curator, professional art adviser, or an experienced gallerist. The latter are out there working nationwide, and we salute their ongoing commitment to excellence.

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 10:24 AM

christina c. kuo www.christinackuo.com

Pensive I 16” x 12” Oil on Linen on Panel

E D I T O R ’ S

I

n December I was thrilled to visit a superb exhibition at New York City’s Morgan Museum & Library.

It featured 150 breathtaking drawings donated to the museum by the dealer-collector Eugene V. Thaw and his wife, Clare, covering five centuries and ranging from Mantegna and Rembrandt to Goya, Van Gogh, and even Pollock. The drawings are among the finest of their kind, offering an intimate look over each master’s shoulder.

A few weeks later, “Gene” Thaw died, aged 90, six months after his wife.

Their passing represents the end of an era because they were America’s ultimate connoisseurs, passionate about quality and an array of art forms, including Native American material. Fortunately, those visiting the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown can see the Thaws’ treasures until April 22; then they will go back into storage at the Morgan, accessible to all — by appointment and during special exhibitions — forevermore.

The Thaws are on my mind because the art they loved is quiet and requires focus.

But washing over the art world now is a tsu-

020

nami of “fun” art. Until May 6, for example, you can visit the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts to see PlayTime, “the first major thematic exhibition celebrating the role of play in contemporary art and culture. Forty works by 20 leading contemporary artists — including large-scale installations, sculpture, photographs, video, and tactile interactives — examine how play catalyzes creative expression, enchants the ordinary, and helps us understand ourselves in new ways.” All fair enough until the bottom of the press release: “Share your impressions with us on social media using #PEMplaytime.”

Uh-oh. In my frequent museum-going, I am increasingly jostled by visitors taking selfies before something spectacular — perhaps a small drawing, but more often an artwork that’s big, famous, or sensational. Like a balloon dog by Jeff Koons. Whoosh — up the photo goes to Instagram, and in pour the likes.

My fellow visitor is staring at his or her phone the entire time. What exactly have they “seen”?

I am still recovering from the circus that consumed Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden last year when the touring exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors invaded. There were lines around the block to experience six of this Japanese artist’s mirror-lined installations; visitors were limited to just 20 seconds in each space before having to move along. Not surprisingly, one visitor accidentally smashed one of Kusama’s pumpkin sculptures because he was looking at his phone.

Alas, hardly anyone stopped by the Hirshhorn’s other exhibitions that season; they came for the main event, and then they were off to another Instagramable experience.

Last month at London’s Tate Modern, I saw students swinging on a giant installation created by the Superflex collective. Couldn’t they do that on their school playground? Last year at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien (“Mumok”), I watched visitors playing ping-pong in Julius Köller’s retrospective. Couldn’t they do that in their own basement?

M A R C H / A P R I L

I sound like an old grumpus, but really, I am not against fun. My concern is this: amusement parks, state fairs, video arcades, and carnivals (do we still have carnivals?) exist to deliver fun.

They are really good at it. Art museums are not.

If art museums now reprogram themselves to compete for fun-seekers, they are going to lose in the end. Because Disney does it better, every time. I completely sympathize with museums hoping to sell tickets to care for collections and maintain buildings, but it’s not going to work.

Instead, let’s encourage museums to reimagine their art in fresh ways. What do these historical artworks mean to living artists? To visitors today? How have they been influential on other art forms like film and video gaming? Living artists are easily the most enthusiastic — most carefully observant — visitors of all. Let’s milk their enthusiasm, working with them — through programs, videos, tours, and yes, exhibitions of their new artworks — to show visitors why seemingly staid art still matters. As an exhibition curator working primarily in Europe, I recently did this myself, re-presenting the small oil paintings of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) as forerunners of “sword and sandal” films like Gladiator. The crowds loved it — 300,000 of them, spread over three museums. It’s not that hard to do, but we must really believe in older art and convey how thrilling it can be.

Why is this urgent? Because a company called Blackdove (please visit blackdove.com right now) will assemble for you an entirely digital art collection. Subscribers already accustomed to sampling music tracks on Spotify can order an unlimited set of artworks to use any way they wish: they can stream them on mobile devices or on almost any Internet-connected video display. This means the next generation will not bother to visit a museum or buy an original artwork because it’s much easier to enjoy, and afford, virtually.

Unless...? Unless we make looking at original artworks so meaningful that younger people want to be there in person, too. Gene and Clare Thaw felt that thrill when you behold an original artwork. Now we must carry on their good work.

Corrections: In our February 2018 article on New Jersey’s Morven Museum & Garden, we neglected to explain that its current exhibition (through June 3) focuses on Commodore Robert F. Stockton’s 19th-century greenhouse. The trompe l’oeil exhibition mentioned in the article will open early next year. On page 98 of the same issue, the lady sitting next to Wen Newman is Cara Rhoads, not Dawn Black. We regret any confusion these mistakes may have caused.

2 0 1 8

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

IM O R-OCUS

N O T E

O r c h i d s

&

S c o r p i o n s

O i l

o n

C a n v a s

5 2

x

3 3 ”

ALAIN VAES R J D G a l l e r y 2 3 8 5 M a i n S t r e e t B r i d g e h a m p t o n , N Y a r t @ R J D g a l l e r y . c o m | 6 3 1 . 7 2 5 . 1 1 6 1 | R J D g a l l e r y . c o m

Z.Z. Wei:

Shadow Stories

© Z. Z. Wei, Crow Series II, 2007, oil on canvas, 48 x 72”

cartersville, georgia boothmuseum.org | 770.387.1300

ELIZABETH FLOYD

Pink Pajamas, 48 x 32 inches, Oil on Linen

elizabethfloydstudio.com

Auction & Quick Draw · 2018 CODY, WYOMING

· SEPTEMBER 21

Featuring 0ver 100 Outstanding Western Artists

&

22

c

KEVIN RED STAR | Horse Tipis

Join Us for the Many Educational Opportunities: Painting on Porch | Artist Tours | Lectures & Great Cody Hospitality

PART OF SEPTEMBER 21–23, 2017

8 8 8 . 5 9 8 . 811 9

•

W W W . B U F FA LO B I L L A R T S H OW . C O M

WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO

S T A Y I N G

O U T

O F

T H E

S U N

ANDRÉ ACIMAN

Novelist, Memoirist, Literature Professor

Window Opening on Nice RAOUL DUFY (1877–1953) 1928, oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 31 3/4 in.

Shimane Art Museum, Japan

André Aciman Photo © Sigrid Estrada. Window Opening on Nice © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

A

ndré Aciman doesn’t like the beach or the sun or even the city of Nice, and yet he remains captivated by a scene that depicts all of those elements in exquisite detail. The noted novelist and memoirist — one of whose books, Call Me by Your Name, was recently made into a movie nominated for an Oscar in that other famous city by the sea, Los Angeles — claims, “Ten minutes in the sun and I get a headache.

My entire childhood I was fighting with my parents not to go to the beach. But I long now for cities by the sea, places like Barcelona, Naples, and Genoa.” Among Aciman’s favorite painted scenes are a series by Raoul Dufy (1877–1953) that depict the Nice waterfront through open windows. Versions of it are held by such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Art Institute of Chicago, and Japan’s Shimane Art Museum.

In addition to his writing, Aciman is a distinguished professor of literature at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he leads his devoted students in classes that parse the motivations of fictional characters. In books by Ovid, Boccaccio, Stendhal, Henry James, Jane Austen, and others, he remains fascinated by the way characters make sense of their motivations, especially when it comes to matters of love.

Aciman’s motivations for loving the Dufy scene, and others that the painter completed, mostly in the 1920s, do not, however, elude him. “This painting is a simulation of the kind of world I come from,” he says confidently,

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

FAC Favorite Mar/Apr18.indd 25

referencing his childhood in Alexandria, and later exodus, as he and his family were exiled from Egypt during the anti-Semitic zeal of president Gamal Abdel Nasser. “I love this Dufy work, and the other similar scenes he made, because of what it means to me. The memory of my place and this place, Nice, is essentially evoked by the image he painted.”

Aciman looks at the painting as if he himself is occupying the very room Dufy shows, standing in back, out of range. He points to the old-fashioned furniture and accessories, the floral motifs, the views of the blue Mediterranean framed by an open window.

“I like open windows because they suggest an access to the sea but maintain a distance from it. I can feel the breeze coming in, in what seems to me, by the light he paints, late morning, and it kind of awakens in me the sense of promise of a wonderful day and a wonderful evening to come.”

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Dufy, and his brother Jean, were often labeled Fauves (“wild beasts”) for their bold colors and forms. While many of Dufy’s works adhere to that moniker, his Nice paintings, in particular, are softer and more visually poetic.

At a time when cubism and early abstraction were in vogue, Dufy remained true to representational art. “Aesthetically, I have no ability to recognize if it’s great art,” Aciman admits, “but when I saw a Dufy exhibition at the Centre Pompidou years ago, I was very moved.”

Aciman’s Manhattan apartment does not have water views, but it does look out to Central Park. “Whenever I am traveling in a place by the sea, I’ll actually stop the car and put my feet in the water. If I’ve touched water, I feel I’m reconnecting with something primordial.

I’m reacquainted with my past.”

As for this painting, Aciman says, “If I could buy it, I would. If I could steal it, I would.”

025

2/13/18 2:28 PM

KELLI FOLSOM

OPA, AWA

Beauty of Blue and Gold 20x16 oil on panel $2995

Join my artistic community

kellifolsom.com

R YA N M E LLODY

Hammonasset Tide 36 by 36 inches, set of 5 Oil on birch

ryanmellody.com

Impressions, Markings & More Exhibition & Sale

2018 Fra Angelico Artist of the Year Dan McCaw Silhouettes

C4C DENVER ARTS WEEKEND APRIL 12-14 GALA OPENING-APRIL 12, EVENING, SPACE GALLERY, DENVER Invited Artists: Kathy Anderson, Stephanie Birdsall, Daniel Bilmes, Scott Burdick, Haze Diedrich, Miguel Edwards, Michael Gadlin, Ulrich Gleiter, Albert Handell, Ron Hicks, Liu Huihan, Michael Klein, Calvin Liang, Terrie Lombardi, David W Mayer, Dan McCaw, Danny McCaw, John McCaw, Jean-Pierre Moran, CW Mundy, Desmond O’Hagan, Vanessa Rothe, Don Sahli, Karen Scharer, Jill Soukup, Adrienne Stein, Nancy Switzer, Clive Tyler, Karen Vance, Jeff Wenzel, John Wood, Vincent Xeus, and Ron Zito

Schedule of Events: windowstothedivine.org Shannon Robinson, Chairperson 303-679-1365 or shannon@artistcalling.com

Presented by:

T. C. C A N N O N ARTIST • MUSICIAN • POET • VETERAN

MARCH 3–JUNE 10, 2018 AT TH E P E AB O DY E S S E X M U S E U M

T.C. Cannon: At the Edge of America is organized by the Peabody Essex Museum. Carolyn and Peter S. Lynch and The Lynch Foundation and Ellen and Steve Hoffman provided generous support. We also recognize the generosity of the East India Marine Associates of the Peabody Essex Museum.

MEDIA PARTNERS

MK5198_TC Cannon_Fine Art Connosoiour_FP_FINAL.indd 1

T.C. Cannon (1946–1978, Caddo/Kiowa), His Hair Flows Like a River (detail), 1973. Oil on canvas. Anne Aberbach and Family, Paradise Valley, Arizona. © 2017 Estate of T. C. Cannon. Photo by Thosh Collins.

161 Essex St. | Salem, MA pem.org

1/17/18 11:02 AM

AD2021Home_BDW2018_FAC_MarchApril:Layout 1

1/29/18

1:12 PM

Page 1

Boston Celebrates Design April 4 - 15, 2018

Fifth Annual APRIL 4 - 15 12-Day Citywide Festival 80+ Events All Open to the Public + Most Free of Charge

BostonDesignWeek.com

Fine Art • Furnishings • Home Design APRIL 12 - 15 Gala Preview Thursday to Benefit the ASID New England Scholarship Fund Weekend Show and Sale + Final Design Week Programs

AD2021Home.com

Sean Flood, Chopper Ride, (detail) Courtesy of Childs Gallery, one of 50 exhibitors in AD20/21 HOME. Sponsored by:

Produced by Fusco & Four/Ventures, LLC www.BostonArtFairs.com

Philip Koch

Burchfield Penney Art Center

Philip Koch, Winter Sky, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 inches, 2018 (detail)

Time Travel in the Burchfield Archives: Paintings by Philip Koch April 13 - July 29, 2018 Burchfield Penney Art Center 1300 Elmwood Ave. Buffalo, NY 14222 716 878 6011Â burchfieldpenney.org

REMOTE BIDDING Available

M A RCH 15‒17, 2018 Join us to celebrate the 50th Russell Auction to benefit the C.M. Russell Museum. The Russell Exhibition and Sale is widely recognized as one of the most prestigious and fun, western art events across the country. It is set to impress once again, offering competitive bidding for significant works by highly-acclaimed historical and contemporary artists.

R EMOTE BIDDING OPTIONS Contact Director of Art and Philanthropy, Duane Braaten at, dbraaten@cmrussell.org or (406) 727-8787, ext 333 Charles M. Russell, Just as Everything is Turning Black, I Hear Bed Rock's Winchester, c. 1899, watercolor, gouache, en grisaille on paper laid down on board, 11 ½ x 17 ¾ inches

400 13 th Street North | Great Falls, Montana | (406) 7271939 | cmrussell.org

Untitled-5 1

2/8/18 4:50 PM

Deb Schmit Cascade, Montana Hi-Ho Silver, 18 x 24 in., oil on linen panel Heritage Room 166 deb@debschmit.com | www.debschmit.com

Brian Bateman Fallbrook, California The Long Winters Hunt, 11 x 14 in., oil Heritage Room 286 brian.bateman48@gmail.com | 760.331.3944 | www.brianbatemanavart.com

Tangerine, 20 x 18 in., oil on linen C.M. Russell Museum, First Strike Live Auction, March 16, Lot #79

Janell James Salt Lake City, Utah Me and My Friends, 40 x 40 in., acrylic on multi-layered acrylic Heritage Room 262 janell@janelljamesartist.com | 435.655.5013 | www.janelljamesartist.com Represented by RARE Gallery, Jackson Hole, WY; Terakedis Fine Art, Billings, MT; Trove Gallery, Park City, UT.

Mary Ann Cherry Idaho Falls, Idaho Family Outing, 18 x 24 in., oil Heritage Room 122 cherryfineart@cableone.net | www.maryanncherry.com Represented by R.S. Hanna Gallery, Fredericksburg, TX; Kathie Rice Gallery, Idaho Falls, ID.

Laurie A. Stevens Cascade, Montana Bathed In Gold, 20 x 20 in., oil on gessoed board Heritage Room 176 lauriestevens296@yahoo.com | www.lauriestevensart.com Represented by Creighton Block Gallery, Big Sky, MT; Frame of Reference, Whitefish, MT; Latigo & Lace, Augusta, MT.

Michael Blessing

Meagan Abra Blessing

Bozeman, Montana Night Watch, 24 x 18 in., oil on canvas Heritage Room 126 info@blessingfineart.com | 406.548.5953 | www.blessingfineart.com Represented by Mountain Trails Gallery, Jackson, WY; Huey’s Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; Westward Gallery, Denver, CO.

Bozeman, Montana Balance, 12 x 16 in., oil on canvas Heritage Room 126 info@blessingfineart.com | 406.548.5953 | www.blessingfineart.com Represented by Huey’s Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM; A. Banks Gallery, Bozeman, MT; Coila Evans Art Gallery, Roundup, MT.

- ADVERTISEMENT -

BOCCARA ART: MANOLO VALDÉS Lillie IX, 2006 Mixed-media, oil on canvas 75 1/5 × 55 1/10 in 191 × 140 cm

- ADVERTISEMENT -

Fine art dealer, established in 2007

New York • MoNte-Carlo • HoNg koNg Features historically important and emerging artists, seeing discovery and support of young talents as one of its goals. Provides tailor-made consulting services to corporate and private clients for acquisition of Old-masters paintings, Modern and Contemporary Art. At BOCCARA ART we are dedicated to helping our clients uncover and drive value through strategic acquisition of art works in today’s more complex than ever environment.

NEW YORK +1 718 687 00 22 ny@boccara-art.com Exhibition Space: 30 West 56th Street, Floor 5M, “Artists Management. Ardani” New York, NY, 10019 by appointment only

MoNte-Carlo +33 628 77 12 74 fax: +377 99 99 77 78 mc@boccara-art.com advisory office: 74 bd d’Italie, “Monte-Carlo Sun”, Sun Office, Monaco, MC, 98000

loNDoN +44 7860875531 L@boccara-art.com Exhibition Space: 29, Dover Street, Wine Palace Mayfair, London, W1S, United Kingdom (coming soon)

HoNg koNg / SINgaPore Contact - Wenxia Chen, Jenny Cheung +852 6430 7589 wenxia@boccara-art.com

exhibition Spaces: “THIRTY-NINE Monte-Carlo” 39, Avenue Princesse Grace, Monaco, MC YaCHt ClUB de Monaco “Wine Palace Monte-Carlo” Quai Louis II, Monaco, MC

UPCOMING ART FAIR: MAY 2-6, 2018 Andy Warhol • Robert Indiana • Manolo Valdes • Roy Lichtenstein Monique Frydman • Gianfranco Meggiato • Franta

www.boccara-art.com

America Creative Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery March 23 to July 14, 2018 1220 21st Avenue South Nashville, Tennessee 37203 vanderbilt.edu/gallery

Morris Museum of Art August 11 to November 4, 2018 1 Tenth Street, Second Floor Augusta, Georgia 30901 themorris.org

Everett Raymond Kinstler (American, b. 1926) Paul Jenkins, 2006 Oil on canvas 60" x 50" Collection of the artist

America Creative: Portraits by Everett Raymond Kinstler is the third in a three-part series on portraiture organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Joseph S. Mella, director, and Margaret F. M. Walker, assistant curator, with special thanks to the artist, Peggy Kinstler, and Michael Shane Neal.

The exhibition is made possible, in part, by Mr. and Mrs. Charles L. Brock, Robbie and Hank Davis, Mr. and Mrs. J. Michael Duncan, John and Margarita Hennessy, Mr. and Mrs. B. Frederick Horne, Mr. Michael J. Horvitz, Virginia Cretella Mars, Holly Metzger, Michael Shane Neal, Ms. Trish Savides, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Steiner, Neika Stephens, the Terra Foundation for American Art on behalf of board member Greg Williamson, Westtown Publishing, and Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Williams III.

S A L M AG U N D I A C e n t e r f o r A m e r i c a n A r t f o r 1 4 7 Ye a r s

EXHIBITIONS | WORLD RENOWNED SPEAKERS | ART AUCTIONS MONOTYPE EVENTS | INTERNATIONAL REACH | AMERICAN MASTERS

Salmagundi artists and patrons have shaped the history of American art since 1871.

Join us as we continue to shape the art of the 21st Century.

Salmagundi Club 47 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003 | (212) 255-7740 | www.salmagundi.org

MARY PETTIS

Taylors Falls, Minnesota Adagio, 20 x 30 in., oil on linen, Royal Talens Best of Show Available through the artist mary@marypettis.com | www.marypettis.com Represented by Jennifer Nash Kochevar, Minneapolis, MN; Palms Gallery, Kauai, HI; her own studio/gallery #366 in Minneapolis’s Northrup King Building, MN.

KATHY ANDERSON

Redding, Connecticut Hollyhocks and New Dawn Roses, 30 x 20 in., oil on linen Available at the Salmagundi Centennial Show kathy@kathyandersonstudio.com | 203.938.2996 | www.kathyandersonstudio.com Represented by Susan Powell Fine Art, Madison, CT; Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ, Jackson, WY, and Bozeman, MT; West Wind Fine Art, Colorado Springs, CO.

PAULA HOLTZCLAW

Waxhaw, North Carolina Evening Serenade, 11 x 14 in., oil pbhfineart@aol.com | www.paulabholtzclawfineart.com Represented by Anderson Fine Art Gallery, St. Simons Island, GA; Cheryl Newby Gallery, Pawleys Island, SC; Highlands Art Gallery, Lambertville, NJ; Providence Gallery, Charlotte, NC; Williamsburg Art Gallery, Williamsburg, VA.

Thanks to the Salmagundi Club for hosting my 50-year retrospective this past year, and congratulations on the 100th anniversary of their famous building.

John Howard Sanden

For a complete pictorial report on the exhibition: visit johnhowardsanden.com.

Or request a free copy (while supply lasts) of the 18-page exhibition catalog: InstituteOrders@aol.com Photographs by Jonathan Sanden

ALEXANDER KATLAN CONSERVATOR INC.

56-38 Main Street, Flushing, NY The Rain Over the Desert, Santa Fe, New Mexico, by Lumen Martin Winter (1908-1982), circa 1960s, 30 x 40 in., oil on canvas Available alexkatlan@aol.com | 718.445.7458 | www.alexanderkatlan.com

RICK J. DELANTY

San Clemente, California Uprising, 18 x 24 in., acrylic on linen Available through the artist rdelanty@cox.net www.delantyfineart.com Represented by Mission Fine Art Gallery, St. George, UT; Delanty Studio & Gallery, San Clemente, CA.

LEE HUTT, FNSS South Hadley, Massachusetts His Honor, 12 x 6 x 9 in., bronze Available (4 of edition of 8) leehutt@mac.com | www.leehutt.com

DEBORAH NEWMAN

Henderson Old Grand Dad, 24 x 30 in., oil on linen Available through the artist deborah.newman20@gmail.com | www.deborahnewmanfineart.com Represented by Mary Martin Gallery, Charleston, SC; Stellers Gallery, Ponte Vedra, FL; Crystal Cove Alliance Gallery, Newport Beach, CA.

STEPHANIE BIRDSALL

Redding, Connecticut Poetry, 12 x 16 in., oil Available through Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ sbirdartist@gmail.com 239.571.8895 www.stephaniebirdsall.com Represented by Illume Gallery of Fine Art, St. George, UT; The Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Saks Galleries, Denver, CO; Susan Powell Fine Art, Madison, CT.

JOHN STOBART

Westport, Massachusetts San Pedro The Bark “Vidette” Towing into Port at Sunrise in 1890, 23 x 36 in., oil on canvas Available through Kensington-Stobart Gallery ksgsalem@aol.com | 978.825.0022 | www.stobart.com

MICHELE BYRNE

Reading, Pennsylvania CrossBox, 30 x 30 in., oil on canvas Available through the artist michele@michelebyrne.com | 610.698.3372 | www.michelebyrne.com Represented by Eckert & Ross Fine Art, Indianapolis, IN; Reinert Fine Art, Charleston, SC; Evalyn Dunn Gallery, Westfield, NJ.

DAVID WILLIAM TERRY

Jacksonville, Oregon Dorothy, 16 x 20 in., oil on linen Available through the artist david@davidterry.com | 214.676.8840 | www.davidwilliamterry.com

STEPHANIE AMATO

Milton, Georgia Conservatory Water, 24 x 18 in., oil on linen Available through J. M. Stringer Gallery of Fine Art, Vero Beach, FL stephanieamato35@gmail.com | www.stephanieamato.com Represented by J. M Stringer Gallery of Fine Art, Vero Beach, FL; Studio 7 Fine Art Gallery, Bernardsville, NJ; Burton Gallery, Clarkesville, GA.

GRACE SCHLESIER

El Cajon, California After the Storm, 12 x 16 in.

Available through the artist graceschlesier@cox.net | 858.220.6733 | www.graceschlesier.com Represented by Seaside Gallery, Pismo Beach, CA; Village Frame & Gallery, Montecito, CA; Concetta D Gallery, Albuquerque, NM; Hillside Fine Art, Claremont, CA; Judith Hale Gallery, Solvang, CA.

SUSAN BRANDSEMA

Long Island, New York Well Read, Salmagundi Books, 14 x 18 in., oil on linen Private collection brandsemastudio@gmail.com | 631.422.2210 | www.brandsemafineart.com Represented by robertpaulgalleries.com, Stowe, VT.

JOHANNE MANGI

North Haven, Connecticut IsaBella, 16 x 20 in., oil on linen Private collection jo@johannemangi.com | 203.215.5255 | www.johannemangi.com Royal Talens Art Ambassador Represented by The Salmagundi Club, NYC. By commission, contact the artist.

NEDRA NEWBY

Niskayuna, New York The Brooklyn Bridge in 2000, 13 x 16 in., acrylic on canvas Available through The Salmagundi Club nedra_newby48@msn.com | 518.374.4638 | www.nedranewby.com Represented by Albany Center Gallery, Albany, NY; The Salmagundi Club, NYC.

JOHN POTTER

Red Lodge, Montana Eagle Woman, 18 x 24 in., oil on linen jpotterpainter@gmail.com | 406.425.4262 | www.johnpotterstudio.com Represented by Mountain Trails Gallery, Jackson, WY; Legacy Gallery, Bozeman, MT; Mountain Trails Fine Art, Santa Fe, NM.

LYNN MEHTA

Alexandria, Virginia Italian Market, 16 x 20 in., oil on linen Available through the artist lynn@lynnmehta.com | www.lynnmehta.com Represented by Down Creek Gallery, Ocracoke, VA; Crystal Moll Gallery, Baltimore, MD; R.H. Ballard Gallery, Little Washington, VA; Stewart Gallery, Gloucester Courthouse, VA.

GEORGETTE SINCLAIR

New York, New York Haystack from Carpathian Mountains, 12 x 9 in., pastel Available through the artist georgettesinclair@gmail.com 212.421.4941 www.rivaa.com Represented by The Salmagundi Club, NYC; Gallery RIVAA, Roosevelt Island, NY.

STEPHANIE REITER

Demarest, New Jersey Kiawah Morning, 5 x 7 in., oil stephanie@camptowanda.com | 914.645.9748 | www.stephaniereiter.com

THALIA STRATTON San Francisco, California Manhattan Elegance, 20 x 16 in., oil on canvas Available through New Masters Gallery nmstaff@newmastersgallery.com | www.newmastersgallery.com Represented by New Masters Gallery, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA.

DEBRA JOY GROESSER

Ralston, Nebraska Timeless, 9 x 12 in.

Available through Montgomery-Lee Fine Art, St. George, UT debra@debrajoygroesser.com | 402.592.6552 | www.debrajoygroesser.com Represented by The Mission Gallery, St. George, UT; Montgomery-Lee Fine Art, Park City, UT; Vanessa Rothe Fine Art, Laguna Beach, CA; Mary Williams Fine Art, Boulder, CO; SouthWind Gallery, Topeka, KS.

There is a lot of superb art being made these days; this column by Allison Malafronte shines light on a trio of gifted individuals.

RICHIE CARTER (b. 1988) is only 29, yet this Montana-based painter has already assimilated decades’ worth of education into his professional practice. While earning his B.F.A. from the University of Montana at Missoula, which focused on conveying concepts through various media, Carter simultaneously developed a love of realism through drawing and painting from life. After graduating, he sharpened his technical skills further by taking numerous workshops, and he continues to draw inspiration through frequent travel abroad — the observations and experiences of which become fodder for future paintings.

Discussing the conceptual aspects of his work — notable for being at once simple and striking — Carter says he sees himself as a receiver of visions.

Once he sees the scene or subject, he then composes each element with much care. “It’s as if I see the painting before it’s actually painted,” he shares. “All of the outside inspiration, influences, and ideas that I continually absorb throughout my life coalesce with my own thoughts, emotions, and visions, and are eventually realized through these paintings.”

One such painting that Carter saw before it was created was the scene in Waiting. On a visit to Italy this past autumn, Carter awoke early to walk the streets of Florence before they became overcrowded. Gazing past the statues near the Uffizi Gallery, Carter observed a stunning moment of fleeting light. “I immediately saw a painting,” the artist recalls. “It was as if it were downloaded into me, and I had to paint it.” The addition of the silhouetted figure creates an entry point for the viewer, allowing us to stand alongside Carter in this beautiful vision of stillness and solitude.

Seeing traditional techniques and subject matter through contemporary eyes is a recurring theme in Carter’s work. One of his goals is to create dialogue between “the rich tradition of realism and the contemporary reality of our times.”

He also realizes that his paintings resonate with people on a level beyond the solely visual: “I work from an emotional place, and people seem to respond to my paintings on an emotional level as well,” he says. “Knowing my paintings help in some way to make authentic human connections is more than I could ask for as an artist.”

RICHIE CARTER (b. 1988) Waiting, 2017 Oil on linen, 24 x 18 in.

Private collection

Carter is represented by Frame of Reference Fine Art (Whitefish, MT), Montana Gallery (Billings, MT), Persimmon Gallery (Bigfork, MT), and Sundog Fine Art (Bozeman, MT).

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

FAC 3 to watch Mar/Apr 18 (3 pages).indd 53

M A R C H / A P R I L

053

2 0 1 8

PEREGRINE O’GORMLEY (b. 1977), Angelorum, 2016, burnt juniper, 21 x 8 x 11 in., collection of Karen Duddlesten

2/13/18 9:44 AM

NANCY BOREN (b. 1955) Echoes along the Slipstream, 2016 Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in.

Collection of the artist

NANCY BOREN (b. 1955) began her journey to becoming a painter as she sat beside her father, the artist James Boren, in the Grand Canyon and worked on her first watercolor at the age of 12. Growing up in the presence of a professional painter, Boren developed a love of beauty, color, and light and ultimately earned a B.F.A. from Abilene Christian University with a focus on both painting and printmaking.

Today Boren is recognized for her oil paintings, specifically ones depicting figures in the landscape. Although the influence of such past masters as John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, and Nikolai Fechin is evident in her palette and compositions, she is also clearly influenced by the Golden Age of American Illustration. Paintings such as Thunder on the Brazos, Meet Me under the Sky, and Aloft in the Western Sky suggest her in-depth study of Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, and Frederic Remington, among others.

Boren’s particular strength lies in depicting ethereal moments in nature with an emphasis on how the figure feels and relates to his or her

054

FAC 3 to watch Mar/Apr 18 (3 pages).indd 54

surroundings. In these paintings, it’s as though we are viewing a still from a beautiful passage of cinematography: the season, light, and perspective of the scene are in perfect sync with the subject’s story. Cimarron Solstice and Paper Lights, Magic Nights are two such examples.

Boren is also intrigued by the moodier and more mysterious side of storytelling, as seen in such paintings as El Dia de Los Muertos and the Slipstream series. “I enjoy creating images that contain another world,” she says. “Mystery, narrative, and magic are the goals in these types of works.” Delivering those elements alongside dreamy color, dynamic brushwork, and dramatic scale is one of several reasons that paintings such as Echoes along the Slipstream capture viewers’ imagination.

Boren is represented by Claggett/Rey Gallery (Vail), Davis & Blevins Gallery (Saint Jo, TX), L.A. Thompson Gallery of Fine Art (Clifton, TX), Southwest Gallery (Dallas), and Wild Horse Gallery (Steamboat Springs, CO).

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:45 AM

LEE HUTT (b. 1957) has a diverse educational background that is the backbone of her eclectic art-making.

She first studied painting in Belgium, where her love of the classical tradition began. She went on to receive a master’s degree in science from Columbia University, where she was privy to forward-thinking philosophy and psychology. While in New York City, Hutt took classes at the New School and was strongly influenced by the modernist art of Jacob Lawrence and Chaim Gross.

Like any good artist, Hutt combines all of the influences and ingredients from her past and present into artwork evolving toward her future. Her foundation and materials are traditional — figurative and portrait work created in clay and cast in bronze, plaster, or carbon steel — but her modernist and abstract sensibilities manifest in non-traditional subject matter. Her interest in psychology allows her to examine the sitter’s inner dialogue with empathy and intuition.

Hutt works primarily on gestural poses for her figure work, while her faces seem to fall into two categories: portraits of those she knows personally, and portraits that represent a universal. Without knowing much about the woman depicted in Abstracted, for instance, we can easily attach our own experiences to the model. Her nudity leaves no indication of time or place, and her traditional likeness creates a sense of familiarity. Following her gaze into the distance, we feel as if we recognize this woman whose essence has been expertly captured

by Hutt.

“There is never one likeness,” the artist says while describing her process. “I dig for the strength and beauty I see and feel, and when the piece has the spirit, often in the eye, I know it is complete. I don’t know how it happens — I have no repeated pattern of working. It always seems spontaneous and to emerge from feelings about the subject and my dialogue with the clay.”

LEE HUTT (b. 1957), Abstracted 2007, hydrocal, 22 x 18 x 18 in.

Collection of the artist

Hutt is a board member of the National Sculpture Society, and is selfrepresented.

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

FAC 3 to watch Mar/Apr 18 (3 pages).indd 55

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

055

2/13/18 9:45 AM

BY SHERYL NONNENBERG

T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S

WAYN HIBAUD’S MOS CRUCIA DCAD

P

opened in 2016 on this sprawling, rural campus 75 miles east of San Francisco.

Partly funded by, and named for, the owners of Napa Valley’s Clos Pegase winery, the museum has become a regional landmark thanks to its enormous, undulating canopy roof.

Once known primarily as an agriculture school, UC Davis is now renowned for outstanding programs in medicine, veterinary science, and viticulture. In the 1960s it became a mecca for artists wanting to get away from San Francisco and from art schools promulgating the latest theories of abstract expressionism. Guided by Richard Nelson, who founded the art department, an extraordinary roster of artists found both teaching posts and a community supportive of their innovations, which often involved a return to the figurative. They included Thiebaud, Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, Roy De Forest, and Manuel Neri. Together with artists like Richard Diebenkorn and David Park, what became known as the Bay Area Figurative School offered tongue-in-cheek alternatives to the angst of abstract expressionist art.

ies, cakes, hot dogs, and gumball machines are not usually considered suitable subjects for fine art. But when they are depicted by a master painter like Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920), they become sensory delights, glowing with rainbow-hued impasto. At 97, Thiebaud has lived long enough to enjoy critical acclaim and to be the focus of countless museum retrospectives worldwide.

Now an exhibition mounted at the University of California at Davis, where he spent 42 years teaching, is the first anywhere to highlight a 10-year period when a series of important breakthroughs in subject and style set the course for Thiebaud’s long career.

Wayne Thiebaud: 1958–1968 consists of more than 60 paintings and prints gathered from public and private collections throughout the U.S. On view until May 13, it has been organized by the university’s Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, which

Cup of Coffee, 1961, oil on canvas, 18 x 12 in.,

A CIRCUITOUS ROUTE When Thiebaud was hired by UC Davis in 1960, he was 40 years old and had weathered a childhood marred by the Great Depression and U.S. Army

Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis, gift of Fay Nelson, photo: M. Lee Fatherree, Oakland, art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York

056

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

Pies, 1961, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in., private collection, photo: Douglas Sandberg, art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York

service during World War II. Born in Mesa, Arizona, he had a peripatetic childhood while his father sought employment in Utah and California. As a teenager, Thiebaud worked in fast food stands on Long Beach’s boardwalk; there his experience of lining up rows of burgers and hot dogs created a lasting visual memory. During high school, he worked in the theater department on lighting and stage design — another influence that would appear in his art years later.

Like most young men then, Thiebaud was enthralled with cartoons.

He became skillful enough at them to land a job at Walt Disney Studios as a sketch artist while still in his teens. During the war he spent four years creating posters and murals for the U.S. Army. Returning home, Thiebaud realized that work as a cartoonist would be difficult to find and would not support his young family, so he took a job with Rexall Drug Company as an art director and designed its magazine. This experience in advertising and illustration would also have a profound effect on his choice of subject matter, medium, and method. Having earned an undergraduate degree in art from Sacramento State University, Thiebaud began teaching at Sacramento Junior College in 1951. As a traditionalist, he stressed to his students F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

the importance of drawing via repetitive exercises and of studying the Old Masters to appreciate their handling of color, surface, and light. When not teaching, Thiebaud tried to exhibit his own art, even in a group show at a local drive-in cinema. But it was a trip to New York City in 1961 that propelled his career forward.

Like many of his contemporaries, Thiebaud was steeped in abstract expressionism but was trying to find his own distinctive style. This transitional period is well documented in the Manetti Shrem’s re-creation of Thiebaud’s breakthrough solo exhibition in 1962 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City. In paintings dating from as early as 1955, his quick, gestural brushstrokes and muted colors remind us of Willem De Kooning and Mark Rothko. One year earlier, Thiebaud had walked up and down Manhattan trying to interest galleries, but it was only Stone who had liked his paintings of such ordinary things as cakes and ice cream cones. The resulting show sold out and won rave reviews, yet it also cast Thiebaud as a Pop artist, even though his depictions of comestibles actually predated Andy Warhol’s by several years. Pop is a label he has resisted ever since.

Rachel Teagle, executive director of the Manetti Shrem Museum and curator of the Thiebaud exhibition, explains why she chose to focus on this pivotal decade: “Thiebaud rose to fame while teaching at UC Davis and… found his voice here. This story is not well known and the last museum retrospective of his work was 17 years ago.” In the accompanying catalogue, she notes that Thiebaud’s seemingly sudden success “actually resulted from a period of sustained experimentation and focused production.”

057

Delicatessen Counter, 1963, oil on canvas, 60 1/2 x 73 in., private collection, art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York

(RIGHT) Cream Soups, 1963, oil on

canvas, 29 3/4 x 36 in., private collection, photo: Paul Mutino, art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York

Entering her show’s main gallery, the viewer is met with eye-popping, mouth-watering examples of Thiebaud’s signature subject — food.

There are pies, cakes, sandwiches, deli counters, breakfast platters, and gumball machines, all featuring his lavish application of paint. Here it is easy to see how his experiences as cartoonist, set designer, and advertising designer coalesced into this distinctive style. Yes, Thiebaud portrays everyday objects, but, in contrast to his Pop contemporaries’ cynical take on mass consumerism, he presents them, almost nostalgically, as the best that American life has to offer. As the art historian Edward Lucie-Smith has noted, “In a sense he is both the Chardin and Corot of the West Coast, a man who interprets traditional values in purely American terms.”

IN HIS OWN WORDS Thiebaud views himself as a traditionalist with a fascination for realism. In an articulate article he wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle in

058

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

Girl with Ice Cream Cone, 1963, oil on canvas, 48 1/8 x 36 1/4 in., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest Fund, Smithsonian Collections Acquisition Program, and Museum Purchase, 1996, photo: Cathy Carver, art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, (Below) New York Football Player, 1963, oil on canvas, 72 x 36 in., Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis Foundation, photo: Travis Fullerton, art © Wayne Thiebaud / Licensed by VAGA, New York

isolation” and pointed out that the rows have “a kind of lonely togetherness.” As usual with Thiebaud, the background is a neutral white, allowing for “a kind of head-on directness.” The paint has been applied thickly in broad strokes, especially appropriate for emulating frosting and meringue: “My surfaces are activated and brushed heavily to try and keep them visually available.” Color plays a major role, too: “The real color of the object is paramount… in my paintings a lemon pie is that yellow and breads are the closest color to the dough that I can get.” All of these strategies yield images that are at once recognizable and illusionistic — a treat for the eye and a tour de force of technique.

ONWARD TO THE FIGURE As the 1960s progressed, Thiebaud turned his attention to the figure, perhaps wanting to differentiate himself from the Pop movement. This season’s exhibition includes several key paintings reflecting his idiosyncratic manner of dealing with this timeless subject. Unlike the food paintings, all done from memory, Thiebaud used live models for these newer works. In Girl with Ice Cream Cone (1963), the artist has employed the classical technique of foreshortening to portray a young woman, seated with legs outstretched toward the viewer, enjoying a frozen treat. She is rendered in a somewhat stiff and blocky fashion, alone on the canvas against a stark white background. Here again, the neutral background and the strong, stage-like lighting create deep shadows that add to the painting’s static, formal quality.

Some critics have compared Thiebaud’s figuration with that of Edward Hopper, mainly because of their isolation.

If his food paintings are exuberant celebrations of cultural artifacts, then pictures like this from the mid-1960s tackle the age-old challenge of painting the figure with quiet contemplation and focus.

By 1968, Thiebaud was by all accounts a leading American artist. He continued teaching at UC Davis until his retirement in 2002, and has occasionally returned to campus thereafter. Teagle calls him “a truly passionate teacher and mentor who ignited a spirit of creative innovation in countless students and aspiring artists spanning four decades.” Thiebaud has remained steadfast in his passion for the medium of painting, which he considers “more important than art” itself.

1962, he explained his motivations and technique.

His revelatory words are cited in many of this exhibition’s wall texts and are also made available in their entirety as a brochure. The latter serves as a useful reference while examining a key painting in the show, Pies, from 1961. The subject is one of the artist’s favorites and shows his predilection for both geometry and presenting objects in a serial fashion.

Why depict such a quotidian object? Thiebaud explained, “I try to find things to paint which I feel have been overlooked.” He felt that we do not often recognize, or appreciate, what makes our own lives special at the time. Like a cultural anthropologist, he has called attention to things essential to our moment, saying, “Each era produces its own still life,” and, “I hope that [my art] may allow us to see ourselves looking at ourselves.”

In Pies, triangular slices of fruit and cream pies have been placed on round, white plates and lined up in rows. The desserts are presented on a white table that features a horizontal band of blue shadowing across the center of the composition.

And although the table is crowded, there is a strong sense of each object standing on its own. Thiebaud noted, “The space inference that I want is one of F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

Information: 254 Old Davis Road, Davis, CA 95616, 530.752.8500, manettishremmuseum.ucdavis.edu. On March 1, Stanford University professor Alexander Nemerov will give a lecture on Thiebaud at the Manetti Shrem.

SHERYL NONNENBERG is an art researcher/writer who lives in Northern California.

2 0 1 8

059

BY CHARLES R ASKOB ROBINSON

T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S

HOW

MICH JUNG OUND HR VOIC



here is much to be said about the recent success of the painter Michelle Jung (b. 1964), but what has mattered most to her is finding her artistic “voice.” Now that she has it, she feels totally liberated and enthused about expressing it as fully as she can. This is driven by both discipline and dedication, evidenced — for example — by the fact Jung spends half of her time in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the other half in California (Santa Cruz and Atherton). It is particularly interesting to learn how her bi-coastal living and working arrangements have affected how and what she paints.

Born and raised in Connecticut, Jung demonstrated artistic talent in both elementary and high schools. This led her to earn a B.A. in art history from Colorado State University and to complete an internship at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. After graduation, she applied her new knowledge while working in various art galleries, but eventually strengthened her bottom line by cofounding a California insurance agency, from which she is now retired. She had two daughters through a first marriage before meeting her current husband, Mark Alexander Jung, who was born in Toronto, raised in Wellesley, and has had a successful career in technology. He also has two daughters from a previous marriage; all four girls have earned college degrees and three have gone on to graduate school, while the fourth is a merchandising manager in San Francisco.

Agave, 2017, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in., available from the artist

060

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

(ABOVE) Cliffs at Davenport, 2016, oil on panel, 8 x 10 in., collection of John Noia

(RIGHT) Eucalyptus, 2017, oil on canvas, 40 x 48 in., available from

the Guild of Boston Artists

A LATE START Jung returned to art when she began painting, at age 40, in local classes and workshops. Her instructors encouraged her to go back to school and so she did, ultimately earning an M.F.A. from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. By the time she entered the arena of professional exhibiting, she was nearly 50: she needed to establish her name and reputation in short order, so she set goals and achieved them in a timely fashion by entering high-profile competitions and developing relationships with established organizations. In the process, she has won awards from coast to coast and has been elected to membership in the American Society of Marine Artists, California Art Club, Oil Painters of America, Guild of Boston Artists, and New York City’s Salmagundi Club.

Launching into this arena came easily for Jung, whose father, police lieutenant Allan Frederick Freiheit, Jr., raised his four children in a physically competitive environment where discipline was expected. “I am a ‘trophy chaser’ and enjoy winning,” Jung F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

061

(LEFT) In the Night, 2016, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in., available from the artist Lily, 2017, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 in., available from the artist

(RIGHT)

(BOTTOM) River Song,

2017, oil on canvas, 24 x 48 in., collection of Ed and Sally Daihl

admits. “During high school, I was a 10-varsity-letter athlete competing in gymnastics, softball, and cross-country track, and I went on to earn a black belt in taekwondo. Every day I paint from 7:30 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon, with no lunch break, then clear my head by taking a fivemile run.” In California, that jog takes her along the Pacific Ocean, a mix of exercise and visual inspiration that doubly recharges her.

062

THE ARTISTIC BENEFITS OF A BI-COASTAL LIFE Jung’s bi-coastal commute provides cherished time in the air, during which she continues her study of art by reading books and articles. She also values the “mirror effect” gained by leaving paintings in her studio on one coast and returning to those on the other. “Some artists use mirrors or turn their work upside down to gain a new perspective, but I get a fresh look after having been away for a couple of weeks,” Jung says. “I find this an important part of my creative experience, especially in light of the very different painting environments on the East and West Coasts. At first it was a huge adjustment: it gets dark very early in the east and the light is flatter, with fewer shadows. I had to adjust everything and stick to values. That made me think about color more. Yet the longer I observed the contrast between coasts, the more I could capture it. I believe my work is very distinctive because of that. The value scale is much tighter on the East

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

(ABOVE) Monterey Pine, 2017, oil on canvas, 36 x 58 in., available from the artist

(BOTTOM)

Silent

Watchers, 2016, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., available from the artist

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

063

(ABOVE) Steamers Lane, 2017, oil on canvas, 24 x 60 in., collection of Wittmann Hill

(BOTTOM) The

Pinnacle, 2015, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in., available from the artist

Coast. The color is more muted, with less contrast. In California, the colors are more vibrant, much more saturated.” Jung’s gravitation to the coasts and to marine scenes generally is a natural outgrowth of having been around boats and water for much of her life.

Although she is bi-coastal, Jung confides, “Neither side of the U.S. has a monopoly on my heart. I was born and raised in Connecticut, so I will always be a New Englander. I will always be nostalgic about the East Coast. But on the West Coast, the sunset on the water is so different from the sunrise.

That drama is what I’m drawn to. It’s a matter of nostalgia and mood versus drama and color. And I love them both.”

HER VOICE: FINDING IT As Jung became more competent in the basics of painting, her confidence in producing a finished work grew. She took workshops and saw the different approaches and styles her instructors offered. As part of her self-education, she has also studied artworks in museums here and abroad. Metaphorically speaking, she knew she could “sing,” but needed to find her voice first. One day she did.

Every autumn the Jungs try to join Peter Trippi and Eric Rhoads (editor-in-chief and publisher of Fine Art Connoisseur) when they lead a group of readers to Europe, so over the years Peter and Michelle have developed a professional relationship. During one trip, Jung told Trippi she could paint competently, yet wanted more — to use her own voice: “I can paint scenes of the California

064

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

Swell, 2016, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in., collection of Jessica Braun

coast or the Hudson River Valley, but where do I belong?” Surely she knew the answer, but had not realized it until Trippi replied simply, “Paint for yourself!” Jung recalls, “It set me free!

I found my own voice. I could focus on what I wanted to say. No longer did I care about ‘what they would say.’

I could now express my opinion about what I was seeing and experiencing even though I am often pushing the boundaries of what is expected, even tolerated, by the viewer or exhibiting organization.”

Today Jung gets her ideas for paintings from the dualistic qualities fundamental to human life: “Some examples are life/death, earth/water, love/hate, chaos/order, etc. I use these opposing principles to create energy, and to guide my train of thought through a series of paintings. For instance, my recently completed Northern California Seascape series is based on the relationship between earth and water. My new Flora series is based on chaos and order.”

She continues, “Once I know the direction of thought (dualism) I want to explore, I go out into nature and observe. Observation, in my opinion, is the most important step. Before I started the seascape series, I spent every day for an entire year painting en plein air at the same location. Although the view never changed (sky, rock, water, sand), I began to observe the subtle changes that occur between solid masses. These connections were where the truth — the purity — was happening in front of me. That is where the true energy in my paintings lies. Nature provides the elements, but my observation through all my senses directs my art making.”

Jung then returns indoors: “After a long period observing and painting those small studies, I move to the studio to execute the compositional elements of the final painting. This phase is all about design. How do I translate the experience onto a two-dimensional surface? I think I enjoy this process most because I must be very clever in the execution or ‘delivery’ of my intention. I am aware of the many compositional rules, so it’s fun to push those boundaries — which I think creates drama. I have mastered many techniques that ‘trick the eye,’ and I no longer need to think about color, value, and temperature. These have become second nature. I finally have the freedom to paint truthfully. I’ve now gotten to a point comparable to when, in learning to play the piano, you suddenly don’t need to look at the keys or sheet music. I’ve learned that each color has its own personality, so I manipulate mood and emotion through the distinctive interrelationships of my colors.” After Jung has covered the canvas, she can see if the painting will be successful. “I then decide how much softening of edges and blending I will do. Do I want to push it toward realism and, if so, how far? Or do I want to keep it abstract and fresh? The painting itself usually reveals the answer.”

Jung is on the faculty of the Plein Air Convention & Expo (PACE), the annual gathering launched by Eric Rhoads in 2012. As a field instructor at last year’s edition in San Diego, Jung shared her voice with many attendees. In one recording, she can be heard saying, “Plein air painting is not really about color and composition; it’s about what is happening at that moment. The task is to figure out what you are experiencing and what you are feeling. It’s not just painting what you see.” She added, “You can’t always expect to complete a painting in two hours, but you can get F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

down on canvas ‘what it is to be in San Diego.’ When you are in a new locale painting, you need to figure out what in that environment is different. Lighting? Color? Shapes? Texture? Pick one or two things and get that down in the painting.”

Asked to advise younger artists, Jung urges them to “get the best education affordable.” She says, “Seek out art groups for support. Learn to draw well. Accept criticism and advice with an open mind. Master your tools and learn color theory. Read everything you can about past masters, and go see their paintings in person. As you advance, seek out a mentor you admire, and don’t be afraid to change mentors as you develop. Embrace failure, build endurance, and work hard. And finally, find your own voice.

This is the most important. Finding your own voice is the culmination of foundation mastery, technical mastery, deep intellectual thought, and purpose. Using the artistic process is the selective path that can bring order and peace to life’s chaos. Most importantly, that path of beauty is achievable if it is done with intention.”

MORE TO COME Jung says she is now “working on a new series that, by eliminating a point of perspective, requires me to use other techniques to create gravity in the painting.” She next plans to show paintings in the Guild of Boston Artists’ Annual Members Juried Exhibition (May 5–31), followed by the California Art Club’s 107th Annual Gold Medal Exhibition (June 10 – July 1). She will return to the Guild for a solo show running October 6–31. No doubt this energetic artist will schedule other showings as the year unfolds.

Information: On April 12, Jung will offer an oil painting demo co-presented by the Wellesley Society of Artists and Needham Art Association. For details, visit wellesleysocietyofartists.org.

CHARLES RASKOB ROBINSON is an author, contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur, and Fellow of the American Society of Marine Artists, the nation’s oldest and largest not-for-profit organization dedicated to marine art and history.

065

BY PETER TRIPPI

T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S

JAMS McHINNY’S JOURNA PAININGS:

WHN INIMA VISIONS GO DIGIAL

B

ased in Manhattan with a studio at Haverstraw in New York’s scenic Hudson Valley, James Lancel McElhinney (b. 1952) is an artist, author, scholar, oral historian, and art appraiser. This past November he also became a publisher when his new firm, Needlewatcher Editions, launched Hudson Highlands: North River Suite, Volume One. This is a handsome set of seven archival digital prints of seven landscape watercolors McElhinney had previously painted in his journals.

Published as a limited edition of 50 copies, each housed in a cloth-covered box with a title page, colophon, and chapbook, the suite offers its owners a sumptuously old-school viewing experience (complete with white cotton gloves), yet it has sprung to life in a truly 21stcentury way. Yes, McElhinney simply scanned the page-spreads of his own journals on a standard flatbed printer he had bought at Staples, then e-mailed the resulting scans to Brilliant Graphics in Exton, Pennsylvania, where the prints were made. “The digital technology used to create these prints did not exist two centuries ago,” he explains, “but in other ways this project invokes historic precedents.” Given how much we all admire the colorful woodcuts of 19th-century Japan’s ukiyo-e masters, it’s worth remembering that they did not make their own prints either. The lively designs were theirs, not the woodcuts themselves. As ever, great art always centers on the artist’s vision, not always on its fabrication.

James McElhinney painting

at the grave of the naturalist John Burroughs (1837–1921) in Roxbury, New York

Hudson Highlands: North River Suite, Volume One comes in a “clam-shell” box with a unique postcard-size painting as a bonus.

ON THE MOVE So how did McElhinney reach his goal of becoming an independent publisher — of finding a way to retain his precious journals while sharing the paintings inside them with 50 different collectors? His story begins in an arts-minded family living in historic Doylestown, Pennsylvania, 27 miles north of Philadelphia. The artist fondly recalls exploring the rolling hills of Bucks County, as well as family visits to the Revolutionary War encampment site at Valley Forge, where some of his ancestors served under Gen. Washington. From boyhood McElhinney regularly visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and by 14 he was taking classes at Philadelphia College of Art. It was only natural that he should earn a B.F.A. at Tyler School of Art, where he focused on painting figures and still lifes.

066

FAC TodaysMasters-McElhinney (4 pages).indd 66

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 8:56 AM

(TOP) A bird’s-eye view of the chapbook (left) and title page (right) with the “clam-shell” box.

(LEFT) A

typical page from the accompanying chapbook. Each of the seven images is accompanied by a detailed description of the site, its history, and its character.

One even features a stanza of poetic verse.

Given his passion for landscape painting today, it seems remarkable that McElhinney did not get hooked on it until the summer of 1973, between his junior and senior years at Tyler, when he attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. There he and his Tyler comrade Frank Hyder were, in his words, the “urban roughnecks” completely astonished by the beauty of Maine’s natural scenery. Why, they wondered, should they sit indoors when they could be outside painting nature? (In response to disparaging comments by orthodox abstractionists, they styled themselves “Sunsets Incorporated,” mostly to annoy them further.) McElhinney continued working outdoors occasionally while earning an M.F.A. in painting from Yale University, where he focused on figures.

Since Yale, McElhinney has pursued a distinguished, if peripatetic, career teaching art at institutions nationwide, from Maine to Colorado, from North Carolina to Wisconsin. In 1977, while teaching at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, he visited the New-York Historical F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

FAC TodaysMasters-McElhinney (4 pages).indd 67

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Society to see an exhibition of Hudson River School paintings. Though he was not overcome by what he saw that day, he was inspired to spend more time painting outdoors near Saratoga. One day he stumbled upon a striking view from a hilltop, a view flooded with light that would have thrilled Frederic Edwin Church, whose passion for both travel and science has always impressed McElhinney. That unexpected vista deepened his zeal for elevated perspectives, so he roamed further afield, exploring the Berkshire

067

2/13/18 8:56 AM

(TOP) South Gate from Bear Mountain

(BELOW) West Point from Garrison’s Landing

hills, the Helderberg Escarpment, and sites closer to Skidmore, like the cottage on Mount McGregor where President Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs and died.

It was relocating to Richmond, Virginia, that fully awakened McElhinney to the powerful connections between landscape and history. He began reading books like James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993), and right up through 2003 he created a series of paintings that explore historic battlefields as flashpoints in the ongoing conflict between preservationists and developers. McElhinney dug deeper not only by researching these places’ backstories, but also by joining the 1st New York Engineers, a regiment of Union Army re-enactors active at Virginia’s battlefield parks.

McElhinney writes: “Landscapes do not occur in nature. According to [the landscape theoretician] J. B. Jackson [1909–1996], they are created when people adapt terrain to their use. By extension, what we behold as a landscape is nothing more or less than a projection of personal desire. The visual echoes we receive, as pictures of terrain, are thus our own reflection.”

McElhinney notes, for example, how Native Americans’ trails — literally their paths of least resistance through rugged wilderness — often became colonial post roads, which were then widened into highways and ultimately interstates. The interstate did not fall from the sky fully formed: it is only the next step in a long chain of human engagements with nature. For McElhinney, what we call landscape is actually “a palimpsest of simultaneous narratives and memories, conditioned by topography, climate, and the forces of nature.”

068

FAC TodaysMasters-McElhinney (4 pages).indd 68

From 2004 onward, McElhinney began teaching at major art schools in New York City, including Pratt Institute and the Art Students League.

Things went sideways in 2005, however: “Stricken with a mysterious pulmonary illness, I was admitted to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where I remained for nearly a month. My future wife, [Prof.] Kathie Manthorne [see page 119 for her latest project], brought me a set of watercolors and a New York Central Art Supply linen sketchbook. A lounge afforded spectacular views of the New Jersey Palisades and the George Washington Bridge. Painting in the book for the first time, I suddenly realized that an open spread could replace a stretched canvas as the substratum for a fully developed painting. Following my discharge from the hospital, a newfound hypersensitivity to spirit vapors and oil paint caused me to shift my painting practice to aqueous media.”

SHARING HIS JOURNEYS Ultimately, McElhinney explains, his “paintings migrated off the easel and into sketchbooks during trips to Europe, Hawaii, Ecuador, Peru, California, the Rocky Mountains, and the American Southwest.” Over time, he has reversed the conventional order of art-making: his studio has become a kind of laboratory, where he tests ideas while painting in oils.

But it is outdoors where he makes the finished work in a journal, usually — as we can see in the illustrations here — annotating the image with his own words. These small paintings are not preparatory at all. Instead, McElhinney notes, “journal paintings treat the open page as equal to the canvas, a complete work in its own right that might be read as a pocket diptych, its halves divided by the binding.” Making them is an intervention, an opportunity to probe the vista — what am I really looking at? What happened here? This is essentially an “excavation of visual and written narratives from firsthand experience, travel, and observation.”

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 8:56 AM

(TOP) Crow’s Nest Mountain from Cold Spring Landing

(BOTTOM) Western Highlands

from Boscobel

Not surprisingly, McElhinney identifies intensely with such expeditionary traveler-artists as John James Audubon, George Catlin, and Seth Eastman, people who operated at the “nexus of art, science, and history.”

Years ago, he visited Roy Goodman, a curator at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, to examine the expedition journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804–06). He wanted to see them because he was considering a project to retrace George Catlin’s 1830 journey up the Missouri River. Ultimately he eliminated figures so as not to create “history paintings,” secure in the knowledge that the land itself conveys what we need to know.

Turning to his more recent Hudson Valley subjects, he recalls: “Following in the footsteps of Charles Willson Peale, William Guy Wall, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Parker Willis, Washington Irving, and John Burroughs, I traveled up and down the Hudson Valley. Learning the names of its mountains, hills, and streams such as Anthony’s Nose, Storm King, and Treason Creek, which flows behind my studio, I became absorbed in its history. Muhheahkunnuck to the Lenni-Lenape, North River to the Dutch, the Hudson remains a major thoroughfare linking the port of New York to a chain of inland seas, the Saint Lawrence River, and the interior of North America. Informed by historic narratives such as Robert Juet’s 1609 journal about the journey of Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half-Moon, and Benson J. Lossing’s The Hudson from the Wilderness to the Sea, I completed roughly 200 journal paintings in the Hudson River Valley.”

So, what to do with 200 journal paintings, McElhinney wondered?

He turned for advice to Dick Solomon, the legendary head of Pace Prints F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

FAC TodaysMasters-McElhinney (4 pages).indd 69

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

in Manhattan, who pointed him toward the digital solutions illustrated here. A grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation reassured McElhinney that its jurors also believed this was a viable way to proceed, and so, after e-mailing those seven scans to Brilliant Graphics, he headed to London, where the cloth-covered boxes were fabricated by Wyvern Bindery, a firm founded in the 18th century.

Hudson Highlands: North River Suite, Volume One is not actually classified as an artwork, but rather as a book with its own ISBN number (9780-9993673-0-8). Always a fan of Audubon, McElhinney decided to fund the project partly through subscriptions; half of the 50 copies have already been sold in this way, and sales are continuing via mcelhinneyart.com. The renowned conservationist Barnabas McHenry donated one set to Boscobel House and Gardens, set on a hill overlooking the Hudson from which several of these scenes were painted. McHenry also underwrote the purchase of another set by the West Point Museum, which collects material related to the U.S. Military Academy and its environs. (It is meaningful to McElhinney that Seth Eastman and Robert W. Weir both taught drawing at the academy.)

This coming March 8–11, one of McElhinney's journals will be exhibited at the 58th Annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair by David and Cathy Lilburne of Antipodean Books (Garrison, New York).

Fortunately, Hudson Highlands: North River Suite, Volume One is only the first in what will be a series of such publications from Needlewatcher Editions. We look forward to seeing more, and we encourage other artists to consider whether McElhinney’s approach — a blend of tradition and the cutting-edge — may serve their purposes as well.

PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.

Photos: Amanda Weber

069

2/13/18 8:56 AM

BY M AT T H I A S A N D E R S O N

T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S

28 BOCKS: GARIN BAKR’S

RSH OOK A AN AMRICAN ICON



ast summer the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., was enhanced with another monumentally sized public artwork — one with a profound back story that has been unfairly overlooked until now. Traveling south from his studio in New York’s Hudson Valley, the artist Garin Baker (b. 1961) was delighted to complete his mural 28 Blocks. At its tallest, it measures 65 feet high and spans 160 feet wide.

The story of how it came to exist is encouraging in many ways.

For better or worse, Washington is booming economically, with formerly neglected neighborhoods being cleaned up and, in some cases, gentrified. One focus of activity in the city’s northeastern quadrant is the industrial zone of Eckington, now crisscrossed by the new Metropolitan Branch trail for cyclists and joggers. The District of Columbia’s Department of General Services operates an Art on the Trails program, which in 2015 invited applications from artists to adorn the side of a city-owned warehouse, Penn Center, near the corner of Third and R Streets. The agency identified this massive surface as significant because approximately 40,000 people see it every day from cars and buses along New York Avenue, from MetroRail and Amtrak trains, and from the Metropolitan Branch trail. Officials sought to create not only a pleasant

070

FAC TodaysMasters-Baker (4 pages).indd 70

Baker draws a preliminary sketch at the Lincoln Memorial.

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:11 AM

(LEFT) Two sections being painted by Baker in his New York studio

(RIGHT) Baker inspects several completed sections.

sight and a veritable welcome sign to the city, but also a “place marker” that would resonate with local residents.

The winner of the competition was Garin Baker, who was born and raised in Manhattan. Having studied with the social realist masters Max Ginsburg and Irwin Greenberg at New York City’s renowned High School of Art & Design, he went on to train at the Art Students League under Ted Seth Jacobs, Harvey Dinnerstein, Burton Silverman, David A. Leffel, and Frank Mason. Baker completed his education at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute, where the faculty were not quite so keen on the young man’s realist tendencies. Nonetheless, Baker has conducted a successful career as a painter and muralist ever since from his studio in New Windsor, 53 miles north of New York City.

Baker won the competition not only because he is a gifted artist, but also because his idea for the mural chimes powerfully with what’s happening in America today — the (usually) healthy revisiting of iconic historic

images in order to better appreciate their complexities. Baker’s focus was the massive seated sculpture of Abraham Lincoln that graces the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall — one of the country’s best-loved statues and the single most visited monument in Washington. Unveiled in 1922, this 19-foot-high, 150-ton portrait is the masterwork of Daniel Chester French (1850–1931), one of the finest sculptors this country has produced.

Missing from all these superlatives is the fact that many now-forgotten people were involved in creating the sculpture after French designed it in 1915. For starters, it is made of extraordinarily high-quality white marble that was quarried in the mountains of northwestern Georgia by the sons and grandsons of African American slaves. In 1916, 28 blocks of this stone were cut and hauled, not to Washington, but to the South Bronx, where the six sons of Giuseppe Piccirilli (1844–1910) set to work on them.

This family had worked stone for centuries in their ancestral Tuscan town of Massa Carrara, and now as immigrants to America they had been assigned the demanding task of carving one block at a time while consulting French’s maquette. Ultimately their 28 blocks were pieced together on site in Washington, and the fit was flawless.

Baker named his project 28 Blocks to underscore the materiality of the Lincoln statue. Accordingly, his mural can be read — left to right — as a chronicle of how it came to exist: at left we see the finished sculpture, but in the foreground are the Black men who quarried the stone, along with a relevant poem by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. As our eyes move to the right, we see the Piccirillis, French, his assistant Evelyn Beatrice Longman, and other figures involved in the process, all researched by Baker through archival photographs.

Once he had completed this historical research, Baker made drawings of the finished statue in Washington, then set to work in his

The first sections installed

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

FAC TodaysMasters-Baker (4 pages).indd 71

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

071

2/13/18 9:11 AM

(LEFT) Section featuring an African American quarry worker, Daniel Chester French, and French’s studio assistant, Evelyn Beatrice Longman

(MIDDLE) An Italian immigrant marble carver symbolizes the craftsmanship handed down

over generations since the Renaissance.

New York studio designing the composition, using PhotoShop to stitch together relevant archival images. He spent five months hand-painting 120 gessoed cloth panels (each 10 by five feet) with gray, black, and white acrylics manufactured by Nova in California. Baker was confident of this technique’s durability — which has been perfected by Philadelphia’s renowned Mural Arts program over the past 25 years — and also that his panels — like the Piccirillis’ 28 blocks — would ultimately fit together.

Last summer he and two paid artist-assistants — Bryan Guglielmi of Philadelphia and Julia Lanihan of New York — adhered all 120 sections to the warehouse’s brick exterior, then applied a polyurethane coating to protect them from the elements.

Now that it’s completed, Baker has time to reflect on the powerful fact that, just over two miles northeast of the Lincoln Memorial, his mural sheds valuable light on who helped bring that famous sculpture into existence. He hopes that it will always call to mind “the hands and the struggles, the hopes and the dreams that went into building this country, and all of the immigrants and slaves and sons and grandsons of people who were brought to this country in chains and are now free men and women.”

(RIGHT) Section showing the Piccirilli brothers installing the statue

Ultimately their stories will be amplified at the Lincoln Memorial itself, where Baker is advising the National Park Service and Chesterwood (French’s home and studio in Stockbridge, Massachusetts) on the planned redesign of their interpretive exhibition gallery in the basement. There millions of tourists may be able to view some of Baker’s preliminary works for 28 Blocks, further encouraging visits to that newly transformed warehouse in northeast Washington.

Information: A one-hour documentary film, 28 Blocks: From Mountain to Monument to Mural, directed by Shawn Strong, is being edited and will be released this year. Its trailer can be viewed at vimeo.com/222625398. Strong and Baker welcome readers to contact them with leads on both completion funding and promotion of the film.

MATTHIAS ANDERSON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.

Artist-assistants Julia Lanihan and Bryan Guglielmi installing the mural

072

FAC TodaysMasters-Baker (4 pages).indd 72

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:11 AM

Fully installed and completed, September 2017

Garin

Baker

(left)

with

artist-

assistants Julia Lanihan and Bryan Guglielmi in front of the U.S. Capitol

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

FAC TodaysMasters-Baker (4 pages).indd 73

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

073

2/13/18 9:11 AM

BY MICAH CHRISTENSEN

T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S

BRYANMARK TAYLOR’S VANISHING LANDSCAPS There

Europeans, this image distilled both the exhilaration that comes with progress and also the concern that traditions would fade precipitously.

Today there is no better example of the is a famous story of the English artist J.M.W. dichotomy between old and new than China, Turner putting his head out a train window now undergoing its own Industrial Revoluonly to have his fellow passengers pull him tion. Its rapid transition recently enticed back in, worried that the 45-mile-per-hour Bryan Mark Taylor (b. 1977), one of his genspeed would cause irreversible brain damage. eration’s leading plein air painters, to GuangShortly afterward, Turner painted his zhou to capture the vanishing landscapes masterpiece Rain, Steam, and Speed, which of traditional life. Born in Portland, Oregon, shows a newly invented steam engine passing Taylor earned his B.A. from Brigham Young through countryside then being transformed University and his M.F.A. from San Franby the Industrial Revolution. For 19th-century cisco’s Academy of Art University in 2005.

He lives with his wife and four children in Alpine, Utah.

The Chinese call Guangzhou, a city of 44 million located 75 miles northwest of Hong Kong, the “Third Capital of the World.”

Bisected by the Pearl River, it has been a center of international trade for more than 2,200 years. In antiquity, its ships carried porcelain and silk to the ocean and beyond, but today it exports China’s manufactured goods around the world.

In China entire historic cities are being cleared to make way for highways, electric grids, and skyscrapers. The result is not only an advance in wealth and education for many

(OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP LEFT) J.M.W TURNER (1775–1851) Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, 1844, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., National Gallery, London PAGE, TOP RIGHT) Havana Classic, 2016, oil on panel, 24 x 18 in., private collection

074

FAC Today's Masters BryAn MArk TAylor (4 pages).indd 74

(OPPOSITE

(OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM) Datang Twilight, 2017, oil on panel, 18 x 24 in., Anthony's Fine Art M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 2:24 PM

FAC Today's Masters BryAn MArk TAylor (4 pages).indd 75

2/13/18 2:24 PM

FAC Today's Masters BryAn MArk TAylor (4 pages).indd 76

2/13/18 2:24 PM

citizens, but also displacement and the loss of traditional culture. This is particularly true for the Tanka people, who live and fish along the shores of the Pearl River, increasingly in the shadow of soaring skyscrapers.

A seasoned traveler who seeks out what he calls “nature’s everyday miracles,” Taylor explains, “As someone who is both a student of tradition and who embraces technology, I found myself drawn to China and the Tanka in particular. I wanted to show the juxtaposition of old and new.” It is telling that Taylor has taught painting not only at his traditionminded alma mater, Academy of Art University, but also at the cutting-edge headquarters of Pixar Animation Studios across San Francisco Bay. When he’s not teaching, Taylor can be found working at his easel outdoors around the American West, observing nature and painting directly from it.

For his Guangzhou paintings, Taylor adopted the perspective of the Tanka villagers. Despite protests from his local guide — who, like Turner’s fellow travelers, tried to pull him back to safety — the artist bypassed typical tourist sites and ducked under Guangzhou’s elevated highways, where wooden fishing boats still rest on the Pearl River’s muddy shores. “It is a surreal experience,” Taylor recalls, “to see a 1,000-year gap between the way people live on one side of the river and the other.”

Where once there were tens of thousands of Tanka people living here, now there are only hundreds. In January 2017, The New York Times quoted the 60-year-old Tanka fisherman Tam Wing-keung: “Before, we could sing [to our children] the saltwater songs of our people, but very few people know them now — I don’t.” Some experts estimate that within 15 years, the Tanka way of life — their fishing villages and open-air markets — will have vanished; Tanka children will assimilate into modern Chinese culture. Taylor’s paintings, then, are not only an expression of his skills but, perhaps more importantly, documentation of a vanishing landscape. Rather than focusing on the encroaching change, however, these scenes are full of hope, emphasizing the dignity and colorfulness of Tanka life.

Though featured heavily in his most recent work, Guangzhou has not been Taylor’s sole subject: early in 2017, he traveled to Cuba, where he painted Havana’s old cars and faded pastel-colored buildings. Though synonymous with the capital’s charm, these are likely to be replaced or scrubbed clean as the government embraces new economic policies.

Back in his native Utah, which is renowned for its natural wonders and five national parks, Taylor has eschewed the typical subjects of red rocks and mountain passes

(TOP) C h i c k e n C o o p , 2 0 1 7, o i l o n p a n e l , 1 1 x 1 4 i n . , Anthony's Fine Art

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

FAC Today's Masters BryAn MArk TAylor (4 pages).indd 77

M A R C H / A P R I L

in order to document another kind of vanishing. Rural Utah was once thriving and productive, but, as the state develops ever more jobs in new technologies, its farms, mines, and factories are being abandoned in favor of its larger settlements. A fine example of farm life left behind is Chicken Coop, illustrated here.

Whether it’s in China, Cuba, or the rural West, whether it’s technological change or government policy, our world is in dramatic flux. Occasionally, it helps to have someone like Bryan Mark Taylor put his head out of the window and capture a moment before it is gone.

MICAH CHRISTENSEN holds a Ph.D. in art history from University College London, where his dissertation focused on late 19th-century Spanish painting in the academic tradition. This past winter he organized the exhibition Vanishing Landscapes: New Paintings by Bryan Mark Taylor at the gallery his family operates, Anthony’s Fine Art (Salt Lake City).

Unless noted otherwise, all images are by Bryan Mark Taylor.

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Ta n k a H o u s e B o a t , 2 0 1 7, o i l o n p a n e l , 1 1 x 1 4 i n . , A n t h o n y ' s F i n e A r t

2 0 1 8

077

2/13/18 2:24 PM

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

TODAY’S MASTERS

OOKIN

INSID

N

o matter how much we like being outdoors, most of us spend far more time inside buildings. Chances are we were born indoors, and we will probably die there, too. Much of life takes place inside: from the classroom where we learn to read to the church where we marry, onward to the house where we raise our children. It’s no wonder that artists — especially those working in twodimensional forms like painting, drawing, and printmaking — have focused their attention on interior spaces for centuries.

Illustrated here is an array of recent interior scenes reflecting this age-old fascination. Two are worth noting for different reasons. On July 2, 2011, the artist Neil MacCormack made a deal with his wife: in their home they switched on several surveillance cameras that proceeded to record 7,200 stills depicting the couple going about daily life: sleeping, showering, eating, making love, working, lounging. Referring to the resulting frames, MacCormack created a series of small paintings and drawings, one of which is seen here. This is life indoors at its most banal, and also at its most intimate.

We were touched by a recent note from the artist Linda Cloonan, represented here by a luminous bedroom view. Last October, she learned that one of her watercolors, Alcove at Alcazar, was inside the Northern California home of Dr. Monica Minguillon when it was consumed by the massive Santa Rosa fire. Minguillon told her brother, “Of everything I have lost, there are three things I will miss the most: my guitar, my wine collection, and Linda’s painting.”

This collector’s deep connection to Cloonan’s interior scene is a moving reminder of how such images can inspire viewers.

The scenes here range from cheery to melancholy because interior spaces truly have their own personalities. They reverberate with the people who occupy them, and often make us long to occupy them ourselves.

KELLY COMPTON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.

LINDA CLOONAN (b. 1961), Southern Exposure, 2017, watercolor on board, 20 x 16 in., collection of Elizabeth Wolfson, Santa Barbara, CA

078

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 78

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 11:11 AM

(CLOCKWISE) HEATHER ARENAS (b. 1969), The Mrs., 2017, oil on birch, 18 x 24 in., Reinert Fine Art, Charleston

ADAM MILLER (b. 1979), Song of the

Cosmos, 2015, oil on canvas, 71 x 47 in., RJD Gallery, Bridgehampton, Long Island

EDMOND ROCHAT (b. 1 9 8 4), A Stri ng i n a M aze, 20 17, oil

o n lin e n, 2 5 x 3 0 in ., c o ll e c tio n of t h e a r ti s t

NEIL MacCORMACK

(b. 1 9 5 8), O ne D ay at Re st: Untitle d 13 (6:48 p m), 20 13, a c r ylic o n b o a rd, 8 x 5 1/2 in ., B e rn a rd u c c i G a ll e r y, N ew Yo rk C it y

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

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 79

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

079

2/13/18 11:11 AM

(CLOCKWISE) ANNE BLAIR BROWN (b. 1969), Warm and Cozy, 2017, oil on linen, 24 x 24 in., contact artist for availability

JOHN CAG-

GIANO (b. 1949), Waiting for the Milk, 2017, oil on linen, 24 x 20 in., available from the artist

JENNIFER DIEHL (b. 1982), Everything

and the Kitchen Sink, 2017, oil on canvas, 20 x 24 in., private collection

KIM ENGLISH (b. 1957), Art School, 2008, oil on linen, 20 x 22

in., private collection

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 80

2/13/18 11:11 AM

(TOP)

HEATHER

LYNN

GIBSON

(b.

1970), Golden Apollo Gallery, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in., available from the artist

(BELOW RIGHT) LINDSAY

GOODWIN (b. 1982), Fresh Linens at Le Train Bleu, 2017, oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in., Ella Walton Richardson Fine Art, Charleston

(BELOW LEFT) JENNIFER

STOTTLE TAYLOR (b. 1967), Chateau Living, 2017, oil on board, 16 x 16 in., available from the artist

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

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 81

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

081

2/13/18 11:11 AM

RAY HASSARD (b. 1949), The Workbench, 2017, pastel on panel, 16 x 12 in., collection of the artist

THALIA STRATTON (b. 1957), The Grill Room, 2015, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in., Lee Youngman Galleries, Calistoga, CA

PATRICK LEE (b. 1972), Industrial Interior, 2017, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in., South Street Gallery, Easton, MD

082

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 82

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 11:11 AM

(TOP LEFT) LARRY MOORE (b. 1957), Home of the Free, 2017, oil on canvas on board wood, 30 x 30 in., Brazier Gallery, Richmond s ic hord, 20 16, oil o n c a nva s, 2 4 x 18 in ., p rivate c o ll e c tio n l e c tio n

(TOP RIGHT) JEFF MORROW (b. 1 9 5 5), Tu ni ng the H arp -

(BOTTOM RIGHT) ALINE ORDMAN (b. 1 9 5 3), C harle ston Inte rior, 20 1 5, oil o n c a nva s, 12 x 16 in ., p rivate c o l-

(BOTTOM LEFT) DESMOND O’HAGAN (b. 1959), Midday Coffee (St. Mark’s), 2012, pastel on paper, 16 x 20 in., available from the artist

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 83

2/13/18 11:11 AM

(TOP LEFT) BETTY ANGLIN SMITH (b. 1945), The Bedroom, 2017, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in., Anglin Smith Fine Art, Charleston

(TOP RIGHT) MICHAEL SOLOVYEV (b. 1972), Japan

(from the Passenger series), 2016, watercolor on paper, 14 x 10 in., collection of Michel Andersen

(BOTTOM) JILL STEFANI WAGNER (b. 1955), All That’s Left, 2015, oil on linen

panel, 12 x 24 in., private collection

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 84

2/13/18 11:11 AM

MICHELE USIBELLI (b. 1962), Light from Above, 2017, oil on linen panel, 20 x 16 in., private collection

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

FAC TodaysMasters-Interiors (8pages).indd 85

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

085

2/13/18 11:11 AM

BY MAX GILLIES

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

RDISCOVRING

JAN PRSON R

Jane Peterson painting c. 1928; photo: Underwood & Underwood Studios; courtesy Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

086

eaders of Fine Art Connoisseur may recall a lengthy, gorgeously illustrated article about the American painter Jane Peterson (1876–1965) in our February 2015 issue. This winter we were delighted to visit Jane Peterson: At Home and Abroad, the first major retrospective in 45 years devoted to this once-renowned artist. Much credit goes to the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Connecticut, where organizing curator Cynthia Roznoy gathered more than 85 works from lenders nationwide and published an impressive 124page catalogue. That book opens with a touching preface by J. Jonathan Joseph, who produced the first biography of Peterson in 1981.

Although the Mattatuck’s inaugural presentation closed in January, its Peterson show is continuing, relatively unchanged, to three more lucky venues: the Long Island Museum in Stony Brook, New York (February 11–April 22), South Carolina’s Columbia Museum of Art (May 13–July 22), and finally the Hyde Collection in Glen Falls, New York (August 5–October 14).

The genesis of this long-overdue project is all too revealing. Essentially American museums have forgotten how terrific Peterson’s paintings are, but commercial galleries never made that mistake because real-life, middle-market collectors have always adored them. Sure enough, in 2013 Mattatuck director Robert Burns was exploring the Liros Gallery in scenic Blue Hill, Maine, when he admired two superb pictures by “Jane Peterson”: one was a Venetian scene in muted tones and the other an electrifyingly orange floral still life. How, Burns wondered, could these have been created by the same artist? Proprietor Serge Liros filled him in on Peterson’s remarkable story, so when Burns returned to the Mattatuck, he shared his new enthusiasm with Roznoy. That’s one way good exhibitions get going. In the process, the Mattatuck even acquired two Peterson paintings for its collection.

It’s surprising Jane Peterson’s life has not been made into a biopic movie. In the mid-1890s she left her middle-class family in Elgin, Illinois, to study with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After graduation she taught art and cultivated a group of rich patrons who supported the travels that took her — unmarried, mind you — to England, France, Italy, Balkans, northern Africa, Turkey, and Egypt. Seemingly fearless, Peterson connected with people who could teach her something — from Gertrude Stein (whose Paris salon she visited) to the Spanish master Joaquín Sorolla and the British illustrator-muralist Frank Brangwyn.

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

(ABOVE) Boats on the Nile, Dawn, 1905–15, oil on canvas, 19 x 24 3/4 in., Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Morton and Marie Bradley Memorial Collection, 98.49, photo: Kevin Montague

(RIGHT) Market Day at Plougastel, Brittany,

n.d., watercolor, gouache and charcoal on paper, 18 x 23 7/8 in., Mattatuck Museum, Purchase, Acquisition Fund, 2017

Curtailing her travels only because World War I got in the way, Peterson painted American scenes ranging from New York streets (in neighborhoods poor and privileged) and quaint harbors in Massachusetts to beach parties in Palm Beach and the Long Island gardens of her friend Louis Comfort Tiffany. There were also many images of women, usually seen in reverie or at the dressing table. In 1925, aged 49, Peterson married a widower friend — an older man of means — and from then on, she could truly afford to paint what she liked, and travel where she wished. The exhibition offers glimpses into Peterson’s private life through photographs and archival materials, and concludes with a heady dose of boldly, brilliantly colored floral still lifes.

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

087

088

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

(OPPOSITE PAGE) The Accused and Her Dog (Woman with Umbrella), n.d., oil on board, 16 7/10 x 12 1/5 in., Collection of Dominique Riviere, photo: Doyle New York (RIGHT) Marché aux Fleurs, 1908, oil on canvas, 17 1/8 x 23 1/8 in., Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1994.17

(BOTTOM) Fishing Boats,

Gloucester, c. 1915–20, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in., Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Martin Horwitz, 76.191, photo: Jonathan Dorado

Tracing Peterson’s journey, we watch her exploring different approaches, from impressionism to expressionism (including fauvism), from realism to a form of representational abstraction. This evolution reflects what was happening in early 20th-century modernism generally, offering a fresh vantage on an extraordinarily exciting period. The fact that Peterson was female is irrelevant to us now; she was a huge talent, and that’s all that matters.

Information: longislandmuseum.org, columbiamuseum.org, hydecollection.org.

The catalogue can be ordered at mattmuseum.org/product/jane-peterson MAX GILLIES is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

089

090

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

BY CORDULA GREWE

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

MYSRY MAN: HOW A 19H-CNURY GRMAN

PORRAI BROK NW GROUND

I

t was a cold day early in March 1835, and the North German city of Hannover was eagerly awaiting the arrival of spring.

For the past two weeks, however, something had diverted attention from the unfriendly weather. On February 24, the city’s third annual art exhibition had opened. Among its many fine works, one stood out — the life-size likeness of a bearded man in his early 20s, dressed in lush brown velvet and a green wool coat with generous fur trimming (Fig. 1). Posed dramatically against the clear blue sky of the Upper Rhine Valley, there was something enigmatic about him, a self-possessed gravitas that, in turn, suggested a deeper meaning, a back story that transcended his attractiveness.

The portrait’s aura garnered so much public attention that the exhibition review in the local art journal, the Hannoversche Kunstblätter, chose this work for an illustration (using the line drawing seen at Fig. 2) instead of one of the show’s more prestigious history paintings. The prominence of the portrait’s creator, Wilhelm Schadow (1788–1862), was undoubtedly a factor in the newspaper’s interest. The second son of the famous sculptor Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), the painter had first made his name as a member of the Brotherhood of St. Luke, which, since its founding in 1809, had sought to reform contemporary art by re-enchanting it. Now, more than two decades later, Schadow was a powerful prince of painters. Having accepted the directorship of the Düsseldorf Academy in 1826, he had quickly transformed that some-

(OPPOSITE PAGE) Fig. 1 WILHELM SCHADOW (1788–1862), Bearded Man (Jacob Becker, called Becker von Worms), 1832, oil on canvas, 38 1/2 x 30 in., Galerie Paffrath, Düsseldorf

what moribund institution into an utterly modern training ground; soon it attracted students from all over Europe and even the United States to the Rhineland.

The meteoric rise of what became known as the Düsseldorf School of Painting explains the enthusiasm of the Hannoverian newspaper critic, who was particularly pleased to see several important examples of that school in the exhibition. Turning to the portrait painted by Schadow, he enthused, “it is so completed, so self-contained and rounded out, and differs precisely thereby from portraits of the ordinary kind, that one soon recognizes the history painter in the hand that created it.” Smitten by its loving execution and technical perfection, the critic exclaimed that “one doesn’t believe that it is a portrait from our own shallow, fleeting time we see in front of us, but from the age of the great Italian masters!”

Yet, for all its allure, this painting was shrouded in mystery. Its descriptive title, A Bearded Man, did little to quench viewers’ curiosity about the sitter, a curiosity the reviewer conveyed through a conversation between two ladies he had allegedly overheard standing in front of it: The First: Who, then, may this interesting man be?

The Second: It is supposedly a painter in Düsseldorf.

The First: Impossible!—how could a painter look like this;— it must at least be a count.

Their dialogue is revealing. It shows a deeply rooted desire on the part of viewers for social legibility while highlighting the period’s obsession with questions of genre — with the particular form, content, technique, and norms defining a category of painting.

(ABOVE) Fig. 2 MONOGRAMMIST “G. O.,” Portrait of a Düsseldorf

Painter, 1835, wood engraving on paper, 4 3/4 x 4 in., GWLB — Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek, Hannover

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

PECKING ORDERS Looming behind this obsession was an acute crisis into which Europe’s academies had tumbled earlier in the 19th century. Among the mounting challenges facing them was a relentless attack on the

091

Fig. 3 WILHELM SCHADOW (1788–1862), The Princes Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig of Prussia and Wilhelm of Solms-Braunfels in the Uniform of the Cuirassiers, 1830, oil on canvas, 51 in. (diameter), Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, photo: Horst Kolberg

traditional hierarchy of genres, especially on its privileging of history painting as the highest form of expression. Schadow himself had become an antiacademic rebel when he joined the Brotherhood of St. Luke in 1811, a year after that fraternity left the forbidding climate of Vienna for the creative, if poverty-stricken, freedom of expatriate life in Rome. The painter did not shed his rebellious impulses when he became one of Europe’s most powerful academy directors.

Eager to transform Düsseldorf into an international magnet, he not only launched a substantial reform of its curriculum but also radically modernized its conception of genre categories.

Under Schadow, the Düsseldorf Academy retained the traditional hierarchy, but in name only. In Paris, the rise of the so-called genre historique, which undermined the rules of rhetoric-based history painting by abandoning its focus on cathartic turning points, posed a major challenge to the academic system. But in Düsseldorf, it did not: Schadow simply expanded the definition of history painting to encompass all forms of historical representation, including the genre historique. Thus he could declare portraiture — rather than the male nude body acting out a narrative — as the foundation of all history painting. In turn, portraiture could rise from its lower status by adopting the spirit of history painting, liberating it from paying sitters’ whimsies and the demands of an increasingly capitalist market.

From a young age, Schadow had excelled as a portraitist of the Prussian elite. In Rome, where he remained until 1819, he began to experiment with religious, allegorical, and literary allusions as means to transform individuals’ likenesses into true tableaux. Now, after a second sojourn in his beloved Italy in 1830–31, he undertook what is perhaps his most intriguing attempt to elevate portraiture to historie without resorting to such pictorial conventions. The result was A Bearded Man, which he completed in 1832.

The secret to its success was a bold, ingenious fusion of two seemingly contradictory strategies. On one hand, Schadow emulated — in format, composition, outfitting, and décor — the striking portraits of old-German patricians, like the ones depicted by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553).1 On the other hand, Schadow alluded to the politically charged iconography of contemporary royal portraiture first developed in his large round portrait of The Princes Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig of Prussia and Wilhelm of Solms-Braunfels in the Uniform of the Cuirassiers (Fig. 3). Its visual impact derives from its subtle yet powerful juxtaposition of public with private spheres,

092

and of the sitters’ political roles with their intimate relationship. Standing almost uncomfortably close to the picture-plane, the two nephews of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, greet us as commanding figures; their poses convey royal stature as much as military prowess.

Here manliness mingles with courtly elegance: the princes grasp their swords as their uniforms sparkle seductively.

Schadow’s portrait of the princes stood out in an era teeming with such noble likenesses, for he was not satisfied with stately auras or the tired trope of heroic noblemen posed before stormy skies. Instead, he enriched this depiction with sensitive psychological observation of the half-brothers’ individual characters and their mutual relationship. Schadow’s genuine interest in the princes’ distinctions gives the portrait a narrative depth and an unexpected intimacy that personalize the scene’s political iconography. This was rare with Schadow, who had not engaged in such overtly politicized portraiture for at least 20 years. Back then, when the German states were seeking to throw off Napoleon’s yoke, the ambitious young artist had expressed the fearless anti-French attitude of his key patron, Princess Amalie Marie Anne of Prussia, by presenting her in an old-German dress (Fig. 4).

Now, in 1830, Schadow embraced the contemporary nature of the princes’ appearance by extending their portrait’s political meaning into the background, a beautifully rendered Rhine River landscape. Equally rare in Schadow’s œuvre, this realistic view carries a clear political message: it asserts Prussia’s claim to rule the RhineM A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

land, a territory it had only recently acquired during the Congress of Vienna (1814–15). Yet the princes’ poses do not convey only repressive power. The sensitive evocation of their inner landscape translates into love for the homeland. Their assertion of power is also one of loyalty, a pledge to care for the Rhineland. Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig of Prussia, standing at the left immersed in his own thoughts, expressed this commitment through his groundbreaking effort in historic preservation: he purchased and then restored the castle visible at far left, Burg Rheinstein, which functions here almost as an attribute. This complex set of allusions and alliances remained in play when Schadow repeated this pictorial scheme in his Bearded Man two years later.

thing from high-end prints to cheap postcards. At the left edge we glimpse the ruins of the once-magnificent stronghold, Burg Rolandseck, with its ivy-covered arch, and at right the Seven Mountains range with the Drachenfels hills. Together these surroundings conjure up the period’s rampant Ruinenromantik (Romanticism of Ruins), which is key to the painting’s interpretation.

The portrait transcends the mere depiction of an individual, to offer a vision of a long-lost ideal that was about to be reconquered and revived. It was the promise of rebirth, both artistic and political — a new golden era of German art born from the spirit of the Middle Ages, and with it, the birth of a unified German identity, of a Deutschtum (Germanness) at once anachronistic and forward-looking.

A Bearded Man summons the same kind of NOT WHAT IT SEEMS interdependency of reconstruction and renewal In A Bearded Man, Schadow again thought embodied by Prince Friedrich’s restoration of Burg through the task of dissolving traditional borders Rheinstein. Therefore, it seems neither surprising nor between genres. It is only this goal that might explain coincidental that a nobleman of the highest birth, Adolhis rather puzzling choice of model, Jacob Becker phus Frederick, 1st Duke of Cambridge and (after (1810–1872), the son of a tailor. A year after this pic1831) viceroy of Hannover, ultimately purchased A ture was completed, Becker enrolled in the Düs- Fig. 4 LUDWIG BUCHHORN (1770–1856) after Bearded Man. seldorf Academy and ultimately became one of its Wilhelm Schadow, Princess Amalie Marie Anne One particular detail in this portrait perfectly most successful genre painters. When he first met of Prussia, after 1812, stipple engraving and epitomizes the interplay of past and present, of Schadow, however, he was working as a draftsman engraving on paper, 10 3/4 x 7 1/2 in. (sheet), nostalgia and renovation at the heart of Schadand lithographer in Frankfurt, where his employer collection of the author ow’s painting: Becker’s beard was both fashionpaid him and a colleague, Jakob Fürchtegott Dielable and a throwback to Renaissance patricians. mann, to sketch the Rhine’s banks. The result of Alas, only the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm their endeavor was a mammoth publication, less a III, remained skeptical. When informed that the practical guide than a precious souvenir that cappainting was still for sale, the monarch replied, tured the region’s idyllic atmosphere at the brink of its destruction “First shave the beard.” Fortunately, Schadow ignored his advice: in through industrialization.2 Schadow admired their views of German our own hipster age, this man’s beard seems eerily contemporary, as does the portrait’s visual impact. natural scenery, but he was equally smitten by Becker’s appearance, which he proceeded to stage with an aristocratic bravado quite out of sync with the young man’s social station.

Without recourse to the sartorial markers of power and prestige CORDULA GREWE, associate professor of art history at Indiana Univerpresented by a high-born sitter, Schadow had to find an alternative sity Bloomington, specializes in German art from 1750 to 1920. She authored way to imbue his subject with stately dignity. He solved this probPainting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (2009) and The Nazarenes: lem by emulating German Renaissance portraiture. This reference Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (2017), and she served as edito the past, through dress and posture, created a vague yet palpable torial consultant for the catalogue The Enchanted World of German Romantic sense of grandeur and tradition, and the fictive conversation of the Prints (2017). She describes Schadow’s A Bearded Man in greater detail in her two women printed in the Hannoversche Kunstblätter (above) testi2017 publication Wilhelm Schadow: Werkverzeichnis (Michael Imhof Verlag). fies to his strategy’s success. Yet in a somewhat surprising move, Schadow then proceeded to give the sitter’s historicism a decidedly contemporary twist through modern fashion, etiquette, and scenery.

Endnotes Under Schadow’s brush, Becker, the son of modest parents, becomes 1. Examples include Dr. Johannes Cuspinian (1502, Slg. Oskar Reinhart, ennobled twice, from his self-confident pose and lavish coat to the Winterthur) and Moritz Büchner (1520, Minneapolis Institute of Art). distant castles and the oak foliage carved on the pillar of the loggia 2. The Leporello Panorama of the Rhine: View of the right and left bank of the on which he stands. Most of Schadow’s contemporaries would have Rhine, Mentz to Coblentz, published by F. C. Vogel (sic) appeared in 1833. immediately recognized the famous monuments in the background as borrowed from a touristic view endlessly reproduced in every-

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

093

BY JENNIFER SAUER

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

HOMAS CO IN A NW IGH S cheduled to mark the 200th anniversary of the arrival in America of the English artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848), the exhibition Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings is on view at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art until May 13.

Featuring three dozen of his finished landscape paintings, oil studies, and works on paper, it traces Cole’s life, from his youth in northern England and immigration to America through his extended travels in Europe and subsequent success in the New York art world. Hailed as one of America’s finest landscape painters, Cole inspired the next generation of them, now generally known as the Hudson River School.

This exhibition breaks new ground by characterizing Cole as an international figure with a transatlantic perspective, and by reconsidering his art as a response to the history of the British Empire, the rise of the United States, the Industrial Revolution, and concerns about the fate of America’s wilderness. “Cole has been understood in an entirely American context as the ‘father of the Hudson River School,’ but in fact he is a trans-regional figure, profoundly immersed in British and Italian culture, whose relationship to American national identity was complex,” says Tim Barringer, who has co-curated this exhibition with the Met’s Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and also chairs the art history department at Yale University. ”Cole was passionate about the American landscape, but he believed that the nation was embarking on the wrong course.

He believed landscape painting was the best medium for the presentation of profound ideas. He was the first really ambitious landscape painter in America.”

From Nature, 1823, ink on paper, 9 5/8 x 7 1/4 in., Albany Institute of History & Art, Gift of Edith Cole (Mrs. Howard) Silberstein, 1965.68.1

094

FAC Historic-Cole (4 pages).indd 94

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:27 AM

BACK AND FORTH Born in 1801 in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire (about 13 miles from Manchester), Cole spent his first 17 years in that region, which bore the effects of recent industrialization. It was dense in both population and pollution, and unemployment rose steeply among people whose work was being phased out by machinery. Setting aside his personal interests in poetry and music, Cole found a job in a cotton mill and later as a wood engraver. In 1818, he and his family immigrated to America to follow his father’s manufacturing business in Steubenville, Ohio.

There Cole began working as a portrait painter in 1822 before turning his attention to landscapes. The wilderness around him inspired the young man and became his primary subject. (See his drawing From Nature illustrated here.)

Intent on pursuing art as a career, Cole borrowed textbooks, studied other artists’ work, and took lessons. Traveling around Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, he was encouraged by paintings he saw at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and particularly by an 1825 trip to New York’s Catskill Mountains, the region that ultimately became his focus. Using his Hudson River sketches, he created three landscape paintings that were displayed in a bookshop window. These introduced a daring approach: a vision of the wilderness before European settlement. Col. John Trumbull, the celebrated painter-chronicler of the American Revolution, purchased one of them and recommended the F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

FAC Historic-Cole (4 pages).indd 95

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Clouds, c. 1830s, oil on paper laid down on canvas, 8 3/4 x 10 7/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Morris K. Jesup Fund, 2013.201

others to colleagues prominent in the art world, William Dunlap and Asher B. Durand. Dunlap brought Cole further attention, such that he was quickly embraced by the cultural community in New York City, including the poet-editor William Cullen Bryant and author James Fenimore Cooper. As a result, Cole helped establish the National Academy of Design in 1826. From 1827, he began staying in the Catskills, focusing on outdoor scenes while exploring the literary and religious themes he referred to as “a higher style of landscape.”

Cole returned to England (1829–31) to seek some perspective there: he examined artworks in London’s museums, painted studies outdoors, and met the era’s pre-eminent landscapists, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and John Martin. Hanging at the Royal Academy of Arts, Constable’s Hadleigh Castle greatly influenced the younger man; as the two artists developed a friendship, Cole added to his repertoire Constable’s habit of sketching in oils. (A fine example, Clouds, is illustrated here.)

Cole was less open to Turner’s influence, finding his more ethereal approach too radical and experimental. Though Cole gained much

095

2/13/18 9:27 AM

The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire, 1835–36, oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 76 in., New-York Historical Society, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.3, photo: Oppenheimer Editions

(RIGHT) View of the Round-Top in the Catskill

Mountains (Sunny Morning on the Hudson), 1827, oil on panel, 18 5/8 x 25 3/8 in., Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Martha C. Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865, 47.1200

inspiration in London, he did not attain the success he had hoped for, so he moved on to Italy (1831–32).

Cole spent eight months in Florence, studying the figure and sketching in the Tuscan countryside. (Though best known for his finished landscape paintings in oils, Cole was an avid sketcher as well, ultimately producing thousands of sketches on various subjects during his lifetime.) He then spent four months in Rome, visiting monuments of the classical and Renaissance past and painting outdoors. He returned to Florence for the summer of 1832, painting Italian landscapes commissioned by affluent Americans he met there.

A DISTINCTIVE VISION Now imbued with an intercontinental worldview, one that adopted elements of the European landscape tradition reaching all the way back to Claude Lorrain (1600–1682), Cole came back to New York City in 1832 and exhibited his recent paintings of Europe with great success. Soon after, he established his studio at Cedar Grove in Catskill, New York. There he melded his European perspective and longstanding passion for American wilderness to create two iconic projects: The Course of Empire series and The Oxbow are panoramic in effect, visualizing narratives that underscore the importance of ecology and sensitive development.

096

FAC Historic-Cole (4 pages).indd 96

Commissioned by the New York patron Luman Reed, The Course of Empire (1834–36) is a five-canvas group chronicling the rise and fall of a classical state. It depicts the same landscape evolving over time: The Savage State; The Arcadian or Pastoral State; The Consummation of Empire; Destruction; and Desolation. Pastoralism is shown as the ideal state of civilization, contrasted strikingly with imperialism, which inevitably leads to gluttony and decay.

The Oxbow (1836), formally known as View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, is a quintessentially Romantic scene of the Connecticut River Valley. Cole emphasizes the opportunities presented by this undeveloped landscape, crystalizing the moral implications of the confrontation between wilderness M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:27 AM

View

from

Northampton,

Mount

Holyoke,

Massachusetts,

after a Thunderstorm — The Oxbow, 1836, oil on canvas, 51 1/2 x 76 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908, 08.228

and progressive expansionism, the dichotomy at the heart of his project and of the Hudson River School painters he inspired. In 1836, Cole consolidated his moral leadership in this arena by conveying his environmentally conscious ideas in an “Essay on American Scenery.”

In the Catskills Cole met his future wife, Maria Bartow. They married at Cedar Grove in 1836 and ultimately had five children. His family life enhanced Cole’s interest in religion and virtue, evidenced by such works such as the four-canvas series The Voyage of Life (1840). Here we observe a man traveling on a river through the American wilderness.

His journey represents the four stages of life: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age.

Eager to experience Europe again, Cole returned to Rome to paint and exhibit (1841–42), this time including Sicily in his itinerary. Upon his return, Catskill became his base of operations, and he maintained his ties to the New York City art world largely through Durand. In 1844, Cole decided to share his expertise by taking on students, including Durand and Frederic Edwin Church. Barringer notes, “While Thomas Cole was the first major landscape painter in the United States, landscape subsequently became recognized as a key American art form in the hands of his students and followers. The second generation’s views — more sympathetic to ideas of Manifest Destiny — were at variance with Cole’s Romantic pessimism and his distaste for Jacksonian America’s expansionist policies. Above all, Cole seems modern in his revulsion at the destruction of the environment and his dislike of ‘dollar-godded utilitarians,’ people who value the pursuit of profit more highly than the love of nature.”

By 1846, Cole had begun his largest and most ambitious series, The Cross and the World (now unlocated). Unfortunately, he died of pleurisy in February 1848, aged only 47 and before completing this project.

Tributes flowed in from near and far; Church and Durand painted landscapes to honor their friend and mentor, and the Catskills’ fourth highest peak was named for Cole. Today, thanks in large part to the innovative programming of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site at Cedar Grove, the artist’s legacy endures, and he continues to inspire landscapists today.

LEARNING MORE The Met has scheduled a particularly lively schedule of events to complement its exhibition. On April 8, the artist Ed Ruscha will discuss F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

FAC Historic-Cole (4 pages).indd 97

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

his five-part Course of Empire series (1992 and 2003–5) with the author and artist Tom McCarthy. On April 15, co-curator Elizabeth Kornhauser will moderate a discussion of Cole’s role as a proto-environmentalist with scholars Alan Braddock and Rebecca Bedell and artist Michel Auder, whose The Course of Empire was shown at Documenta in Germany last year. On April 24, 25, and 26, Sting will offer a 40-minute acoustic performance inspired by Cole’s art and ideas. On April 27, Tim Barringer will explore the musical and literary references that inspired Cole.

In celebration of the Met’s exhibition, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site has joined forces with the Yale Center for British Art and members of the Yale History of Art Department to create its own complementary show. On view from May 1 through November 4, Picturesque and Sublime: Thomas Cole’s Trans-Atlantic Inheritance will present masterworks on paper by major British artists, including Turner and Constable, together with Cole’s oil paintings, to demonstrate his radical achievement of transforming the well-developed British traditions of landscape representations into a new bold formulation, the American Sublime. On May 13, co-curator Tim Barringer will give a talk in Cole’s reconstructed studio.

Finally, the handsome catalogue accompanying the Met exhibition contains groundbreaking research by the museum’s conservation team into Cole’s methods as a painter, illuminating this previously neglected area.

JENNIFER SAUER is a New York City-based writer who holds an M.A. in literary arts from New York University. She has worked primarily in communications for the arts, charitable foundations, and the financial sector.

Information: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028, 800.662.3397, metmuseum.org. This exhibition will go on to London’s National Gallery (June 11–October 7), nationalgallery.org.uk. Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street, Catskill, NY 12414, 518.943.7465, thomascole.org. On March 9, the Site will host a benefit dinner at the Met honoring Kornhauser and Barringer.

097

2/13/18 9:27 AM

The PASON RASUR

I N S I D E T R A C K

A M YSTER IOUS

PA I N TI NG R EV E A LS ITS SECR ETS

FAC Inside-Paston Mar/Apr 18 (6 page).indd 98

2/13/18 10:47 AM

BY LOUISE NICHOLSON

UNKNOWN ARTIST (Dutch School), The Paston Treasure, c. 1663, oil on canvas, 66 x 96 in., Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service, photo: John Hammond

FAC Inside-Paston Mar/Apr 18 (6 page).indd 99

2/13/18 10:47 AM

100

FAC Inside-Paston Mar/Apr 18 (6 page).indd 100

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 10:47 AM

A

round 1663 a remarkable oil painting was commissioned by a member of the Paston family, who were landowners in Norfolk, the part of eastern England that bulges into the chilly North Sea toward the Netherlands. Now known as the Paston Treasure, this painting is huge, almost five and a half feet by eight feet. At first glance, it seems to be a super-sized still life of a pile of random, though exquisite, objects. You can quickly spot a clock, a globe, some mounted shells, various flagons, a lobster, and the exotic vervet monkey and gray parrot, both from Africa. However, the longer you look, the more apparent it becomes that each precious object has been selected on purpose, while more commonplace ones are perhaps decorative fillers or mood enhancers. And who are those two figures?

Now, after years of deep-digging detective research, this mysterious picture has an exhibition devoted to it: The Paston Treasure: Microcosm of the Known World can be enjoyed at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) through May 27, then at its usual home in Norfolk, the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, from June 23 through September 23. With the Treasure itself as centerpiece, approximately 140 objects gathered from 50 collections worldwide help illuminate this painting and the Paston family’s worldview.

The idea for the show was hatched by Dr. Andrew Moore, former keeper of art at Norwich Castle. He and an army of more than 40 international scholars have been investigating the painting and its context; their findings appear in the engrossing 589-page catalogue that accompanies the exhibition. “It has been such an adventure, a real detective story,” Moore explains. “I’ve known this painting for 30 years.

The picture shows real objects, so the commissioner must have had a very strong hand in its composition.”

For Moore, the painting captures a specific moment in British art, one of refined tastes and intellectual enlightenment. “It’s a selection of objects from a documented kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities) of natural objects and rarities, the kind then found in great princely collections in Venice, Vienna, Florence.” He finds the painting “plays into the patron’s understanding of the 17th-century concept of vanitas, the vanity of human possession — see the ivy leaves, the plate overturned, the sands of time.” It also addresses another popular theme, memento mori, when an object signifies death: the clock is stopped at midnight, while the girl sings a lament, “bring Death’s black seale.”

Some tantalizing questions have been answered by the collaborative detective work, yet some basic ones have not. It is still not certain if it was Sir William Paston (1610–1663) or his son Robert (1631–1683) who commissioned the painting, nor for what specific purpose. The case for William is growing: he was more cultivated; he developed and displayed his collection; he might well have wished to memorialize it as he approached his own death; and he might have wanted to note his other son’s early death in 1662 by placing (probably) his elder granddaughter in the center. We do not know for sure who painted it, either. Presumably it was a Dutch — or at least Dutchtrained — itinerant artist, but oddly, the painting is not mentioned in any of the 11 inventories of goods in the Paston properties. Vanitas still lifes were a distinct subgenre in the Low Countries and researchers found several candidates, among whom Moore leans toward the Antwerp artist Carstian Luyckx.

The painting’s date is fuzzy, too: no item depicted was made later than the mid-1660s, and the girl’s hairstyle came into vogue in the late 1650s, so the best guess is early to mid-1660s. For the place it was painted, we are no better off. Moore argues with logic that it was done at the Paston family seat,

Oxnead Hall, where their collection was kept, for someone “deeply steeped in the Dutch tradition”: Oxnead is near the port of Great Yarmouth, which is closer to Amsterdam than it is to London, and there were strong bi-cultural links. But there’s no proof.

What we do know is this: the painting captures a moment in time for a great collecting family whose fortune and status were on the brink of collapse. It was made to be a visual portrait of their world — their travels and ambitions, the society they lived in, their ideas of family and legacy. We know that some of the objects have survived because they have been identified.

And we know that some parts were re-thought shortly after the painting was completed, because they were over-painted.

AN AMBITIOUS FAMILY So let’s go to the Paston family itself. After Wulstan Paston arrived from France soon after the Norman Conquest of 1066, generations fought their way to power, land, and multiple homes. In the 1560s or ’70s, Sir Clement Paston — soldier, sailor, and courtier — built a new house at Oxnead, on higher ground than the medieval one. This became the main Paston residence. Here his descendant William would build up a magnificent collection and library while also funding the fugitive Charles II, who was restored to his throne in 1660, ushering in the Restoration period. William toured Europe in 1638 before the concept of the Grand Tour had become fashionable, meeting the Grand Duke of Tuscany and heading as far east as Jerusalem. His son Robert also visited the Continent and added to the collection.

We can see the results of their acquisitiveness in the extraordinary inventory of Oxnead’s rooms and contents made in 1673. It lists 66 rooms, walls covered in gilt leather and tapestries, quantities of paintings and sculptures, antiques, stags’ heads, and even two preserved crocodiles.

An earlier inventory of just the contents describes what is in William’s schatzkammer (treasure room), then unparalleled in England and exceptional even in Europe. It describes in detail more than 300 precious objects arranged in a decorative display crammed onto shelves, ledges, and even the chimneypiece. The entry for one item sets the deluxe tone: “one mother of pearl bottle, each side the fashion of a swan with a silver and gilt foot, and a silver and gilt statue on the top.”

Because the contents of Oxnead were sold and dispersed in 1709, explains Dr. Nathan Flis, who served as organizing curator for the show at Yale, “we have reconstructed the splendor of this magnificent collection which was scattered to the four winds. It is about English Restoration wealth and culture. It is about legacy, the passage of objects. It’s about ambition, too, and about rise, decline, and loss.” And, he adds, “It also pushes us back into our own collection, to look at what we have got.” The exhibits range from a mounted ostrich egg to a preserved Nile crocodile. “Our own English miniature paintings fill in for the lost portraits.” Most exciting, however, are the five objects, selected from William’s treasure room to be in the painting, that have miraculously survived. “Four of these were known about, but one was identified only during this research,” says Flis. Of the four, one is the exceptionally fine chased and engraved silver flagon held by a black servant. It is one of a pair made in London in 1598 and now owned by New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, having had various previous owners including William Randolph Hearst.

Three more are exotic rarities — the three mounted shells at the back of the table. The one on the left is an English enameled brass cup of the 1550s

(ABOVE) UNKNOWN MAKER (English), Pair of Flagons, 1597–98, silver gilt, cast, chased, engraved, and pricked, each approx. 12 1/2 in. high, Untermyer Collection, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

(OPPOSITE PAGE) UNKNOWN ARTIST (Dutch), Sir William Paston, first Baronet, c. 1643–44, oil on canvas, 48 1/8 x 40 in., Felbrigg Hall, Norfolk, National Trust

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

FAC Inside-Paston Mar/Apr 18 (6 page).indd 101

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

101

2/13/18 10:47 AM

or ’60s holding a rare Strombus shell from Brazil, now in the Norwich Castle Museum. The two others are Nautilus cups whose rare and valuable shells are found among the deep coral reefs of the Indo-Pacific oceans, and which were believed to be an aphrodisiac and also its antidote. Hence, the lavish attention given to their mounts. The pale blue one — lost until 1960, when the Rijksmuseum acquired it — was mounted in 1630–60 by a Dutch craftsman who gave it virtuoso bulges and flowing lines so that, by flickering candlelight, it would glitter and defy its hard surfaces. The other, which has the Paston coat of arms engraved inside the shell, was owned by the discerning collector Horace Walpole of Strawberry Hill and, having been shunted through various auctions, arrived in Delft’s Museum Het Prinsenhof in 1949. Attributed to Nicolaes de Grebber (active 1574–1613), its mount is a masterpiece of mannerist goldsmiths’ work and imagery. The top is a ferocious open-mouthed sea monster surmounted by Neptune, while the base is a sea turtle — on whose back Native Americans believe their land was born — so this piece alludes to maritime and trading expansion to the Americas. The satyrs forming the stem refer to Dionysus, god of wine and eroticism, while the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale appears on the rim’s underside.

The fifth item is the new find, the mother of pearl flask standing to the right of the shells, behind the globe. It was made in London around 1650–60

by Gujarati (people from western India) and English artists. This flask is made of eight pieces carved from the backs of Turbo marmoratus (turban snail shells found in the Indian Ocean), held together with silver. Its top is decorated with a silver shell. To the viewer, it evoked the rich natural resources of distant lands, and their mysterious rituals. It was acquired

by Sir William Paston — several similarly exotic flasks are listed in Paston inventories — but its whereabouts were unknown until recently; it is now privately owned.

(ABOVE) UNKNOWN ARTIST, Mother of Pearl Flask, early 17th century (mother of pearl body), c. 1660s (mount, cover), shell-flask with mother of pearl segments attached to a silver body and mounted in silver gilt, the cover surmounted by a cast silver shell, 11 2/3 in. in. high, Collection of Lady Diane Lever, London, photo: Jon Stokes (OPPOSITE PAGE) ATTRIBUTED TO NICOLAES DE GREBBER, Nautilus Cup, 1592, Nautilus pompilius shell, silver gilt, glass, and enamel, 10 1/3 in. in. high, Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, acquired with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

102

FAC Inside-Paston Mar/Apr 18 (6 page).indd 102

LOOKING CLOSELY Moving from the objects to the painting itself, Jessica David, YCBA’s senior paintings conservator, has examined how it was made, how long it took to paint, and the sequence of painting. What she discovered is the subject of a five-minute film screened inside the exhibition, and also viewable on the Center’s website. “From visual examination,” she explains, M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

“we are fairly sure the painter did the items from the Paston collection first, to a degree of finish, then the figures and the other items, again to a degree of finish. Then the artist worked right across the painting despite its large size, adding stock items and working fast in the typical method of Dutch still life painters. This was done systematically in layers so that, by the time he completed one layer, the first part of it was dry enough to start the next. First a base color, then shadow colors, then highlights and final overall tweaking.”

David’s investigations also unraveled the over-painting process. On the far right side she found that a large silver salver (possibly the same mentioned in William Paston’s will) had been over-painted by the same artist with a lady’s figure. It was then overpainted again with the clock we now see, “using different pigments, working at speed, less skillful, the layers still wet when the next was put on so the paint is bleeding into the layer below.”

Deduction: this was by a different artist.

“The artist did not scrape down because you can see the highlights of the lady’s pearls through the clock face.”

Infra-red testing revealed little apart from indicating there was no visible under-drawing. But when the whole painting was subjected to Macro XRF scanning — using a huge machine that scientists brought from Catania in Sicily to Norwich and set up on site — David gained “an elemental map of the pigments such as mercury and iron, showing precisely which were used where.” It offered key clues to substantial new theories.

David now believes that the pigments of the last layer, including orpiment (or king’s yellow) for the clock mount, suggest Robert Paston ordered this change and supplied the pigment. As it happens, orpiment interacts with other pigments and is associated with alchemy; as the Pastons’ debts mounted and Robert’s lavish lifestyle continued, he set up a chemical lab in a desperate attempt to create gold.

She also thinks Robert may have supplied the vermilion pigment, which was used with lake red (cochineal) on the lobster, “because vermilion is man-made and an ingredient in alchemists’ optimistic recipes for gold.” So, why these changes at all? Perhaps because Robert did not inherit that silver salver; his father bequeathed it instead to his second wife!

More than 20 pigments were used in the painting, including four blues: azurite, ultramarine (lapis

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

2/13/18 10:47 AM

lazuli), smalt, and indigo. This was unusual, as one or two would have been adequate, David says. “The painting is big, and the painter could have bought large amounts of pigment in Norwich, where there was an artist community, then made up big batches.” However, where cheaper smalt — with its degrading properties — would usually have been used for the china bowl’s blue, “this artist used ultramarine and azurite, which don’t degrade and are expensive. This is so atypical that it again points to the patron asking for it, wanting high-quality pigments to depict his most precious objects.” So, perhaps, muses David, “the patron, William or Robert, supplied some of these dearer pigments from Norwich or London. We have Robert Paston’s journal in Yale’s Beinecke library. It includes recipes related to artists’ materials and discussions of pigments. So he knew enough to mind about them.”

THE STORY CONTINUES The Paston story is still being written. After the demise of the family fortunes beyond redemption, Captain John Buxton bought the Paston Treasure at the 1709 sale, as well as other objects including the enameled shell cup on view in the exhibition. The painting moved by descent to Maud Isabel Buxton who, entirely unaware of its potential interest, gave it to Norwich Castle Museum in 1947. Meanwhile, all but one wing of the house at Oxnead crumbled, and the gardens went to ruin. Then, a few years ago, Beverley and David Aspinall came upon it one weekend and bought it. Living in the surviving range of rooms with no heating, they set about converting its outbuildings into rentable spaces to fund their restoration. Today, they welcome researchers, host lectures on all aspects of the Pastons, and have installed an organ in the little 13th-century church of St. Michael where Sir Clement Paston has a handsome monument.

Information: 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT 06520, 203.432.2800, britishart.yale.edu LOUISE NICHOLSON is an art historian, journalist, lecturer, and author. Born and educated in Britain, she has lived in New York since 2001.

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

FAC Inside-Paston Mar/Apr 18 (6 page).indd 103

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

103

2/13/18 10:48 AM

BY PETER TRIPPI

BEHINDTHESCENES

A UROPAN AK ON

AMRICAN RAISM

R

eaders of Fine Art Connoisseur already know that realist art never died in 20th-century America, though it certainly came close to doing so during abstract expressionism’s heyday in the 1950s. The survival and evolution of American realism since World War II are, however, not a familiar story in Western Europe. There, even artworks by American realists as famous as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth are surprisingly hard to find because European museums have somehow not acquired them.

This gap has recently been tackled head-on by two energetic partners: the Drents Museum in Assen, a town of 60,000 people in the northeast of the Netherlands, and the Kunsthalle Emden in Emden, a German town of 52,000 in northwestern Germany. Located just over an hour’s drive apart, the institutions came together several years ago to begin coorganizing the exhibition The American Dream: American Realism 1945– 2017. In a spirit of collegiality that has characterized the entire project, they decided to split the checklist of artworks in two: most dating from 1945 to 1965 went to Assen, and later works to Emden. The grand total is just over 220, in every possible medium including photography and video.

Both halves have been on view since November 2017, and will remain so until May 27, 2018. All visitors are encouraged to see both presentations, so a joint ticket is sold to make achieving this goal easier. (The second half of the ticket can be used anytime before May 27; one does not need to see both halves on the same day.)

Spring is an ideal time to visit northern Europe, when the weather is fresh and the tourist hordes of summer have not yet invaded. Ironically, Americans who love their own country’s realist art may find this foreign survey more revealing than any such show they might have seen in the U.S. Indeed, one reason the two museums took on the project at all is because it has not been done properly in America — yet.

The logic for attempting this effort was clear. The Drents Museum has a long track record of organizing exhibitions of 19th- and 20th-century realist art from around the world — not only the Netherlands, but also Russia, Scotland, Germany, Italy, and even North Korea. Its commitment has

104

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 104

The Kunsthalle Emden’s main entrance

been nourished by director Harry Tupan, who previously served as senior curator and deputy director, and more recently by his curator colleague Annemiek Rens. Across the border at the Kunsthalle Emden, Mrs. Eske Nannen has guided the institution since she co-founded it with her husband, Henri (1913–1996), in 1986. In 2010 it scored a hit with an exhibition of realist art from around the world, so it was only a matter of time before it co-organized something else realism-related with its enthusiastic Dutch neighbor. Leading Emden’s development of the current project has been senior curator Katharina Henkel, assisted by curator Antje-Britt Mählmann. I was kindly invited to join their team as an adviser, which involved M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:39 AM

A

banner

featuring

Edward

Hopper’s

Morning Sun (1952, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio) adorns the Drents Museum.

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

105

TOM Market

BLACKWELL Basket

(b.

1938),

Harley,

2007,

acrylic on paper, 16 1/2 x 22 in., Louis K. Meisel Gallery, New York

RALPH GOINGS (b. 1928), A1 Sauce, 1995, oil on canvas, 28 x 32 in., Seven Bridges Foundation, Greenwich, CT

106

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 106

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:39 AM

(TOP) Inside The American Dream at the Drents Museum

(MIDDLE) At the Kunsthalle

Emden, visitors can learn more on touchscreens inside a classic American diner.

(BOTTOM LEFT) This brightly decorated bus carries school tour groups between the two museums.

(BELOW) JAMIE WYETH (b. 1946), Moonlight Voyeur, 2012, watercolor,

gesso, gouache and oil on board, 27 1/2 x 36 in., The Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth Collection

introducing the European curators to decision-makers at U.S. museums, galleries, foundations, corporations, and private collections.

Although many loans came from Europe, most originated in the U.S. Among the generous lending institutions are the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, Delaware Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, and Brandywine River Museum of Art. F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 107

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Two exceptional Hopper paintings came from Ohio’s Columbus Museum of Art and Michigan’s Muskegon Art Museum. Among the most generous private lenders were the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, AXA Corporation, the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Collection, the Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth Collection, the Gordon Parks Foundation, and the dealer Louis K. Meisel.

Every good exhibition should have a catalogue to document it: fortunately, the 212-page volume published by W Books in Dutch and German versions is both handsome and informative. (Alas, there is no English edition because the show is not visiting an English-speaking country.) It opens with “Reality Check,” a fascinating survey of the subject by Dana A. Miller, the Whitney’s former director of collections. Next comes an essay outlining the period’s historical, social, and political developments

by Tim Jelfs, professor of American studies at the University of Groningen in Holland. Finally, each genre (figures, cityscapes, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes) is addressed in a focused essay written by one of

107

2/13/18 9:39 AM

(TOP LEFT) RICHARD ESTES (b. 1932), View of the W Train Crossing the Manhattan Bridge, 2003, oil on board, 20 x 16 in., Seven Bridges Foundation, Greenwich, CT

(BOTTOM LEFT) YVONNE

JACQUETTE (b. 1934), Chrysler Building Composite at Dusk, 1997, oil on canvas, 75 x 86 in., Rose and Morton Landowne, New York (TOP RIGHT) EDWARD MELCARTH (1914–1973), Private Worlds, c. 1962, oil on canvas, 58 x 58 in., The Forbes Collection, New York (BOTTOM RIGHT) LARRY RIVERS (1923–2002), Double Portrait of Berdie, 1955, oil, fabricated chalk, and charcoal on linen, 71 1/2 x 82 11/16 in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

108

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 108

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:39 AM

Max Ferguson (b. 1959) and his model Luara Skrzek before Ferguson’s Coffee, 2015, oil on panel, 27 x 27 in., Seavest Collection, Rick and Monica Segal; photo: Frank Bernarducci

KARL HAENDEL (b. 1976), Hillary Clinton, 2016, pencil and graphite powder on paper, 103 x 171 in., courtesy of the artist, Suzanne Vielmutter Los Angeles Projects, and Wentrup Gallery, Berlin

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

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 109

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

the curators or me. Every artwork is illustrated and each of the 82 artists gets a thumbnail bio at the back.

The curators have defined “realism” very broadly, allowing for a critical consideration of what reality might be, rather than focusing exclusively on life-like renderings of perceived reality. This means the show encompasses not only such iconic figures as Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, and Charles Burchfield, but also leaders in Pop (e.g., Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein), Photorealism (Chuck Close, Audrey Flack, Robert Bechtle), and far beyond (Fairfield Porter, John Koch, Rackstraw Downes, Wayne Thiebaud, Alex Katz, Jasper Johns, Will Barnet, George Segal, Martha Rosler, Diane Arbus, Richard Prince, Eric Fischl, Kehinde Wiley, Catherine Murphy, John Moore, Vija Celmins). Clearly there is no stylistic agenda here at all; it’s a delight to explore the galleries and discover what the curators have concocted. (A fine example is the corner at

109

2/13/18 9:40 AM

DUANE HANSON (1925–1996), Cowboy with Hay, 1984/89, Judith Hess Fine Arts (left) with Richard Prince (b. 1949), Untitled (Cowboy), 2003, Hall Collection, courtesy Hall Art Foundation

STONE ROBERTS (b. 1951), Grand Central Terminal: An Early December Noon in the Main Concourse, 2009-12, oil on canvas, 76 x 74 in., Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection, courtesy of The William LouisDreyfus Foundation

110

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 110

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:40 AM

Photo capti Designer: T Emden illustrated here, showing Duane Hanson’s life-like cowboy sculpture facing down Richard Prince’s huge photo of a cowboy.)

At both venues, the curators have contextualized the artworks with timelines, music sampling, and film/video footage that remind us of important events that shaped each decade. Looming in this background are the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, the moon landing, the American Indian Movement, the Gulf Wars, September 11, and ongoing epidemics like drug abuse and AIDS. The checklist charges right up to today with an extraordinary room at Emden in which Karl Haendel’s gigantic drawing of Hillary Clinton stares at Peter Saul’s giant image of Donald Trump.

As the photos here suggest, The American Dream compellingly conveys just how multifaceted American realist art has been, a tradition that has somehow managed to endure through extraordinarily challenging times.

Information: visittheamericandream.com. Drents Museum, Brink 1, 9401 HS Assen, Netherlands, 31.592.377.773, drentsmuseum.nl. Kunsthalle Emden, Hinter dem Rahmen 13, 26721 Emden, Germany, 49.4921.9755050, kunsthalle-emden.de. The easiest way to reach this region is to catch a direct train from Amsterdam to Assen; trains depart twice per hour and take just over two hours.

PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.

IDELLE WEBER (b. 1932), Cooper Union Trash, 1974, oil on canvas, 45 x 64 1/4 in., Seavest Collection, Rick and Monica Segal

ANDREW WYETH (1917–2009), Blue Door, 1952, watercolor on paper, 29 x 21 in., Delaware Art Museum, Purchase Fund, 1952

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

FAC Behind the Scenes_American (8 pages).indd 111

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

111

2/13/18 9:40 AM

Designer: M building, too.

Designer: M

Designer: C

Designer: M

Designer: C

Designer: M

Jamie Wye gesso, gouache a Wyeth Collectio

GRA AR WORLDWID

E V E N T P R E V I E W

ALBERT HANDELL (b. 1937), Solitude, 2017, pastel on paper, 12 x 18 in., for sale in the Impressions, Markings & More exhibition, Space Gallery, Denver

ART ADVENTURES IN DENVER AND PARIS COLLECTORS FOR CONNOISSEURSHIP

PAINTING BEHIND THE GATES

GLIMPSES OF ETERNITY Westminster Abbey Chapter House London, England SW1 011.44.207.222.5152 westminster-abbey.org March 16–May 16

The British watercolorist Alexander Creswell (b. 1957) is renowned for deft depictions of historic buildings. His first architectural series (1990) examined deteriorated British country houses, and he remains fascinated by old buildings’ changeability. In 1992 HM Queen Elizabeth II commissioned him to depict the charred spaces of Windsor Castle, then to show them magnificently restored just five years later.

For the past six years, Creswell has been allowed to paint any area of London’s medieval

088 112

FAC Events Preview (5pages).indd 112

Denver (April 12–14) and Paris (May 23–26) 303.679.1365 windowstothedivine.org

ALEXANDER CRESWELL (b. 1957), The Quire, Westminster Abbey, 2011, watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 in..

Westminster Abbey that interests him, often behind locked gates. Such privileged access is unprecedented, though it surely owes to the superb job he did there recording — from a balcony high above — the 2011 wedding of Prince William to Catherine Middleton (now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge).

This season visitors to the Abbey’s octagonal Chapter House will admire 38 of Creswell’s scenes, including sketches, sketchbooks, and a maquette from the Royal Wedding project.

Among his subjects is the triforium, a space 70 feet above the Abbey’s main floor, hidden from public view for more than 700 years. Later this year it will be relaunched as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Galleries, displaying hundreds of treasures associated with the Abbey and offering magnificent views of the Houses of Parliament nearby.

All profits from Creswell’s exhibition, and from the Scala book that accompanies it, will benefit the Jubilee Galleries project.

Founded in 2015 by the Denver-based arts consultant Shannon Robinson, Collectors for Connoisseurship (C4C) is a national nonprofit network of people dedicated to the appreciation and patronage of art. Its members meet in person at events and interact through an online forum where they can access resources such as the Know2collect video library and blogs by artists and experts. Its mission underscores the importance of viewing art in museums and other public places, and of collecting art not only to enhance one’s personal spaces, but also to support the vocation of living artists.

C4C is a membership program of Windows to the Divine, a nonprofit that encourages philanthropy by supporting the Dominicans, who serve the poor and elderly in Denver.

This spring C4C will host two intriguing weekend programs. In Denver (April 12–14), participants will tour the Denver Art Museum’s exhibition Degas: A Passion for Perfection and attend the gala opening of Impressions,

M A R MC AH Y/ /AJ PURNI EL 22 0 0 11 78

FF II NN EE AA RR TT CC O O NN NN O O II SS SS EE UU RR ·· CC O OM M

2/13/18 9:51 AM

Markings & More, the biennial Windows to the Divine fundraiser staged at Space Gallery. On view through April 28, this project will juxtapose the representational works of more than 33 artists selected by Windows to the Divine with abstract works made by Space Gallery’s own artists.

That gala opening will encompass presentation of the 2018 Fra Angelico Award, given every two years to a master who inspires the community through service to the art world. This year’s winner is the painter Dan McCaw (b. 1942), who will receive the glass sculpture created by Denver artist Kit Karbler. Prior recipients include Albert Handell, William Hook, Don Sahli, Ramon Kelley, and Quang Ho. The weekend will conclude with a salon at which McCaw will participate in a conversation that also involves his artist sons Danny and John.

Only six weeks later (May 23–26), C4C members will gather again in Paris for a series of events organized by the California artist Vanessa Françoise Rothe. This will include the festive opening at Galerie L’Oeil du Prince of the Americans in Paris exhibition, which features works by Ryan Brown, Michelle Dunaway, Brendan Johnston, Jeremy Lipking, Julio Reyes, Richard T. Scott, Katie Whipple, Shane Wolf, Vincent Xeus, and others. Also on offer are visits to the Musée d’Orsay and Musée Rodin, lectures at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière presented by Dominique Sennelier, Pierre-Yan Guidetti, and Rothe herself, and an excursion to picnic and paint along the River Seine.

TULSA INSIDE OUT MUSEUM CONFIDENTIAL Philbrook Museum of Art 2727 S. Rockford Road, Tulsa, OK 74114 918.749.7941, philbrook.org October 14–May 6

panel, 17 7/8 x 23 7/8 in., Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, gift of Mrs. Mildred Taber Keally, 1966.26.1

The Philbrook Museum of Art is basking in the popularity of its groundbreaking, sevenmonth-long exhibition Museum Confidential.

Director Scott Stulen arrived in 2016, having previously been “curator of audience experiences and performance” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Knowing that many visitors wonder what happens behind the scenes, he decided to turn the museum “inside out” by implementing four initiatives — all at once.

Museum Mysteries invites visitors to help discover the stories and complicated issues behind specific artworks in the permanent collection. Recognizing that the average museum displays only five percent of its holdings, if that, The Other 95% is a dense salon-style presentation that is refreshed regularly. Since October, hundreds of rarely or never-before-seen items have been taken from storage and hung, including pieces once owned by the Phillips family, who gifted the historic home at the museum’s core. Also on offer is the DIY Exhibition, which reminds

KINDRED SPIRITS AMERICA CREATIVE: PORTRAITS

BY EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery Cohen Memorial Hall 1220 21st Avenue South Nashville, TN 37203 615.322.0605 as.vanderbilt.edu/gallery March 23–July 14

One of the world’s leading portrait painters is Everett Raymond Kinstler (b. 1926), who has captured the likenesses of more than 2,000 people, leaders in almost every professional field, including eight U.S. presidents.

Now Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery’s exhibition America Creative explores how the eye of this artist sees kindred souls who EVERETT RAYMOND KINSTLER (b. 1926), Tom Wolfe, 1987, oil on canvas, 50 x 27 in., collection of the artist

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

FAC Events Preview (5pages).indd 113

FÉLIX ZIEM (1821–1911), Venice, late 19th century, oil on

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

visitors that curating is about making choices, prompting them to weigh various considerations before making the “right” decision.

Finally, Stulen says, there is no art without artists, so he invited Minneapolis’s Andy DuCett to take over a gallery with his site-specific installation that playfully illustrates the ongoing relationship between museums and makers. It features a working motel lobby, research library, and displays of everyday objects we all collect and cherish. A nearby area reveals DuCett’s own working process through preparatory sketches, photographs, and studio ephemera.

Augmenting all of this are dozens of scheduled and pop-up programs, from an evening with the National Public Radio show Invisibilia to Tattoo Roulette, from Skyping with museums around the world to irreverent gallery tours. Every guest receives an experience punch card that incentivizes repeat visits.

Is this the future of museum-going? Perhaps, so stay tuned. are equally passionate about the arts, be they visual, performing, or literary.

Kinstler is doubly blessed: his lively impressionist technique imbues each likeness with a crackling energy, and he is also a charming conversationalist, a teller of stories that transport his sitters up out of the anxious present (who wants to sit still for an hour?) into an amusing world of intellectual exchange. The results are there to see at Vanderbilt — several generations of creative leaders spanning the years 1952 to 2015 now seem to be chatting with each other. They include such visual artists as Norman Rockwell and Alexander Calder, actors like Katharine Hepburn and Christopher Plummer, musicians like Tony Bennett and Marian Anderson, and authors such as Tom Wolfe and Dr. Seuss. These works have been loaned by Kinstler and by several institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery and National Academy Museum.

Organized by director Joseph S. Mella and assistant curator Margaret F. M. Walker, America Creative is the third in the gallery’s three-part portraiture series. Kinstler will offer a lecture-demonstration on March 24.

After Nashville, the exhibition will move to the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia (August 11–November 4).

113

2/13/18 9:51 AM

AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN

E. CHARLTON FORTUNE: THE COLORFUL SPIRIT Crocker Art Museum 216 O Street Sacramento, CA 95814 916.808.7000, crockerart.org January 28–April 22

The Crocker Art Museum is presenting the largest retrospective ever devoted to Euphemia Charlton Fortune (1885–1969), who went by “Effie” but signed her paintings “E. Charlton Fortune” to avoid being marginalized for her gender. On view are approximately 85 paintings, drawings, and decorative artworks.

This project has been organized by the Pasadena Museum of California Art, but it was guest-curated by the Crocker’s own Scott A. Shields, who will give a talk about Fortune on March 4.

Born in Sausalito, Fortune studied across the bay at San Francisco’s Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and then at the Art Students League of New York. After traveling abroad, she spent the summer of 1912 in Carmel-by-the-Sea. From then on, she generally spent summers on the Monterey Peninsula making art and teaching, returning to San Francisco in the winter to complete unfinished paintings, exhibit them, and produce charcoal portraits. Unmarried and of independent spirit, Fortune often rode her bicycle to find the perfect setting to paint outdoors. The resulting landscapes are not delicate or feminine, but bold and vigorous — and so were often thought to have been painted by a man.

VENUS ETERNAL

VISIONS OF VENUS / VENUS’S VISIONS Zhou B Art Center 1029 West 35th Street Chicago, IL 60609 773.523.0200, poetsandartists.com zhoubartcenter.com April 20–June 8

The innovative publication PoetsArtists has partnered again with Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center on an interdisciplinary project that will grace both venues, Visions of Venus / Venus’s Visions. It is particularly intriguing because it centers on an ancient idea surprisingly relevant today.

114

FAC Events Preview (5pages).indd 114

E. CHARLTON FORTUNE (1885–1969), Wine Cargoes, 1925, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in., collection of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas B. Stiles II

In 1915, Fortune won a silver medal at San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, and soon became renowned for views of Monterey and its wharf, featuring architecture, people, and other elements of modern life. She spent much of the 1920s in Europe, painting similar scenes and increasingly emphasizing humanity’s impact on the environment.

Back in California from 1927, Fortune shifted to ecclesiastical design due to collectors’ changing tastes and the Depression’s Throughout history, Venus has stood as the great archetype of love, beauty, enticement, seduction, sexuality, eroticism, fertility, desire, and prosperity. As the goddess of love, she was seen as having blessed the unions of mortals by taming and assimilating the male essence and blending it with the female. As a fertility symbol, she was revered as the mother of the Roman people. As a “changer of hearts,” she was seen as a transformative force that encouraged her followers to cherish their sexuality and celebrate it in the context of love, marriage, and family. In yet another incarnation, Venus was seen as the motivator of women on behalf of the military and the state. In all of her aspirations and intents, she is still perceived M A R C H / A P R I L

onset. This phase began when she was commissioned to decorate St. Angela Merici church in Pacific Grove, on the Monterey Peninsula. Its success led Fortune to found the Monterey Guild, which she envisioned as a modern version of a medieval craft guild. In general, she produced designs and oversaw the Guild members, who made devotional furnishings (including liturgical objects) in wood, metal, and textiles. Ultimately Fortune and her team transformed more than 70 Catholic churches in 16 states. In 1955, Pope Pius XII granted her the highest distinction the Vatican could bestow upon an artist. Fortune spent her final years in Carmel Valley, and would surely have been pleased by this re-examination of her achievements.

DANIELA KOVAČIĆ (b. 1983), Female Design, 2017, oil on canvas, 60 x 36 in.

as the embodiment of all things feminine and the complementary opposite of her male cognate, Mars.

Venus, whether in a contemporary or classical incarnation, represents the female way of being, seeing, and creating.

Selected by curator Elaine Melotti Schmidt, this spring’s exhibition will feature works created by more than 50 artists (female and male) that depict the eternal feminine, both as a subject (Venus’s Visions) and as an object (Visions of Venus).

Whether their idea was drawn from classical mythology, like Venus, or from the ether of cyberspace, the artists have all drawn inspiration from this timeless construct.

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 9:51 AM

SURVEYING A MODERN MASTER’S CAREER

DANIEL E. GREENE: STUDIOS AND SUBWAYS, AN AMERICAN MASTER, HIS LIFE AND ART North Light Books 208 pages, $49.99 danielgreeneartist.com/book.htm

Over the years, Fine Art Connoisseur has paid considerable attention to the New Yorkbased painter Daniel E. Greene (b. 1934), who has thrived as a leader in the field of figurative realism for more than six decades. Now he has collaborated with the distinguished critic Maureen Bloomfield to create a handsome hardcover monograph; within its 208 pages are her essays exploring Greene’s techniques, ideas, and influences, illustrated with more than 200 of his oil paintings and pastels.

Among them are his commissioned portraits (featuring the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and Ayn Rand), classically posed nudes, self-portraits, and still lifes. Yet Greene is best known for his scenes of New York City, ranging from subway station platforms, pool halls, and

carnivals to the elite world he has observed within its fabled auction houses.

Greene’s openness to both “high” and “low” culture makes perfect sense in light of his own artistic journey, which began with studies as a youngster at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Having dropped out of high school, he worked on Miami Beach sidewalks sketching passersby before reaching New York, where he attended the Art Students League from 1953 to 1955. Abstraction prevailed at that time, and Greene “actually looked into it, but I quickly decided that there wasn’t any method of improvement inherent in abstract painting. There was no challenge. So I committed myself to getting a solid foundation in classical painting, and devoted myself to realism. Realism was, and remains, extremely challenging.

Over the years there have been those who considered my work anachronistic. I’ve been the butt of a few snide reviews, and have endured a few tirades. But all along, there were also people who responded favorably to realism.

There are more today, now that abstraction’s heyday has passed, so I seem to have weathered the storm.”

Greene has more than weathered the storm, having been elected a member of the National Academy of Design in 1969, and having placed works in more than 700 public and private collections worldwide. He has inspired thousands of people through his influential

A NEW LOOK AT HOMER

COMING AWAY: WINSLOW HOMER AND ENGLAND Milwaukee Art Museum 700 N. Art Museum Drive Milwaukee, WI 53202 414.224.3200, mam.org March 1–May 20

WINSLOW HOMER (1836–1910), Hark! The Lark, 1882, oil on canvas, 36 3/8 x 31 3/8 in., Milwaukee Art Museum, Layton Art Collection Inc., gift of Frederick Layton, L99, photo: John R. Glemblin

The Milwaukee Art Museum has opened Coming Away: Winslow Homer and England, an exhibition that focuses attention — for the first time — on 19 transformational months spent abroad by a master usually lionized as purely American.

From March 1881 through November 1882, Homer (1836–1910) worked in a studio in F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

FAC Events Preview (5pages).indd 115

Cullercoats, a fishing village facing the North Sea. On view now are 50 of his paintings, watercolors, and drawings, accompanied by paintings and photographs made by 19th-century English colleagues whom he admired, including J.M.W. Turner and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

Borrowed from nearly 50 lenders, these works reveal how the landscape of England, the artists Homer met there, and the reviews he received while abroad all had a profound impact on his career. The project also demonstrates how this time exacerbated the tensions he felt between the traditional nature of his subject matter and the modernity of his aesthetic vision.

Homer had already won widespread acclaim for his art when he was drawn to England by Americans’ growing interest in British art, and by the previous success of his work there.

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

DANIEL E. GREENE (b. 1934), Young Girl–42nd Street, 2012, oil on linen, 40 x 30 in., available from Gallery Henoch, New York City

teaching career at the National Academy of Design and Art Students League, and even more through his best-selling books Pastel and The Art of Pastel. Now an even more attractive book is in circulation, and is sure to succeed as well.

While in Cullercoats, he purchased two cameras to record his surroundings, and he looked closely at works made there by artists living nearby.

The exhibition centers on two paintings from this period that reflect Homer’s fascination with the struggle between humanity and nature, as well as his brushwork’s growing vigor. One is the Milwaukee Art Museum’s Hark! The Lark, which represented Homer and his experience in England at the Royal Academy of Arts’ 1882 summer exhibition. Later in life he described it as “the most important picture I ever painted, and the very best one.” The other touchstone is The Gale, the first major painting Homer undertook following his return home, one he worked on for a decade. It is owned by the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, which co-organized and inaugurated this exhibition last autumn.

Brandon Ruud, the Milwaukee curator who co-organized the show with Worcester’s Elizabeth Athens, notes, “During his lifetime, as now, critics celebrated Homer’s work for its honesty and truth to nature, what many believed were quintessentially American qualities, but this exhibition complicates our understanding of Homer as the archetypal American artist.”

On April 5, Indiana University Bloomington professor Sarah Burns will give a lecture, followed on May 3 by John Fagg from the University of Birmingham in England.

115

2/13/18 9:51 AM

CHARLES SHEELER (1883–1965), Yankee Clipper, 1939, oil on canvas, 24 x 28 in., Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Jesse Metcalf Fund and Mary B. Jackson Fund, 41.006, photo: Erik Gould

TECHNOLOGY FROM ANOTHER TIME

CULT OF THE MACHINE: PRECISIONISM AND AMERICAN ART de Young Museum 50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive San Francisco, CA 94118 415.750.3600, deyoung.famsf.org March 24–August 12

Precisionism emerged in America in the 1910s and flourished right through the Great Depression. This impulse combined realist imagery with abstracted forms and married the influence of avantgarde European styles such as Purism, Cubism, and Futurism with American subject matter. Precisionists typically produced highly structured, geometric compositions with smooth surfaces and lucid forms to create a streamlined, “machined” aesthetic.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF) is about to open Cult of the Machine: Precisionism and American Art, the first major exhibition in more than 20 years to survey this distinctly American brand of modernism. More than 100 paintings by key artists such as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Ralston Crawford, Elsie Driggs, Marcel Duchamp, Gerald Murphy, and Francis Picabia will appear alongside photographs by Imogen Cunningham, Paul Strand, and others; clips from films such as Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times; and decorative arts and industrial objects — including a vintage Cord Phaeton car.

Organizing curator Emma Acker, who will give public talks on March 1 and 24, highlights how Precisionism reflected the economic and social changes wrought by industrialization and technological progress during the Machine Age. FAMSF director Max Hollein notes, “This project will resonate here in the heart of the Bay Area, at the epicenter of the emerging tech industries of Silicon Valley. We, like our visitors, often reflect on how our daily lives are impacted by new technologies — much as the Precisionists did almost a century ago. Aesthetically, these works are masterpieces, but perhaps they represent something more. Like all great works of art, they transcend their historical moment and give us insights about both our present and our future.”

As today, there was general excitement about technology’s capacity to engender opportunity and improve the conditions of daily life, yet these attitudes coexisted with fears that it would supplant human labor and deaden the natural rhythms of life. Precisionist artists reflected such complexities, capturing both the beauty and the coldness of mechanization.

After closing in San Francisco, Cult of the Machine will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art (September 9, 2018–January 6, 2019).

Louisville is now enjoying Women Artists in the Age of FROM PARIS TO LOUISVILLE Impressionism, which features more than 80 paintings made by 37 women artists from 13 countries. “This touring exhibition examines an important chapter in art history when an international group of women artists overcame gender-based WOMEN ARTISTS IN THE AGE OF restrictions to build careers for themselves,” says the Speed Art IMPRESSIONISM Museum’s chief curator, Erika Holmquist-Wall. “Paris in the late 19th century was the epicenter of the art world, and scores Speed Art Museum of women artists traveled there to receive training, exhibit their 2035 South Third Street work, and build their own professional networks.”

Louisville, Kentucky 40208 Borrowed from collections worldwide, these paintings 502.634.2700, speedmuseum.org were made by renowned artists including Berthe Morisot February 17–May 13 (French), Mary Cassatt (American) and Rosa Bonheur (French), and also by now-lesser-known ones like Anna Ancher (Danish), Lilla Cabot Perry (American), Ellen Thesleff (Finnish), and Paula Modersohn-Becker (German). Such women were not allowed to attend the École des Beaux-Arts, France’s most important art academy, until 1897. Taboos against women being seen in public without a chaperone limited access to painting locations and narrowed the range of subjects available. In the face of such obstacles, they studied in private ateliers, exhibited independently, and formed their own organizations. Only later in the century did French women gain such fundamental rights as receiving a secondary education, opening a bank account, and obtaining legal guardianship of their children.

Organized by the American Federation of Arts, this exhibition has been selected by Laurence Madeline, chief curator for French National Heritage. It drew crowds to the Denver Art Museum last autumn, and after Louisville will conclude its tour at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts (June 9–September 3).

The Speed Art Museum will spend much of 2018 celebrating women through exhibitions and programming, starting with its founder and first director, Hattie Bishop Speed (1858–1942). On March 8 it will host an International Women’s Day Award Luncheon honoring Louisville’s own groundbreaking women.

116

FAC Events Preview (5pages).indd 116

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

ELLEN THESLEFF (1869–1954), Echo, 1891, oil on canvas, 24 x 17 1/8 in., Anders Wiklöf Collection, Andersudde, Åland Islands, photo: Kjell Söderlund

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

2/13/18 9:51 AM

O F F T H E W A L L S

INFORMATION: 122 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401, 843.805.7144, meyervogl.com

A RT I ST S & G A L L E R I E S

Readers of Fine Art Connoisseur may recall the fascinating article in the August 2014 issue written by Arthur D. Hittner about Harold Rabinovitz (1915–1944), the talented artist who died much too young during World War II. Now Hittner has taken his research two steps further. First, he has published a monograph and catalogue raisonné, entitled At the Threshold of Brilliance: The Brief but Splendid Career of Harold J. Rabinovitz (ISBN 978-0-9989810-0-0, 186 pages, $22.50). Second, he has written a novel inspired by Rabinovitz’s life, Artist, Soldier, Lover, Muse (ISBN 978-0-9989810-1-7, 348 pages, $15.50).

Adam Normandin (b. 1965), Devoted, 2017, oil and acrylic on canvas, 50 x 72 in.

New York City

March 1–31

Bernarducci Gallery is celebrating its new home in Chelsea with a show of “New Precisionist” paintings. The artists represented include John Baeder, Antonio Cazorla, Ester Curini, Peter Drake, William Fisk, Max Ferguson, Gus Heinze, Park Hyung Jin, Cheryl Kelley, Sylvia Maier, Daniel Massad, Sharon Moody, Adam Normandin, Mario A. Robinson, and Nathan Walsh. For the “Old Precisionists,” see page 116.

INFORMATION: 525 W. 25th Street, New York, NY 10001, 212.593.3757, bernarduccigallery.com

Brendan H. Johnston (b. 1984), Artist’s Panel, 2017, oil on wood, 16 x 12 in.

New York City

through March 22

Located next door to the Grand Central Atelier in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, Eleventh Street Arts is presenting the exhibition The Still Life: Contemporary Interpretations. Curated by two of its exhibitors, Samuel Hung and Justin Wood, this show encompasses the whimsical, the everyday, and the most extravagant aspects of the still life tradition. The artists participating are Anthony Baus, Liz Beard, Lucas Bononi, Jon Brogie, Diana Buitrago, Todd Casey, Devin Cecil-Wishing, Jacob Collins, Savannah Tate Cuff, Tony Curanaj, Kathryn Engberg, Kelly Foss, Samuel Hung, Brendan Johnston, Michael Klein, Rodrigo Mateo, John Morra, Kevin MüllerCisneros, Grant Perry, Rachel Personett, Roberto Rosenman, Carlo Russo, Sandra Sanchez, Brian West, Katie Whipple, Justin Wood, and Dale Zinkowski.

The gallery is open by appointment only.

INFORMATION: 46-06 11th Street, Long Island City, NY 11101, eleventhstreetarts.com

Laurie Meyer (b. 1959), Crazy Good, 2017, oil on linen, 36 x 48 in.

Charleston

March 2–30

Meyer Vogl Gallery is hosting Bloom Boom Boom!, an exhibition of artworks inspired by flowers, ranging in approach from abstraction to botanical patterns.

Gallerist and artist Marissa Vogl notes, “From pollination to survival, flowers are incredibly complex, and we often take them for granted.” The participating artists are Stanley Bielen, Nancy Hoerter, Laurie Meyer, James Richards, Dorothy Shain, Marissa Vogl, and Carrie Beth Waghorn. The show opens with a reception on March 2, synchronized with the Charleston Gallery Association’s monthly Art Walk.

118

BC-FAC Off the Wall mar_apr 18 (4 pages).indd 118

Harold Rabinovitz (1915–1944), Self-Portrait, 1937, tempera on canvas, 24 x 17 in., collection of Penny Kautz

M A R C H / A P R I L

John Philbin Dolan (b. 1962), The Hippie, 2016, pastel on paper, 12 x 9 in.

Santa Fe

March 2–31

This season Sorrel Sky Gallery hosts the Pastel Society of New Mexico’s 26th National Pastel Painting Exhibition.

At least 150 artists from North America and Europe each submitted up to three pieces completed during the past 24 months; their subjects include portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, and still lifes. Works were juried in by the artists Susan Ogilvie, Jeanne Rosier Smith, and Frederick Somers, and awards will be selected by the artist Dinah Worman.

INFORMATION: 125 W. Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, NM 87501, 505.501.6555, sorrelsky.com and pastelsnm.org

AU C T IO N S & FA I R S

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 2:44 PM

WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO

D U C K ,

D U C K ,

G O O S E

TWO MEN IN A BOAT Philip R. Goodwin (1881–1935) Date unknown; oil on canvas, laid on board; 28 x 14 3/4 in.

To be auctioned at March in Montana, Great Falls, March 17 Estimate: $40,000–$60,000

CHARLA & BOB NELSON Owners of Manitou Galleries and founders of March in Montana

S

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

FAC Auction Mar/Apr18 .indd 117

ometimes ducks fly away, out of range of hunters’ rifles. The grizzly has been known to chase people through the woods, and many an advancing moose has forced a marksman to hide under an overturned canoe. The great sporting artist and illustrator Philip R. Goodwin (1881–1935) didn’t always depict humans

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

winning their hunting trophy, though most of the time the game and fish were captured. In his Two Men in a Boat, a work never before shown in public, it’s not clear whether the formation of flying ducks (or geese) are soon to disappear into the sky, as they almost do on the canvas, or if they will be felled by the hunters concealed by tall grasses.

“Maybe the ducks are not rendered in as much detail as the two figures, the boat, and the water because they’re about to be dead in five seconds,” says Bob Nelson, with a laugh. “Goodwin might have thought, ‘They’ll be gone soon anyway.’” Nelson’s wife, Charla, prefers to believe that if the ducks are getting away, it’s because “Goodwin liked to depict things the way they really happen in life. He showed how humans aren’t always the ones in control in nature.”

What will be in control is the bidding process at the annual March in Montana Dealer Show and Auction that Bob Nelson founded 31 years ago in conjunction with the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, and that is co-run by his wife. The Nelsons also own the Manitou Galleries in Santa Fe and Cheyenne. Their two-day auction (March 16–17) in Great Falls is part of the Russell Week celebration honoring the Western master Charlie Russell (1864–1926), who lived there.

“Goodwin was a prolific artist who made a lot of illustrations for magazines and books of the day,” says Bob, “but even Len [Peterson], who wrote the definitive book on his art, had never seen this painting, which remained in a private collection. Len didn’t know it existed, and if he didn’t know about it, you can bet it’s pretty obscure. That makes it totally fresh, which is pretty cool.”

Like many illustrators of his era, when there was a nearly insatiable appetite for original art in magazines and children’s books, Goodwin painted scenes filled with drama and action. Although Two Men in a Boat is relatively quiet, with no bear fangs bared or mountain lions set to pounce on hikers, it was likely painted from Goodwin’s imagination rather than on site. “Illustrators like him got to know how to paint without taking photographs,” Bob explains. “It was a matter of skill and experience.” Charla adds, “Goodwin is known for getting his animals right.”

Given the time of day rendered in this emphatically vertical scene (early morning), the colors are more muted than in most Goodwin works. And yet, the red bandana peeking from the back pocket of a hunter offers a vibrant moment on canvas. “Goodwin liked color on his guys, with lots of red shirts and bandanas and flannel shirts,” says Charla. “It’s a painter’s trick to add a spot of red on the canvas. The color immediately pulls the eye in, especially when the overall composition is a bit muted.”

Whether the viewer is a hunter or an animal rights activist, Goodwin’s works are appealing, for both animals and humans are depicted lovingly and realistically. Moreover, depending on your viewpoint, the animals or birds in his scenes are either captured or remain free.

117

2/13/18 11:58 AM

Great Falls, Montana

March 14–19

Once again, all eyes are on Great Falls, Montana, a town of 60,000 that comes alive with more than 15 art shows and 750 exhibiting artists under the banner of Western Art Week. It was on March 19, 1864 that the Western master Charles M. Russell was born in St. Louis, and it was in Great Falls that he spent the second half of his life, and where he died in 1926. The C.M. Russell Museum’s annual fundraiser, The Russell, will celebrate its 50th edition March 15–17, offering live and silent auctions of historical and contemporary Western art, a quick-finish event, a fashion show, and a symposium. Its main exhibition is already open online; it features the cowboys and Indians Russell revered, and also Western landscapes, wildlife scenes, and still lifes.

Also on offer is the Out West Art Show (March 14–17), featuring work by more than 200 artists, a quick-finish competition and auction, a Native American dance program, and live music. Finally, see page 117 for a highlight from the 31st annual March in Montana auction, presented by Manitou Galleries and Coeur d’Alene Art Auction (March 15–17).

INFORMATION: westernartweek.com

New York City

March 12–23

In 1917 the artists and patrons of the Salmagundi Club bought a brownstone at 47 Fifth Avenue as its permanent home. Among the legendary artists who donated paintings to an art sale to help fund that purchase were J. Francis Murphy, Ernest Blumenschein, Frank Tenney Johnson, Emile Gruppe, E.I. Couse, Carl Rungius, Guy C. Wiggins, and J.H. Sharp.

To celebrate 100 years since that momentous event, the club will soon host a Centennial Exhibition & Sale. It will include many renowned artists (club members and not) who have contributed works to raise the funds needed to upgrade this 165-year-old building.

Among the participants are Kathy Anderson, Michele Byrne, Donald Demers, Debra Joy Groesser, Joanne Mangi, Sherrie McGraw, Joseph McGurl, C.W. Mundy, and Thalia Stratton. A reception and wine tasting will occur on March 22.

literature. It was co-curated by Prof. Katherine Manthorne (City University of New York) and Newark curator Tricia Laughlin Bloom; they have produced its publication (D. Giles Limited, London), which also contains essays by Patricia Mainardi and James M. Saslow.

The museum is presenting a small, complementary show of landscape imagery that highlights indigenous people in the American West. Its checklist ranges from Bierstadt’s monumental The Landing of Columbus to a contemporaneous hide painting by Chief Washakie, right up to new works by Kenseth Armstead and Michael Namingha (Hopi).

INFORMATION: 49 Washington Street, Newark, NJ 07102, 973.596.6550, newarkmuseum.org

INFORMATION: 47 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003, 212.255.7740, salmagundi.org

M USEU MS Tim Cherry (b. 1965), Rabbit Reach, 2017, bronze, 22 x 10 x 40 in.

San Antonio

Clark Hulings (1922–2011), Kaleidoscope, 1980, oil on canvas, 29 x 46 in.

Scottsdale

Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Western Landscape, Mount Whitney, 1869, oil on canvas, 36 x 54 in., Newark Museum, Purchase 1961, Members’ Fund, 61.516

April 7

Launched in 2005, the annual Scottsdale Art Auction will again offer superb paintings and bronze sculptures inspired by the American West, both historic and contemporary. The sale is led by Mike Frost (Bartfield Galleries, New York City), Jack A. Morris, Jr. (Morris & Whiteside Galleries, Hilton Head Island), and Brad Richardson (Legacy Galleries, Scottsdale and Jackson Hole).

Unusually, five works by Clark Hulings (1922–2011) will be offered. They include Kaleidoscope, a 1980 scene of a Mexican market; when it first went up for auction in 1981, it fetched $310,000, then the highest price for a work by a living American artist.

INFORMATION: 7176 Main Street, Scottsdale, AZ 85251, 480.945.0225, scottsdaleartauction.com

The façade of the Salmagundi Club

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

BC-FAC Off the Wall mar_apr 18 (4 pages).indd 119

Newark

March 24–August 19

The Newark Museum is about to open a groundbreaking exhibition, The Rockies and the Alps: Bierstadt, Calame, and the Romance of the Mountains. It explores the international fascination with mountains that emerged in the 19th century, when both the U.S. and Switzerland were developing their national identities. Like the Thomas Cole show highlighted on page 94, this project reminds us that American masters were more influenced by European ideas than we have realized.

To prove its point, this show gathers more than 70 paintings, sketches, prints, drawings, and photographs, as well as books, stereoscope cards, and travel literature.

Newark’s superb holdings form the core, though loans have also been obtained from 20 other collections. Represented are 40 artists, including Albert Bierstadt (who first visited the Alps in 1853, before he began making grand paintings of the American West), Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Worthington Whittredge, and John F. Kensett. While such European role models as J.M.W. Turner and John Ruskin are familiar, visitors may not know Alexandre Calame (1810–1864), who led the Swiss alpine school with his scenes of glaciers and gorges.

The exhibition sets these artists in the context of plein air painting’s evolution, and also of developments in tourism, mountain climbing, scientific exploration, and

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

March 23–24

The Briscoe Western Art Museum will host its 17th annual Night of Artists Exhibition & Art Sale, a fundraiser that draws collectors from across the country. At its heart is a show of more than 280 paintings and sculptures made by 75 artists who revere the West. They include Nicholas Coleman, Teresa Elliott, Martin Grelle, Z.S. Liang, Mark Maggiori, Bill Nebeker, Gladys Roldán-de-Moras, Billy Schenck, Kent Ullberg, and Kim Wiggins. Kicking off the opening weekend is a summit for collectors (both seasoned and beginning) that explores the Western art market. Up next is the preview, awards dinner, and live auction of more than 20 works. Finally comes the grand opening, which includes a luck-of-the-draw sale. If you cannot make it then, don’t worry; the show will remain on view through May 6.

INFORMATION: 210 W. Market Street, San Antonio, TX 78205, 210.299.4499, briscoemuseum.org

Fritzi Heron (b. 1954), After Morning Chores, 2016, watercolor on paper, 9 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.

Pawhuska, Oklahoma March 23–April 28 The nonprofit organization American Plains Artists is presenting roughly 55 works made by its signature members

119

2/13/18 2:45 PM

in an exhibition hosted by Preserving Arts in the Osage.

On view are representational artworks in traditional media depicting the landscapes, wildlife, and people of the Plains region in both historical and modern times.

INFORMATION: Ole #1 Firehouse Art Center, Pawhuska, OK 74056, americanplainsartists.com

Little Rock

through April 22

Believe it or not, the Arkansas Arts Center owns 290 works by the American modernist John Marin (1870– 1953), a collection second only in size to that of the National Gallery of Art. These arrived in 2013 as a gift from his daughter-in-law Norma Marin and were subsequently conserved. On view now is Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work, an exhibition tracing his transformation from intuitive draftsman to innovative watercolorist and etcher. Renowned for scenes of gritty New York City and scenic Maine, Marin grew in skill over time. Now his finished watercolors, etchings, and oil paintings have been reunited with the sketches on which they were based. This show encompasses 79 works from the Center’s collection alongside 33 works borrowed from elsewhere. The project is accompanied by a handsome catalogue and innovative website.

INFORMATION: 501 E. 9th Street, Little Rock, AR 72202, 501.372.4000, arkansasartscenter.org and becomingjohnmarin.org Max Liebermann (1847–1935), The Parrot Man, 1902, oil on canvas, 40 x 28 1/4 in., Museum Folkwang, Essen

Eudald de Juana (b. 1988), Lunar Landscape, 2016, resin, 11 3/4 x 8 2/3 x 7 3/4 in.

Jersey City

New York City

March 2–June 10

The Whitney Museum of American Art is mounting New York City’s first retrospective of Grant Wood (1891– 1942) since 1983. In fact, this is only the third survey of his art outside his native Midwest since 1935. One key reason is that the Art Institute of Chicago seldom loans his masterpiece, American Gothic. That iconic image was a hit when it premiered in 1930, and it set the tone for the rest of Wood’s career. (He died of pancreatic cancer in 1942.)

The exhibition will track Wood from his early Arts & Crafts decorative objects and Impressionist oils right through his mature paintings, murals, works on paper, and book illustrations. Near his heart was Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and the farms and rolling hills that surround it.

They represented the values of community, hard work, and self-reliance that Wood and other “Regionalists” championed during the 1930s, perhaps America’s most difficult decade. These hard-edged images are not all rosy, however; often they are melancholy or ambiguous, always rewarding close looking.

INFORMATION: 99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014, 212.570.3600, whitney.org

through March 23

The Florence Academy of Art (U.S.) is presenting a project that challenged its 30 participating artists to make an impression within a standardized format. 12x12: A Portrait Exhibition features likenesses measuring just 12 by 12 inches. The exhibitors include Colleen Barry, Jamie Coreth, Yuriy Ibragimov, Kate Lehman, Mario Robinson, Denis Sarazhin, and Travis Schlaht. Curator Stephen Bauman, who teaches anatomy and ecorché at the academy, says these artists “show us the common features of their subjects, sometimes through a broad handling of their chosen medium and at other times through a finely wrought technique. Whatever approach, these artworks present a vivid sense of a real person’s presence.”

INFORMATION: Mana Contemporary, 888 Newark Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07306, 201.685.7080, florenceacademyofart.com

The Hague

March 24–June 24

The German painter Max Liebermann (1847–1935) enjoyed a special bond with the Netherlands. He visited often, and successfully applied his impressionist technique to sun-splashed scenes of outdoor cafés, beach-bathing, and horse riders at fashionable resorts on the coast. A Liebermann retrospective has not graced Holland since 1980, so the one opening soon at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag will awaken Dutch art lovers to his genius again. Borrowing Liebermann’s works from German museums is not easy because they are popular.

INFORMATION: Stadhouderslaan 41, 2517 The Hague, 31.70.338.1111, gemeentemuseum.nl

John Marin (1870–1953), Manhattan Skyline from the River, 1909–12, watercolor over graphite on paper, 11 1/2 x 12 3/4 in., Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection, Gift of Norma B. Marin, New York, 2013.018.152

120

BC-FAC Off the Wall mar_apr 18 (4 pages).indd 120

Pittsburgh

INFORMATION: 5th Floor, Hunt Library, Carnegie Mellon University, 4909 Frew Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, 412.268.2434, huntbotanical.org Theodor Kaufmann (1814–1896), Portrait of U.S. Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels (1822– 1901), 1870s, oil on mill board, 12 x 10 in., Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 69.170

Grant Wood (1891– 1942), American Gothic, 1930, oil on composition board, 30 3⁄4 x 25 3⁄4 in., Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection 1930.934 © Figge Art Museum, successors to the Estate of Nan Wood Graham / Licensed by VAGA, photo: Art Resource

M A R C H / A P R I L

April 2–June 29

The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation is exhibiting 42 watercolors by the European physician and naturalist Charles Dorat of medicinal plants he found near Cedros, Honduras. Even Dorat’s lifedates are mysterious, but it is certain that he lived in El Salvador and traveled in Honduras in the 1850s and 1860s. Alas, he never realized his dream of publishing his illustrations; though not scientific, they are nonetheless assured, informative, and beautiful.

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 2:45 PM

Jackson, Mississippi

through July 8

The Mississippi Museum of Art is marking the state’s bicentennial with the unprecedented exhibition Picturing Mississippi, 1817–2017: Land of Plenty, Pain, and Promise. It traces changes in the depiction of Mississippi through 175 works made by 100 artists who resided there, visited, or lived elsewhere. Owned by the museum itself or borrowed from institutions nationwide, these works follow Mississippi’s story from the days when its inhabitants were Native Americans, through the periods of Spanish and French exploration, statehood, the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and Civil Rights.

Among the artists represented are the native Missisippians William Dunlap, Sam Gilliam, George Ohr, and Eudora Welty, plus John James Audubon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thomas Hart Benton, George Caleb Bingham, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John Steuart Curry, William Eggleston, Walker Evans, Robert Indiana, Ben Shahn, Kara Walker, and Andy Warhol. Admission is free to all visitors.

INFORMATION: 380 S. Lamar Street, Jackson, MS 39201, 601.960.1515, msmuseumart.org

Adam Miller’s Québec

Alexander Wilson (1766–1813), Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Pileated Woodpecker (Vol. 4, Plate 29), 1811, hand-colored etching and engraving on paper, 13 3/4 x 10 3/8 in., Toledo Museum of Art, Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund, 2014.15d

Philip Koch (b.

1948), Spring, 2017, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in.

Toledo

Buffalo

April 13–July 29

Operated by the State University of New York / Buffalo State, the Burchfield Penney Art Center is dedicated to the American watercolorist Charles E. Burchfield (1893–1967), and also to the artists of Western New York. It offers a two-year residency enabling artists to engage with Burchfield’s legacy and the collection. Opening soon is the exhibition Time Travel in the Burchfield Archives: Paintings and Drawings by Philip Koch, which highlights what Koch, the talented Rochester-born, Baltimore-based painter, learned during his stay. On view will be more than 30 oil paintings and works on paper that Koch started in areas Burchfield loved; these include West Seneca, East Aurora, Chestnut Ridge Park, downtown Buffalo, and even Salem, Ohio (where Burchfield grew up).

Koch pored over thousands of Burchfield drawings, so he is accompanying his own artworks with his selection of preparatory drawings by Burchfield that influenced his own work. Koch notes, “Burchfield built up his world step by step with preparatory studies he organized and documented. This made a big impression on me.” In older age, Burchfield re-evaluated imagery from his early years and incorporated it in later paintings.

Koch was inspired to re-assess his own youthful works, and even “began painting in oil outdoors again for the first time in 20 years.”

INFORMATION: 1300 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, NY 14222, 716.878.6011, burchfieldpenney.org

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

BC-FAC Off the Wall mar_apr 18 (4 pages).indd 121

April 21–July 15

The Toledo Museum of Art will open the exhibition Before Audubon: Alexander Wilson’s Birds of the United States.

It centers on the museum’s first edition of a pioneering multi-volume publication, American Ornithology; or The Natural History of the Birds of the United States.

Scottish-born Alexander Wilson began publishing this magnum opus in 1808, long before 1827–38, when John James Audubon produced Birds of America. Inside Wilson’s nine volumes are 76 hand-colored plates recording birds in the eastern U.S. — 314 species in all, 26 of which he was the first to identify.

The museum mounts bird-themed exhibitions every two years, partly because Toledo hosts the annual Biggest Week in American Birding. Next scheduled for May 4-13, this festival lures tens of thousands of birders to Lake Erie to observe the spring migration of songbirds.

In November, the enormous painting Québec by American artist Adam Miller (b. 1979) enjoyed two unveilings : first at Montreal’s McCord Museum, then two weeks later at the Musée national des beaux-art de Québec. Miller’s picture represents more than 400 years of Québec history, depicting hundreds of people both recognizable and allegorical. It was commissioned by Salvatore Guerrera, president and CEO of the integrated project delivery company SAJO, to mark Canada’s 150th anniversary, 225 years of parliamentary institutions in Québec, and Montreal’s 375th birthday. It also honors Québec’s crucial role in shaping Canada, a country Guerrera hails for having welcomed his Italian immigrant parents in the 1950s. The painting is commemorated by a handsome 60-page book containing essays by François-Marc Gagnon, Alexandre Turgeon, and Donald Kuspit, as well as Clarence Epstein’s interview with the artist.

INFORMATION: 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, OH 43620, 419.255.8000, toledomuseum.org

OUT & A BOUT

Opened in 2016, Chapman University’s Hilbert Museum of California Art is an important addition to the cultural life of Orange County. It is the brainchild of Mark and Janet Hilbert, who donated more than 1,000 oils, watercolors, sketches, and lithographs depicting California between the 1930s and 1970s — a trove valued at more than $7 million. The couple also gave $3 million to establish the museum. Amazingly, Mark Hilbert leads a tour of it every Thursday morning with director Mary Platt. They are illustrated here with a recent visitor, Fine Art Connoisseur’s West Coast editor Vanessa Françoise Rothe (right).

Salvatore Guerrera and Adam Miller

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

121

2/13/18 2:45 PM

122

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

JASON DRAKE Soaring Over Hawksbill Mountain 26 x 40 inches

Oil on linen (detail)

Available by contacting the artist JasonDrakeStudio.com

facebook.com/JasonDrakeStudio

CLAUDIA SEYMOUR www.claudiaseymour.com

“The Golden Obi,” 20”x20”, oil on linen “Visitors,” 11”x14”, oil on linen/panel

J.M. STRINGER FINE ART, Vero Beach, FL www.jmstringergallery.com

HANDWRIGHT GALLERY, New Canaan, CT www.handwrightgallery.com

SUSAN POWELL FINE ART, Madison, CT www.susanpowellfineart.com

GLADWELL & PATTERSON, Knightsbridge (London), SW3 • www.gladwells.org.uk

FAC Page F I N E ASeymour R T C OHalf N N O I Ad.indd S S E U 1R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

123

1/16/18 2:52 PM

Blues and Gold, 24 x 36” oil, $3700

124

CHRISTINE LASHLEY LashleyArt.com • 703-473-9976 • lashleystudio@yahoo.com M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

Retired Farmhouse, 12 x 24, oil on panel, $1600

Evoking a Sense of Nostalgia

Beth Bathe

bethbathe.com 703•628•5044 South Street Art Gallery, Easton MD

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

125

Larry Cannon

C

Morning on the Mountain 11" x 14" Watercolor on paper

Fine Art Watercolors

www.cannonwc.com

Inventive.

Lively.

Bold.

Oil Paintings By

Heather Lynn Gibson

Two-time winner of Best Outdoor Still Life, PleinAir Magazine Competition.

June/July & Oct/Nov 2017

Visit HLGibsonArt.com to see more.

Email: Studio@HLGibsonArt.com Ph: 1-856-625-2170

Golden Apollo Gallery 24 x 24 in. Oil on canvas.

126

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

CHANTEL LYNN BARBER Small Works

Capturing Life in Acrylic, 2nd Edition Available as a Kindle Edition or Paperback chantellynnbarber.com/book/2916/capturing-life-in-acrylic-2nd-edition

“I love all the tips and information Chantel put into this book.

Great! I recommend adding this book to your library.” - Jill S. “This fresh approach to acrylic painting, by an established artist, has been very helpful in understanding the products and process.” - Jenny M.

To view more of Chantel’s work and for online courses: chantellynnbarber.com | 901.438.2420

APA Signature Show March 23 – April 28, 2018 Hosted by Preserving Arts in the Osage at Ole #1 Firehouse Art Center 118 1/2 W. Main, Pawhuska, OK

Mary Lambeth, APA "Claret Cup and Blue", 15" x 22.5", Watercolor www.marylambeth.com | mary@marylambeth.com | 432-770-5800

For more information contact jimcartist@yahoo.com or call 308.249.1488 F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

"By Invitation Only" Donors Meet & Greet and Opening Reception March 23rd, 6-8 PM For Invitation and Info Email bruce@tallgrassgallery.net

Jammey Huggins, APA "Thundering Hooves" Bronze Vessel Edition of 30 14"h x 10"diameter www.jammey.com jammey@jammey.com 432-758-5270

www.americanplainsartists.com 127

FINAL.AD.fineartconlayout3:Layout 1

1/26/18

7:24 PM

Page 1

Joseph Gyurcsak Interior Paintings Inquiries & Commissions are Welcome Represented by

Hagan Fine Art Gallery & Studio 177 King Street, Charleston SC 29401

843-901-8124 allison@haganfineart.com www.HaganFineArt.com

FORGOTTEN

COAST

en plein air America’s Great Paint-Out

ANNOUNCING THE 2018 FEATURED ARTISTS

Brienne M. Brown Luke Buck Ken DeWaard Charles Dickinson Mark Fehlman Kathleen Hudson Charlie Hunter Debra Huse Shelby Keefe Thomas Jefferson Kitts

128

John P. Lasater, IV Nanci King Mertz Vicki Norman Morgan Samuel Price James Richards Ray Roberts Tony Robinson Mark Shasha William A. “Bill” Suys Vladislav Yeliseyev

May 4-13, 2018

www.forgottencoastenpleinair.com M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

SUSAN PLOUGHE .

.

Signature Member OPA AIS Between Poses

.

Oil on linen 14 x 11 inches

Available for purchase at the American Impressionist Society Small Works Showcase March 23 - April 21, 2018 Greenwich House Gallery, Cincinnati, OH

View available paintings or inquire about commission procedures at

www.susanploughe.com

.

.

847 726 0816

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

129

JUDY A. CROWE

Texas in the Spring, 16” x20”, Oil on canvas

For more information visit www.judycrowe.com | 832.640.7131 Inquiries Welcome

Harmony in Pink and Green oil on canvas 48” x 72”

Maddine Insalaco

www. maddineinsalaco.com • 212-388-9832 Workshops: www.landscapepainting.com • m@landscapepainting.com

130

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

Jennifer Taylor Jennifer Taylor is a visionary impressionist artist who works primarily from life.

JSTaylorArt.com • Jennifer@JSTaylorArt.com • 256.701.4888 The Walk To Sorrento oil 18 x 24

braziergallery.com | 804.358.2771

1616 W. Main St. Richmond, VA 23220

Mark Laguë

Loryn Brazier

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

Maggie Siner

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Beth Bathe

Nancy Tankersley

131

R EY

NO L

US DA HO

E | BI

RT IN A R DS

| T HE

EM A

N U EL

NI N

RT E | MO

ON

K A ISH

R | ZU

BA R

ÁN

subscribe today | fineartconnoisseur.com | 800.610.5771

132

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

Catching Up 12” x 12”

Chasing the Light

J I L L S T E F A N I WA G N E R PSA-MP IAPS/MC

jillwagnerart.com

One Up, Two on the Rocks 12” x 12”

J. Petter Galleries - Saugatuck, MI JPetterGalleries.com 269.857.2230 F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Tvedten Fine Art - Harbor Springs, MI TvedtenFineArt.com 231.526.2299

133

The Conference Just for Figurative Painters

CONVERSING WITH THE LILIES

oil on canvas 20” x 20”

SARA JANE REYNOLDS FINE ART

SaraJaneReynolds.com 843.442.6929

Featuring the world’s leading artists on stage and hosted by Fine Art Connoisseur’s Peter Trippi and Eric Rhoads

Don’t miss the second annual conference dedicated to today’s figurative painting movement. You’ll enjoy the fresh, fun, and non-stuffy environment dedicated to the crea tion of museum-quality figurative and portrait painting and sculpting.

Represented by Four days of demos, presentations, and an opportunity to be hands-on. Plus, art marketing for figurative painters.

134

November 7-10, 2018 • Miami Registration is limited, so book now at FigurativeArtConvention.com.

Charleston, SC M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

EQUINE & PORTRAIT ARTIST State of Dee Heart 30” x 40” Oil on Canvas Available through the Artist

NanciFulmek.com

he fresh, sculpting.

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

135

Fields in Fall Light, oil on panel

THE MINERVAVILLE COLLECTION DISCOVER. RELAX. REFRESH. RENEW. Elm Savannah, Spring, oil on panel

MARY BENTZG IL KER SO N MARYGILKERSON.COM | STUDIO@MARYGILKERSON.COM 803.386.1702

UI /BUJPOBM 1BTUFM 1BJOUJOH &YIJCJUJPO March 2 thru 31 I Monday - Saturday, 9am - 6pm I Sunday, 10am - 5pm Awards Judge: Dinah Worman Jurors: Susan Ogilvie Jeanne Rosier Smith Frederick Somers Show Catalog, with all accepted paintings, online at

Sarah Blumenschein

www.pastelsnm.org

Late Afternoon www.sarahblumenschein.com

Lee McVey Chamisa www.leemcvey.com

125 W. Palace Ave., Santa Fe, NM • 505-501-6555 • www.sorrelsky.com 136

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

BARB JANISCH

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

The Annunciation 11” x 14” Acrylic On Canvas

“Reckless Abandon” Pastel on Archival Support 24 x 18 Available at Illume Gallery of Fine Art (801) 210-2853

janischstudio@aol.com www.barbjanisch.com 7161 France Avenue South, Suite 114

Please see website for blog and workshop infor mation

Minneapolis, MN 55435 612-834-9879

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

www.SchneiderArt.com

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

137

Be a part of something bigger.

KEVIN MACPHERSON

ALVARO CASTAGNET

DAVID A LEFFEL

JOE ANNA ARNETT

In April, the 7th Annual Plein Air Convention & Expo will take place in the art mecca of Santa Fe. 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 advantage of this ideal opportunity to own some of the finest paintings being made today, as well as to meet those who created them.

LEARN MORE AT PLEINAIRCONVENTION.COM

A Day in Port, 12x9 Oil • Available at the OutWest Art Show www.micheleusibelli.com

DAVID TANNER Recent Oil Paintings: Opening May 18

Rising Up, 40x30 Oil • Available at The Russell Auction www.davidmarty.com

THE RUSSELL AUCTION & OUTWEST ART SHOW & SALE

DavidTannerFineArt.com

Great Falls, MT • Heritage Inn, Room #248

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

139

Study with the World’s Top Artists.

Visit today: LiliArtVideo.com 877-867-0324

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

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

141

P

STUDY WITH Cesar SANTOS

Secrets of Figure Painting

with Cesar Santos™

F

all in love with figure painting as you follow along with “The Man Who Conquered the World Through Painting,”

artist Cesar Santos! This in-depth, step-by-step video demonstration takes you through the complete process of painting a figure from a photograph. Caesar shows you which brushes to use and where to use them (he only uses four!). He shares his techniques for mixing realistic skin tones (only two colors are needed!).

SECRETS OF FIGURE PAINTING WITH CESAR SANTOS™, MASTER ARTIST LEGACY SERIES™, STREAMLINE PREMIUM ART VIDEO™, ©/TM STREAMLINE PUBLISHING, INC. 2018.

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.

T

H

THE MASTERS. Kathleen HUDSON

Ryan S. BROWN

We discuss how to light and pose your model, how to create and control color harmony and balance.

We talk about the importance of value and color temperature as well as composition and mood.

Artists will also learn how to think aesthetically and how to design a portrait to go beyond likeness to create a stand alone work of art.

George GALLO

Kathleen Hudson, winner of the 2017 grand prize in the PleinAir Magazine PleinAir Salon, demonstrates the creation of the feel, the air between the painter and the subject, to infuse your painting with atmospheric effects ... what lies between the subject and the painter.

In this video she walks through her thought process and the entire creation of a seascape, from start to finish.

George Gallo’s teachings are based on classic principles of color and design. The basis of all impressionistic painting is to get the three secondary colors of orange, green, and purple to interact.

Order today at StreamlineArtVideo.com or call 561.655.8778

t ea

o

dY

kN

ow

o Bo

To

l Ho

S ur

Don’t worry. you won’t be painting the same old landscapes.

Learn more and sign up at AFRICANPAINTINGSAFARI.COM September 14-23, 2018

144

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

\The

Paston Treasure\

microcosm of the known world February 15–May 27, 2018

This exhibition has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art and Norfolk Museums Service.

Free and open to the public 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven 1 877 BRIT ART britishart.yale.edu @yalebritishart #PastonTreasure

Unknown artist (Dutch School), The Paston Treasure (detail), ca. 1663, oil on canvas, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, UK, courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service

d i r e c t o ry o f a d v e rt i s i n g Alexander Katlan Conservator, Inc. 46 Amato, Stephanie ........................... 48 American Impressionist Society .... 135 American Plains Artists .................. 127 Anderson, Kathy ............................. 44 Banks, Jill......................................... 6 Barber, Chantel Lynn ...................... 127 Bateman, Brian ............................... 37 Bathe, Beth Brownlee ..................... 125 Birdsall, Stephanie .......................... 47 Blessing, Michael & Meagan Abra.. 38 Boccara Arts................................40,41 Booth Western Art Museum ........... 22 Brandsema, Susan .......................... 50 Brazier Gallery................................. 131 BROOKGREEN GARDENS ............... 26 Brown, Anne Blair ........................... 129 Buffalo Bill Art Show ....................... 24 Byrne, Michele ................................ 48 C. M. Russell Auction ...................... 34 California Museum of Fine Art ....... 4 Carmel Art Festival ......................... 141 Cherry, Mary Ann ............................ 38 Cloonan, Linda................................ 122 Coeur d’Alene Art Auction.............. 2 Colorado Dominican Vocation

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

Foundation ...................................... 30 Creighton Block Gallery ................. 13 Crowe, Judy .................................... 130 Delanty, Rick ................................... 46 Desert Caballeros Western Museum 11 Drake, Jason.................................... 123 Etruscan Places .............................. 130 Floyd, Elizabeth............................... 23 Folsom, Kelli M. ............................... 27 Forgotten Coast Cultural Coalition 128 Frame of Reference ........................ 35 Fulmek, Nanci ................................. 135 Fusco Four Marketing ..................... 32 Gilkerson, Mary ............................... 136 Gleim, Lisa ...................................... 124 Greene, Daniel E. ............................ 133 Groesser, Debra Joy ....................... 52 Gyurcsak, Joseph ........................... 128 Heather Lynn Gibson Studio, LLC .. 126 Highland Lakes Creative Arts-Paint the Town-Marble Falls..................... 132 Hunter Studio ................................. 19 Hutt, Lee ......................................... 46 Illume Gallery of Fine Art ................ 17 James, Janell ................................... 37 Janisch Studio ................................ 137

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

Jung, Michelle ................................. 8,9 Koch, Philip ..................................... 33 Kuo, Christina ................................. 18 Larry Cannon Watercolors ............. 126 Lashley, Christine ........................... 124 Lynn, Susan..................................... 144 MacDonald, John ............................ 125 Mangi, Johanne .............................. 50 Manitou Auctions ........................... 5 Marty, David.....................................139 Mary Pettis Galleries ....................... 44 McBride, Kirk................................... 122 Mehta, Lynn .................................... 51 National Sculpture Society ............ 29 Newby, Nedra ................................. 50 Newman, Deborah.......................... 47 Out West Art Show and Sale .......... 36 Pastel Society of New Mexico ........ 136 Paula Holtzclaw Fine Art................. 44 Peabody Essex Museum ................. 31 Ploughe, Susan ............................... 129 Potter, John ..................................... 51 Putnam, Lori.................................... 10 Reiter, Stephanie ............................ 52 RJD Gallery...................................... 21 Ryan Mellody Art ............................ 28

Sanden, John Howard .................... 45 Schlesier, Grace.............................. 49 Schmit, Deb .................................... 37 Schneider, William .......................... 137 Scottsdale Art Auction ................... 148 Seymour, Claudia ........................... 123 Sinclair, Georgette.......................... 51 Situ Lighting.....................................141 Sneary, Richard............................... 144 Sorrel Sky Gallery ........................... 147 South Street Art Gallery ................. 14 Steele, Ben ...................................... 7 Stevens, Laurie A. ........................... 38 Stobart, John .................................. 47 Stratton, Thalia ............................... 52 Tanner, David .................................. 139 Taylor, Jennifer Stottle .................... 131 Terry, David ..................................... 48 The Salmagundi Club & Art Gallery 43 Ukrainetz, Ron & Echo .................... 39 Usibelli, Michele.............................. 139 Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery 42 Vanessa Rothe Fine Art .................. 15 Wagner, Jill Stefani ......................... 133 Yale Center for British Art............... 145

145

C L A S S I C

CHARLES IARROBINO (b. 1952) Figure Painting Still Life 2014, oil on linen mounted on board, 20 x 16 in.

B r a z i e r G a l l e r y, R i c h m o n d

146

FAC Classic Momement Mar/Apr 18 (left page).indd 146

M A R C H / A P R I L

2 0 1 8

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

2/13/18 10:20 AM

Scottsdale Art Auction Saturday, April 7, 2018

1

2

4

5

1 Joseph sharp 20'' x 16'' oil estimate: $70,000 - 100,000 2. Carl rungius 25'' x 30'' oil estimate: $250,000 - 350,000 3. Charles russell 13 ¾'' x 10 ½'' oil estimate: $300,000 - 500,000 4. maynard dixon 25'' x 30'' oil estimate: $50,000 - 75,000 5. Bert g. phillips 24'' x 20'' oil estimate: $100,000 - 150,000 6. e. martin hennings 14'' x 14'' oil estimate: $40,000 - 60,000

auCtioning over 350 Works of important Western, Wildlife and sporting art s a t u r d ay , a p r i l 7 , 2 0 1 8 For more information please call (480) 945-0225 or visit www.scottsdaleartauction.com. Color catalogue available $40.

SA SCOTTSDALE ART AUCTION

SCOTTSDALE ART AUCTION

7176 MAIN STREET • SCOTTSDALE ARIZONA 85251 • www.scottsdaleartauction.com • 480 945-0225 7176 MAIN STREET • SCOTTSDALE ARIZONA 85251 • www.scottsdaleartauction.com • 480 945-0225

3

6