SAM ADOQUEI | EVELYN BEATR ICE LONGMAN | COUPLES | BARGUE ENCOR E | ARC SALON
JUNE 20 21 VOLUME 18 ISSUE 3
JUNE 2021
Larry Cannon ASMA . LPAPA . CPAP . CWA
A Moment in Time: Malibu 16" x 20"
Semi-Finalist Art Renewal Center 15th ARC International Salon Competition
Malibu Thunder CAC Gold Medal Exhibition Pasadena Museum of 16" x 20" California Art
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Yosemite Sky 9" x 12"
Fine Art Watercolors www.cannonwc.com
CAC Gold Medal Exhibition Autry Museum: Los Angeles
Yosemite Renaissance 36 Traveling Exhibition Yosemite Museum Gallery
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), A Bust of a Warrior, c. 1475–80, silverpoint on paper, 11 5/16 x 8 5/16 in. © The Trustees of the British Museum, London
The painter who has no doubt about his own ability will attain very little. When his work succeeds beyond his judgment, the artist acquires nothing. But when his judgment is superior to his work, he will never cease to improve, unless his love of gain interferes and retards his progress. — Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
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DALI HIGA
MY SISTER DASU
48" X 36"
OIL ON CANVAS
CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF FINE ART www.californiamuseumoffineart.com
ONCE IN A BLUE HERON MOON
OIL ON LINEN
30x30
PUBLISHER
JILL BANKS
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
A S S O C I AT E P U B L I S H E R
Capturing Life in Oils
A nne W. Brow n abrown@streamlinepublishing.com 435.772.0504
AWA | WAOW | WSLP
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Peter Tr ippi peter.trippi@gmail.com 9 17.9 6 8 . 4 4 76 MANAGING EDITOR
Br ida Connolly bconnolly @streamlinepublishing.com 702.665.5283 CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Matthias A nderson Kelly Compton Max Gillies David Masello Louise Nicholson Charles Raskob Robinson 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 whitney @streamlinepublishing.com 561.655.8778 P R OJ EC T & D I G I TA L A D M A N AG E R
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Rue du Jour oil 30 x 40 in
JillBanks.com
E D I TO R , F I N E A R T TO DAY
Cher ie Haas chaas@streamlinepublishing.com
Jill@JillBanks.com 703.403.7435 jillbanks1 JillBanksStudio Subscribe and follow for happier news and fresh art Settlers West Summer Show CLWAC @ Salmagundi Club Telluride Plein Air 006
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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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JULIO REYES
“Amber Waters”
Egg Tempera on Canvas
12" x 20"
“Tender Mercies” May 22 - June 13, 2021
© 2021 Arcadia Contemporary
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421 West Broadway New York, NY 10012 (646) 861-3941
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Attention retailers: If you would like to carry Fine Art Connoisseur in your store, please contact Tom Elmo at 561.655.8778. Copyright ©2021 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.
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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Mark Shasha
Wanderlust, 36 x 48”, Oil on Canvas
“Braking for Beauty” Solo Exhibition June 5 – 26, 2021 The Guild of Boston Artists 162 Newbury Street, Boston MA 617.536.7660
MarkShasha.com | 617.816.3851 | mark@markshasha.com
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REMBRANDT AND THE PANDEMIC
We highlight the talents of Yoann Lossel, Bertrand Martin, and Sarah Williams.
072 080 088
By Keith Dixon
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MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW
By Kelly Compton
By Peter Trippi
A TIME FOR TWOSOMES
BARGUE ENCORE: AN ACADEMIC TRADITION REVIVED
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By Max Gillies
By Peter Trippi
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119 120
By Michael J. Pearce
There are at least three great reasons to visit the American West this season.
SAM ADOQUEI’S SEARCH FOR BEAUTY AND MEANING
FIND THE RIGHT FRAME By Matthias Anderson
By Annette Blaugrund
SPRING IS IN THE AIR
THOMAS BLACKSHEAR’S WESTERN NOUVEAU
122 123
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LIGHT AND ENLIGHTENMENT
TRAVELING THROUGH TIME WITH LEN TANTILLO
By David Masello
By Peter Trippi
Duffy Sheridan (b. 1947), Something I Don’t Know (detail), 2019, oil on linen, 22 x 18 in. (overall). For details, please see page 73.
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ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: THREE TO WATCH
A TRULY GLOBAL SALON
ON THE COVER
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ART EVERYWHERE
“WRITE IT LARGE ON THE WALL!”: THE SCULPTORS EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN AND DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH
Discover 22 top-notch projects happening this season.
By Dana Pilson
Fine Art Connoisseur is also available in a digital edition. Please visit fineartconnoisseur.com for details.
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F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Upcoming Highlight: Charles M. Russell, Piegans, 1908, oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 14 1/4 inches
ACCEPTING CONSIGNMENTS The Russell is the premiere fundraising event for the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana, attracting artists, collectors, and patrons from around the country. The auction features important pieces by Charles M. Russell and other historic artists, as TM well as new work by both up-and-coming artists and nationally acclaimed contemporary western artists.
Save the Date • August 20-21, 2021
Auctioneer Troy Black
400 13 th Street North | Great Falls, Montana | (406) 727–8787 | cmrussell.org/the-russell
ryanjensenartwork.com
P U B L I S H E R ’ S
L E T T E R
HOW WILL OUR TIME BE REMEMBERED? T
JOHN HOWARD SANDEN (b. 1935), Publisher B. Eric Rhoads, 2015, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in.
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his March, the Charleston-based digital artist Mike Winkelmann (born in 1981 and known as “Beeple”) sold an NFT (non-fungible token) of his collage artwork for $69 million at Christie’s. According to the auction house, this sale places him “among the top three most valuable living artists.” An NFT is a unique digital file that exists only on a blockchain. The buyer gets limited rights to display the artwork it contains, but in many ways, you’re just buying bragging rights and an asset you may be able to resell. NFT marketing has exploded in the past month and seemingly everyone is offering one, including athletes and musicians. Until last autumn, the most a Beeple print had ever sold for was $100. As a technology, the NFT’s potential is unclear. We may see it evolve into a trading tool for physical art, offering continuing commissions to the initial seller, even if sold multiple times. It might also benefit artists by providing a commission every time their work is sold and resold. In addition, NFTs have the capacity to prevent fraud and offer blockchain documentation. The sudden popularity of NFTs raises an urgent question: how will our time be remembered in art history? Will 2021 be remembered for the gifted artist-craftsman who toiled over her paintings, or for the gifted artist-promoter who created an investment asset that has almost nothing to do with quality? (The 5,000 tiny images inside Beeple’s digital collage are sometimes appalling, and mostly forgettable.) The art of today that history records may well be the art of promotion, of the obsession with owning something important, of being the one who paid the most. Is this any different from buying the world’s most expensive home or jewel? As the rest of us debate the gauntlet Beeple has thrown down, he surely is pleased to have achieved his goal — controversy, which increases values further. M A Y / J U N E
I used to get steamed about the proliferation of such art, but I’ve lightened up and now am actually amused by the gallop of others in that direction. I’m not hurt, not offended, not interested in defending the way things used to be, and certainly not against artists pursuing their own means of expression. Perhaps Beeple will eventually be seen alongside Picasso in significance. Or perhaps the two new coowners of his creation will seek a government bailout because they overpaid for something that did not retain its value or stature. (The art market is a fickle place for investors.) The history I care about is that of the new avant-garde of quality contemporary realism. Today we are seeing thousands of artists learning and employing academic techniques, with many galleries selling the resulting artworks to enthusiastic collectors nationwide. Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur is buoyed by the passion these artists, dealers, and collectors have for realism, both contemporary and historical. We are mindful that, without patrons and encouragement, these artists might be forced to follow distracting trends (like NFTs) to survive, and that could derail realism’s renaissance. I believe that markets always return to support the proven successes of the past, which usually outlive cycles of taste. Quality art will always find a market. Moreover, realist works provide comfort in anxious times like these. Those of us who love realism must stand together. Let’s support one another emotionally and financially so that history will remember our era as the one that preserved and enhanced this living tradition.
B. ERIC RHOADS Chairman/Publisher bericrhoads@gmail.com 561.923.8481 facebook.com/eric.rhoads @ericrhoads 2 0 2 1
F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
I N V I TAT I O N A L A R T E X H I B I T I O N & S A L E ART SALE WEEKEND | JUNE 25 – 26, 2 0 2 1
Sherrie McGraw, Spanish Santo with Grapes and Leaves, Oil, 20'' x 16''
In-person event details, reservations, online catalog and proxy information available at pdw.nationalcowboymuseum.org. On exhibit June 7 – August 8, 2021. 1700 Northeast 63rd Street • Oklahoma City, OK 73111 • (405) 478-2250 • nationalcowboymuseum.org Museum Partners Devon Energy Corporation • E.L. and Thelma Gaylord Foundation Major Support True Foundation Sponsored by
I W i l l L o v e Yo u I n T h e N e x t L i f e
30”x40”
Oil on Canvas
03/2021
LILIYA MUGLIA
FROM MY NEW SERIES ON “ETERNAL LOVE” Study for The Next Life R e d C h a l k o n To n e d P a p e r , 8 ” x 1 0 ”
T A K I N G C O M M I S S I O N S F O R P A I N T I N G S A N D D R A W I N G S FINALIST OF ARC FIFTEENTH SALON
STUDIO # 3 LOCATED AT THE ACADEMY OF REALIST ART | 901 LAWRENCE AVE W | TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA MUGLIA-ART.COM | INFO@MUGLIA-ART.COM | 416-434-9442 |
: MUGLIA.ART |
: LILIYA MUGLIA
AMERICAN T ONALIST S OCIET Y Fostering the Tradition and Art Form of Contemporary American Tonalism
D. LaRue Mahlke
Daniel Ambrose
A Sure Hope, Pastel on Board, 16 x 24 in. www.dlaruemahlke.com
I’m With Her and I’m With Him, Egg Tempera, 12 x 8 in. www.DanielAmbrose.com
John MacDonald
Mary Graham
February Dusk, Oil on Prepared Panel, 16 x 20 in.
Solitary, Oil on Linen Mounted on Board, 18 x 24 in.
www.jmacdonald.com
www.marygraham.com
Visit the 2020 Online Juried Showcase Exhibit at www.AmericanTonalistSociety.com
P U B L I S E H D E I TR O ' SR ’ LS E N T O T E T R E
CONNECTING ACROSS TIME
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most of us must still gaze at each other on glowing screens — the painted results of Neel’s unfiltered encounters feel especially thrilling. Even her still lifes and cityscapes ring true, completely in the moment. If the Met had mounted the Neel retrospective two years ago, I doubt it would have resonated in quite the same way. Last week’s visit reminded me: it’s not the art that changes, it’s we who change. That’s one more reason to keep looking, keep going back to see your favorites — and also the ones you didn’t like last time. You never know when they might connect with who you are now.
ALICE NEEL (1900–1984), Nancy and Olivia, 1967, oil on canvas, 39 x 36 in., collection of Diane and David Goldsmith © Estate of Alice Neel, on view through August 1 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
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
L
ast Sunday I headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, partly to catch up on exhibitions and partly because it was raining. Manhattan has been comparatively sleepy during the pandemic, so I was astonished to find a long line of people waiting patiently to visit the temporary exhibition Alice Neel: People Come First. On view through August 1, this is the first retrospective devoted to Alice Neel (1900–1984) that New Yorkers have seen in 20 years. Its 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors reveal her as one of the 20th century’s most daring painters, as well as a champion of social justice at a time when that wasn’t particularly cool. I personally had not encountered so long a line at the Met since its blockbuster featuring the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen in 2011 — a very different affair. Though I realized some of last Sunday’s pile-up owed to the rain and to current limitations on the number of people who can be admitted safely, my heart was warmed to see everyone appreciating such a deeply humane artist — one whose art has long delighted and puzzled me. Clinging to her idiosyncratic brand of expressionistic realism right through the heyday of abstraction and beyond, Neel made frank portraits — like the one illustrated here — that are both insightful and unsettling. We see anxiety and melancholy, but also a thrilling commitment to engaging with people of all kinds, from professors and nursing mothers to addicts and drag queens. “For me, people come first,” Neel declared in 1950. “I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.” In this year of aching disconnection — when
Patricia A. Griffin Thor
36x60 oil on linen
GriffinGallery.com Artist in Residence May 19-30 Goldenstein @ L’Auberge de Sedona, AZ June-July Gallery Wild, Jackson, WY
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MUSKEGON MUSEUM
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LIFTING THE SKY: ELEVATING THE WORKS OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS MAY 20 – AUGUST 21, 2021 – NATIONAL ONLINE EXHIBITION VIEW THE SHOW WWW.AMERICANWOMENARTISTS.ORG/EXHIBITIONS
P O K EY PA R K SI G NATU R E La Mascarade Bronze • 22” x 11” x 13” • pokeypark.com
K A R I N H U ST Y ASSOCIATE Walk by the Water Oil & Cold Wax Medium • 49” x 39” • karinhustyart.com
B A R B A R A N U S S ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION Sheep May Safely Graze Oil • 24” x 24” • barbaranuss.com
25 Museum Shows in 25 Years
LIFTING THE SKY: ELEVATING THE WORKS OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS MAY 20 – AUGUST 21, 2021 – NATIONAL ONLINE EXHIBITION
G E O R G E N E M C G O N A G L E SI G NATU R E Hawk-Eye Bronze • 20” x 10” x 6.5” • gmcgonaglestudio.com
VA N E S S A R U S CZYK SI G NATU R E Sacred Datura at Sunrise Oil • 30” x 30” studiosoledad.com
L E A H H O P K I N S H E N RY ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION Wonderland Oil • 26” x 20” • leahhopkinshenry.com
25 Museum Shows in 25 Years
CTION
VIEW THE SHOW WWW.AMERICANWOMENARTISTS.ORG/EXHIBITIONS
C A R O L STR O C K WA S S O N SI G NATU R E Winchester Barn Soft Pastel • 26” x 30” • strockwasson.com
B F R E E D ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION In the Company of Spheres Soft Pastel • 19” x 27” • bfreedfinearts.com
K A R E N B U D A N ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION Playing With Black and White Oil • 20” x 16” • karenbudan.com
25 Museum Shows in 25 Years
LIFTING THE SKY: ELEVATING THE WORKS OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS MAY 20 – AUGUST 21, 2021 – NATIONAL ONLINE EXHIBITION
B A R B A R A S C H I L L I N G SI G NATU R E Snow Shadows Oil • 30” x 24” • barbaraschilling.com
SUSAN HE
Garden Par Oil • 30” x 22
L I S A G L E I M SI G NATU R E The Bear & The Bees Pastel on State Maps with Gold and Silver Leaf • 40” x 30” • lisagleimfineart.com
DYA N A H E S S O N MASTE R-SI G NATU R E Four Generations to Come, Milkweed and Moth, White Mountains, AZ Oil • 50” x 40” • dyanahesson.com
S A N DY D E
Reflecting o Watercolor
25 Museum Shows in 25 Years
VIEW THE SHOW WWW.AMERICANWOMENARTISTS.ORG/EXHIBITIONS
S U S A N H E L E N STR O K ASSOCIATE Garden Party Oil • 30” x 22” • susanhelenstrok.com
D E B B I E K O R B E L ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION Lovers Sculpture • 42”x 41”x 34” • debbiekorbel.com
S A N DY D E L E H A NT Y SI G NATU R E Reflecting on the Yuba River Watercolor • 24”x18” • sandydelehanty.com
25 Museum Shows in 25 Years
LIFTING THE SKY: ELEVATING THE WORKS OF AMERICAN WOMEN ARTISTS MAY 20 – AUGUST 21, 2021 – NATIONAL ONLINE EXHIBITION
L I N D A S H O RT ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION
L O U I S E S O L E C K I W E I R ASSOCIATE
Spirit in the Sky Scratchboard • 36” x 24” • lindashort.com
Claudia With a Scarf Polymer Gypsum with Oil • 19.5” x 12” x 13” • louisesoleckiweir.com
25 Museum Shows in 25 Years
DIANA
Carousel Bronze •
VIEW THE SHOW WWW.AMERICANWOMENARTISTS.ORG/EXHIBITIONS
LYN ETTE C O O K ASSOCIATE WITH DISTI NCTION Upward and Onward Acrylic • 60” x 30” • lynetteinthestudio.com
D I A N A R E UTE R-T W I N I N G MASTE R-SI G NATU R E Carousel Rabbits Bronze • 72” x 61” x 27” • bronzed.net
JOIN US
Join American Women Artists as we continue our 25 in 25 Initiative with two Museum Shows in 2022! Visit www.americanwomenartists.org for more information.
I think of each painting as a poem, inspired by the space between the wind and the water, the fauna and the flora.
shar coulson
Finding Beauty In the Space Between the Known and Unknown
sharcoulson.com | Instagram: shar_coulson
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BEST OF AMERICA SMALL WORKS NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION
Barbara Nuss I River Blues I 14x14 in I oil I $1900 www.barbaranuss.com Cynthia Feustel I Secret Keeper 16x14 in I oil I $2400 www.feustelfineart.com
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Deborah R Hill Loosing the Mamba 6x12 i n I oil I $750 www.deborahrhillpaintings.com
Sasha Phillips I July Sunshine I 16x12 i n I oil I $2500 www.artwellnessadvocates.com
NATIONAL OIL AND ACRYLIC PAINTERS' SOCIETY
www.noaps.org
PAINTINGS ON DISPLAY
MAY 7-JUNE 3
Margret Short I Mutual Promise
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8x10 in oil $2900 www.margretshort.com
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Carol Amos Prairie Princess 16x12 in oil $2000
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Leonard Mizerek Deadrise at Dusk 12x16 in oil $2500
Steve Creighton Bottle, Apples and Rose 12x9 in oil $800 www.stevecreightonart.com
www.carolamos.com
www.LeonardMizerek.com
--------PRINCIPLE GALLERY-------(843) 727-4500 12s Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29401
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BEST OF AMERICA SMALL WORKS NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION
Christine Drewyer I Golden Glimmer I 14x18 in I oil I $2800 www.christinedrewyer.com
Linda Besse I Old Glory
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15x16 in oil $2200 www.besseart.com
James Wolford I Waiting Skiffs I 16x24 in I oil I $3800
Tom Mostad I Descending I 24x18 in I oil I $2500
wwwJameswolford.com
www.mostadfineart.com
NATIONAL OIL AND ACRYLIC PAINTERS' SOCIETY
www.noaps.org
PAINTINGS ON DISPLAY
MAY 7-JUNE 3
Jing Zhao
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Playing Poker on the Beach I 9x12 in I oil I $690
www�ingzhaoart.com
Karen Budan I Time and Money
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20x16 in o il $3200 www.karenbudan.com
Do nna Lewinter I Western River I 24x36 in I o il I $6500
Lee Alban
www.donnalewinter.com
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There Is No Ceiling I 16x12 in I oil I $1500
www.leealban.com
--------PRINCIPLE GALLERY-------(843) 727-4500 12s Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29401
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BEST OF AMERICA SMALL WORKS NATIONAL JURIED EXHIBITION
Jon Bandish Coast of Carolina
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28x40 in oil
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$2000 wwwJonbandishart.com
Alexander Masyk Girl with Apple 18x14 in oil $2500 www.alexander.masyk.com
Jessica Bianco Above the Trees 38x62 cm I oil
$750
www.BiancoFineArt.com
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Jose Pardo Celestial 35 in oil $5000 www.pardostudio.us
NATIONAL OIL AND ACRYLIC PAINTERS' SOCIETY
www.noaps.org
PAINTINGS ON DISPLAY
MAY 7-JUNE 3
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Jim E. Miller Busted 16x20 in acrylic $2700 wwwJimemillerart.com
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Becca Drach Bluebells 40x30 in oil $4800 www.beccasfineart.com
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Gerard Erley Heading to Sea 18x24 in oil $3800
Mark Hunter I The Ocean Soothes My Soul 16x12 in oil
www.gerarderley.com
$1200 www.markhunterfineart.com
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--------PRINCIPLE GALLERY-------(843) 727-4500 12s Meeting Street Charleston, SC 29401
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40th | Auction & Quick Draw SEPTEMBER 13 th–18th • 2021 in Cody, WY — Featuring Over 100 Outstanding Western Artists —
MICHAEL BLESSING
JOSHUA TOBEY
TY BARHAUG
Auction to be Live-Streamed and In-Person This Year! PART OF
SANTIAGO MICHALEK
MARK EBERHARD
Join Us for the Many Educational Opportunities:
Painting on Porch • Artist Tours • Lectures & Great Cody Hospitality
888.598.8119 | www.buffalobillartshow.com
BRAD TEARE
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eep in the Rocky Mountains, a stream flows by towering cottonwoods, that shift through a spectrum of yellows and reds. Painting from plein air sketches, The fleeting colors are captured in thicks strokes of vibrating color. color.
Big Cottonwood Canyon, 30” x 30”, oil on canas
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n the banks of the Bear River, the meandering current whispers as cottonwoods softly sway against an azure sky. In the distance, birds and insects trill as the scent of shoreline vegetation wafts on the warm summer breeze.
BRAD TEARE began his career as a woodcut illustrator in New York City. He eventually settled in a small village along the Hudson River. His first landscapes were color woodcuts. In 1995, he switched to oil paints and moved to a valley in the mountains of Utah to pursue landscape painting full-time. He developed a unique style using thickened paint and palette knives.
Palace Ave. Gallery • 123 West Palace Avenue Santa Fe, NM 87501 • 505.986.0440 info@manitougalleries.com
Brad Teare painting on location. Above: On the Bear River, oil, 34 x 34”
Michael Obermeyer
Kim Lordier
Carmel Bay Sunset
Lupine Light
8x16 Oil
24x30 Pastel
Rieser Fine Art
Historical and Contemporary California and American Fine Art www.rieserfineart.com (831) 620-0530 Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA
BOULDER
COLORADO
BEAUTIFUL A
virtual art sale featuring 130 artists from
all 50 states, celebrating the greatness and beauty of our nation.
20% of all sales donated to Feeding America®
Proudly launching Memorial Day 2021 To view the show and purchase artwork please call or email www.marywilliamsfinearts.com (303) 938-1588 | info@marywilliamsfinearts.com
ANN LARSEN Troy, New York Troy Alley, Oil, 12 x 12
CHRISTINE DREWYER Annapolis, Maryland Around the Bend, Oil, 16 x 20
BARBARA NUSS Annapolis, Maryland Old Town Shadows, Oil on Linen, 14 x 18
NANCY HALEY Golden, CO Cowgirl Up, Oil on Panel, 11 x 14
ANDY ECCLESHALL Edmonds, WA In the Gloaming (When all’s said and done), 24 x 36, Oil on Canvas NANCY WYLIE Arvada, CO Yea, Though I Walk, California Redwoods, Pastel, 24 x 12
SUSAN HEDIGER MATTESON La Plata Mountains, Colorado Summer Aspen, Oil on Linen, 16 x 7.25
LISA CUNNINGHAM Waverly, Pennsylvania Weathered Spring Hills, Pastel, 18 x 24
30th Annual National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
KATHY ANDERSON OPAM Redding, Connecticut
Spring with Tulips and Daffodils, 16 x 20 in., oil on linen To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.kathyandersonstudio.com Represented by Legacy Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ; Susan Powell Fine Art, Madison, CT; Horton Hayes Fine Art, Charleston, SC
PAULA HOLTZCLAW OPA Waxhaw, North Carolina
Evening Serenade, 11 x 14 in., oil on linen panel To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.paulabholtzclawfineart.com Represented by Cheryl Newby Gallery, Pawleys Island, SC; Highlands Art Gallery, Lambertville, NJ; Hughes Gallery, Boca Grande, FL
California Center for the Arts, Escondido • April 9–May 16, 2021 • www.oilpaintersofamerica.com
BRIAN KEELER Ithaca, New York
Angular Light Over Ithaca, NY, 26 x 30 in., oil on linen To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.northstarartgallery.com Represented by North Star Art Gallery, Ithaca, NY; Argosy Gallery, Bar Harbor, ME; West End Galleries, Corning, NY
JILL STEFANI WAGNER PSA-MP IAPS/MC Saline, Michigan
Vega de Carmona Shacks, 9 x 12 in., oil on linen panel To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.jillwagnerart.com Represented by Tvedten Fine Art, Harbor Springs, MI; J. Petter Galleries, Douglas, MI; Castle Gallery, Fort Wayne, IN
CHUCK LARIVEY OPA
Richmond, Virginia
Breathless, 20 x 20 in., oil on linen To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.chucklarivey.com Represented by Crossroads Art Center, Richmond, VA; Richard Stravitz Sculpture & Fine Art, Virginia Beach, VA; Rich Timmons Fine Art & Studio, Doylestown, PA
30th Annual National Juried Exhibition of Traditional Oils
KAY CRAIN Defiance, Missouri
A Quiet Stream, 10 x 10 in., oil on linen panel To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.kaycrain.com
SUSAN HOTARD OPA The Woodlands, Texas
Asian Preciousness, 16 x 20 in., oil on linen To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.susanhotardartist.com Represented by Gallery 330, Fredericksburg, TX
JUDITH NENTWIG
JON BRADHAM
Vermont Sun, 9 x 12 in., oil on linen To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.judithnentwig.com
Crystal Lake Snow Melt, 30 x 40 in., oil on canvas To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.jonbradham.com Gallery inquiries welcome
Lower Gwynedd, Pennsylvania
Bonney Lake, Washington
B
To purchase, pleas
Represented by Eis Solv
California Center for the Arts, Escondido • April 9–May 16, 2021 • www.oilpaintersofamerica.com
THALIA STRATTON
OPA
San Francisco, California
Le Pigonett, 30 x 24 in., oil on canvas To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.thaliastratton.com Represented by New Masters Gallery, Carmel, CA; Howard/Mandville Gallery, Woodinville, WA; Eminent Design, Palm Springs, CA
BARRON POSTMUS West Hills, California
The Studio, 16 x 12 in., oil To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.barronpostmusart.com Represented by Eisele Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; Dutch Art Gallery, Dallas, TX; Solvang Antiques Fine Art Gallery, Solvang, CA
JOHN BUXTON
Allison Park, Pennsylvania
At First Light, 10 x 24 in., oil on linen To purchase, please call 760.839.4175 or visit www.artcenter.org/museum www.buxtonart.com Represented by Lord Nelson’s Gallery, Gettysburg, PA
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists
JIM MCVICKER Loleta, California
Red Rhododendrons, 60 x 54 in., oil on linen Still Life, 3rd Place mcvickerpaints@gmail.com | www.jimmcvickerpaints.com Visit website for gallery representation (Additional 15th ARC Salon Awards Received: Plein Air, 3rd Place; Plein Air, 2 Honorable Mentions; Other Awards, FWSD Award) The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists
NIK ANIKIS
Sevnica, Slovenia Curse of Triton, 51 x 51 in., oil on canvas Imaginative Realism; Figurative, ARC Staff Award info@anikis.com | 00 38 640476266 | www.anikis.com Gallery inquiries welcome (Additional 15th ARC Salon Awards Received: Animals, Finalist | Figurative, Semi-Finalist | Plein Air, Semi-Finalist)
SHAHNEZ VAN DE SLIJKE Marbella, Spain
The Crown, 90 x 70 cm., soft dry pastel on Pastelmat paper Portraiture, Semi Finalist shahnezvds@gmail.com | 00 34 663948404 | www.shahnezvds.com Gallery inquiries welcome The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists
CAROLYN C.S. KLEINBERGER St.Paul, Minnesota
Umbrellas, Walking Sticks and a Rabbit 16 x 16 in., oil on canvas Still Life, Semi-Finalist ccskartist@gmail.com 651.341.7248 www.carolynkleinberger.com Represented by Fine Art Advocates, Eden Prairie, MN, advocateforartists@gmail.com
EDI MATSUMOTO Carmel, California
Survivor 2020, 30 x 40 in., oil on canvas Portraiture, Semi-Finalist edi@edimatsumoto.com 831.596.5157 www.edimatsumoto.com Represented by Edi Matsumoto Fine Art, Carmel, CA
LARRY CANNON
Santa Clarita, California
A Moment in Time: Malibu, 16 x 20 in., watercolor on paper Landscape, Semi-Finalist cdgplan@pacbell.net 661.367.4886 www.cannonwc.com Gallery inquiries welcome
JESS LE CLERC
Queensland, Australia Shadow & Bloom, 76 x 102 cm, oil on canvas Figurative, Finalist
hello@jess.art www.jess.art Gallery inquiries welcome
The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists ANA SCHMIDT Bilbao, Spain
Bad Seeds, 63 3/4 x 44 4/5 in., acrylic on Belgian linen Landscape, 2nd Place schmidtana.com@gmail.com www.schmidtana.com
JULIANNE JONKER Apple Valley, Minnesota
Dr. Ndely, 24 x 24 in., encaustic wax on birch panel Portraiture, Semi-Finalist juliannejonker@me.com | 952.891.2286 www.juliannejonker.com
Represented by JuliAnne Jonker Fine Art, Apple Valley, MN; 33 Contemporary Gallery, Chicago, IL; Grande Gallery, Edina, MN
BARBARA BRAMHAM Rohnert Park, California
Waldrapp Ibis, 12 x 24 in., oil on canvas Animals, Semi-Finalist
barbara.bramham.artist@gmail.com | 707.665.0377 | www.bbramham.artspan.com Gallery inquiries welcome
ALESSANDRA MARRUCCHI Florence, Italy
Two Self-portraits and a Lot of Life in the Middle, 37 1/2 x 17 3/4 in., oil on linen canvas Portraiture; Figurative, Semi-Finalist The Contemporary, 15 3/4 x 11 4/5 in., oil on canvas board Portraiture, Semi-Finalist alessandramarrucchi@gmail.com www.alessandramarrucchi.com
RAY HASSARD Cincinnati, Ohio
Into the Light, 12 x 16 in., pastel Landscape, Finalist ray@rayhassard.com 513.941.1116 www.rayhassard.com Represented by Cincinnati Art Galleries, Cincinnati, OH; Oxford Gallery, Rochester, NY
The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists MARY K. WEST
Guadalupe, California
The Pastry Shelf, 24 x 18 in., oil on panel Still Life, Finalist mrykywest@yahoo.com 828.777.5032 www.marykaywest.artspan.com
Represented by Classic Art Gallery, Carmel, CA; Portico Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA; Solvang Antiques, Solvang, CA
KAREN BUDAN Scottsdale, Arizona
Playing with Black and White, 20 x 16 in., oil on panel Still Life, Finalist karen@karenbudan.com | www.karenbudan.com Represented by Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK; ArtQwest Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ
KIM DIMENT
Grayling, Michigan
Spring Forward, Fall Back, 28 x 48 in., acrylic Animals, Finalist
kimdiment@yahoo.com | 989.344.1843 | www.kimdiment.com
Represented by Main Branch Gallery, Grayling, MI; Rowe Gallery, Sedona, AZ
CHELSIE MURFEE Ozark, Missouri
Cross the River, 44 x 48 in., graphite and charcoal on paper Drawing, Finalist
cnmurfee@gmail.com | www.simplychels.com
TRACY FREIN Chicago, Illinois
Waiting on My Rebirth, 24 x 16 in., colored pencil Figurative; Drawing, Finalist tracyfrein@gmail.com 773.320.6267 www.tfrein.artspan.com
DIANA KIRKPATRICK Aiken, South Carolina
Winter in Maine, 24 x 20 in., sanded charcoal Drawing, Finalist zelda70@comcast.net 603.380.2266 www.dianakirkpatrick.com
The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists
JOHN SHELTON Atlanta, Georgia
Spirit of the Fathers, 60 x 84 in., oil on canvas Landscape, Semi-Finalist fineart@johnshelton.org 404.259.9020 www.johnshelton.org Represented by John Shelton American Art, Grantville, GA
DANIELA WERNECK Houston, Texas
The Great Kiskadee, 22 x 30 in., watercolor on Aquabord Imaginative Realism, Semi-Finalist danielawerneck@live.com | www.danielawerneck.com Represented by RJD Gallery, Romeo, MI
SARAH WEIZHEN XU New York, New York
The Apache Warrior Raven, 43 x 33 in., oil on linen Fully From Life, Finalist sarahweizhen@gmail.com | 315.439.3083 www.sarahweizhenxu.com
Represented by Lovetts Gallery, Tulsa, OK
JOHANNE MANGI
North Haven, Connecticut
Kawoni, 11 x 14 in., oil on linen panel Animals, Semi-Finalist mangifineart@johannemangi.com 203.215.5255 www.johannemangi.com Represented by West Wind Fine Art, Walpole, NH
KATE MCGRAW Worton, Maryland
Spring Morning, 11 x 14, oil on linen Plein Air, Semi-Finalist kitkatje2@gmail.com www.kitkatje.portfoliobox.net
JOYCE LEE
Vienna, Virginia
Confession of Love, 30 x 40 in., oil on canvas Imaginative Realism; Still Life, Semi-Finalist
joyceleeart@gmail.com | 571.236.8633 | www.joyceleeart.com Gallery inquiries welcome
The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
15th International ARC Salon Competition Finalists & Semi-Finalists
KATHLEEN J. KEATING Edgewood, New Mexico
Unbreakable Bond, 26 x 20 in., oil Animals, Semi-Finalist
art@kjkeating.com | 505.331.2466 | www.kjkeating.com
KARI VISSCHER
Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
Mentor, 12 x 9 in., oil on canvas Figurative, Semi-Finalist
karivisschermd@gmail.com | www.karivisscher.com
DON MAITZ
Sarasota, Florida
Blackbeard’s Delight, 24 x 18 in., oil on linen Imaginative Realism; Semi-Finalist donmaitz@paravia.com | www.paravia.com
EUGENIA SHAPIRO
NANCY HINES
Girl from Acireale, 24 x 18 in., oil on canvas Figurative, Semi-Finalist
All These Years, 36 x 30 in., oil on canvas Figurative, Honorable Mention
Cypress, Texas
Los Angeles, California
936.755.4858 | www.nancyhines.com
eugeniashapiro@gmail.com | www.eugeniashapiroart.com Visit website for gallery representation
LUBA STOLPER
Santa Rosa, California
Abalone Shell, 12 x 19 in., oil on canvas Still Life, Finalist
lubov1959@sbcglobal.net | 707.799.0756 | www.lubastolper.com Visit website for gallery representation
The Art Renewal Center received 4,941 entries from 83 countries for the 15th International ARC Salon Competition. Visit artrenewal.org for details.
THE WORLD’S FIRST GLOBAL ONLINE PASTEL CONFERENCE
AUGUST 19-21, 2021
(MORE ARTISTS TO BE ADDED SOON) Hosted by Plein Air magazine publisher Eric Rhoads
Attendance is limited! Sign up today. PastelLive.com
There is a lot of superb art being made these days. This column shines light on a trio of gifted individuals. YOANN LOSSEL (b. 1985) is a French artist re-imagining the highly visual worlds of Roman and Greek mythology, Celtic folklore, and medieval romance in graphite, oil, and gold leaf. His large-scale, otherworldly scenes resonate like stills from an epic film — forms of time-intensive art that rarely emerge from someone of his generation. Although Lossel depicts fairytales and legends, he actually does not have to go far afield for inspiration. Living in the Brocéliande forest of Brittany, he is surrounded by enchanted woodland, with wide-open spaces ideal for roaming and dreaming. An avid reader, Lossel has assembled an extensive library of classic literature and art history books — including a first-edition collection of Golden Age of Illustration masters — that is at his fingertips in the studio, while his greatest muse, his wife, Psyché, shares his home. Her Pre-Raphaelite beauty, even temperament, and independent artistic endeavors are sources of endless inspiration for him. Psyché is the subject of one of Lossel’s most compelling paintings to date, The Rise. Pictured among ancient ruins, she stands on the precipice of what appears to be a fall. But the artist has imagined her from another angle. With gossamer angel wings and shards of gold cutting through the shadows surrounding her, she becomes a symbol of light and love. “When I first conceived this painting,” Lossel explains, “I named it The Fall, referring to some books I was pondering at the time: Nietzsche’s The Joyful Wisdom and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and also Alain Damasio’s The Wind Walkers. I contacted a model in order to create studies from life, and she perfectly embodied this Fall concept. I knew she would feed the feeling I wanted to create. We met for The Fall and we fell … in love. I decided to rename the painting The Rise to represent her. I dedicate it to Psyché, my model, my muse, and my love.” Over the last year, Lossel has been pursuing a Kickstarter campaign for a book titled Forgotten Gods: The Art of Yoann Lossel. Having achieved his fundraising goal, the artist is devoting the rest of 2021 to creating and publishing that book and will resume exhibiting next year.
YOANN LOSSEL (b. 1985), The Rise, 2017, graphite, 24-karat gold, and silver leaf on paper, 27 1/2 x 20 in., collection of the Art Renewal Center, Port Reading, New Jersey
LOSSEL is self-represented. F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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SARAH WILLIAMS (b. 1984), Eaton Street, 2021, oil on board, 18 x 18 in., George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles
SARAH WILLIAMS (b. 1984)’s latest body of work represents a homecoming of sorts. Having grown up in a Midwestern farm town that made a lasting and positive impression on her, Williams has spent her career thus far exploring the structures of the Midwest and how they symbolize identity. At various times she has had to leave her home region — to earn an M.F.A. degree at the University of North Texas or most recently for a residency in Key West — and now realizes it is the returns that help her see such familiar surroundings with fresh eyes. “These paintings unknowingly started as a way to deal with my homesickness when I moved to Texas to pursue my M.F.A.,” Williams says. “Although I eventually took a job back in my home region, I am realizing that I’ll never be home again in many ways. It’s the distance that allows me to really see my hometown in a deeper way. My pride and passion for the rural Midwest remain, but now they come through my paintings from somewhat of a visitor’s perspective. I believe embedding myself in other environments is the next step in expanding my work. By trying to understand other rural regions in America — their landscapes, layouts, and structures — I can better see what makes the Midwest unique and ‘home’ for me.”
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Eaton Street was painted in this spirit. Williams has long been interested in how the play of light on surfaces, particularly in nightscapes of her hometown, gives familiar yet unremarkable buildings a sense of interest. By painting these scenes in the dark, she is able to extract extraneous detail and focus on the essence of a place. During her residency in Florida, Williams took that approach with an isolated backstreet bungalow, hidden by palm trees and illuminated only by some neon lights. At once eerie and intriguing, Eaton Street piques our interest and begs comparison with similar structures we might have seen near home, on vacation, or in movies. Williams is currently an associate professor of painting and drawing at Missouri State University in Springfield, and her art can be found in several museum and private collections nationally and internationally. Her Southeast of Home solo exhibition featuring works from the Florida residency is on view at George Billis Gallery’s Los Angeles location until May 8. WILLIAMS is represented by George Billis Gallery (Los Angeles and New York City), Talley Dunn Gallery (Dallas), Moody Gallery (Houston), and Andrea Schwartz Gallery (San Francisco).
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BERTRAND MARTIN (b. 1975) arrived at his current oil-painting practice by taking a roundabout yet wholly purposeful path. Growing up in Burgundy, this French artist was equally passionate about the arts and sciences, so he studied music, engineering, drawing, and photography simultaneously. After graduating with a degree in engineering, he exhibited his drawings, but the reception was not what he anticipated, so he decided to live in Taiwan and nearby countries and study their ancient cultures and languages. Upon returning to France, Martin earned a Master’s degree in business administration and began a career in senior management. But as his 40th birthday approached, he could ignore the pull of his artistic calling no longer. Martin threw himself headlong into training in drawing and watercolor, which he had first learned from his watercolorist grandfather. Eventually his watercolors started earning him awards, shows, and articles, but then a Rembrandt exhibition in Paris spurred him to learn oil painting. Several more years of practice ensued, and finally Martin arrived at a style authentic to him, one that incorporates the expressive qualities of both watercolor and oil and that reflects his multi-dimensional interests. Today, based in Toulouse, Martin uses oils to paint pensive and melancholic faces, as it is the meditative state that most inspires him as an artist. “Melancholy is the happiness of being sad,” he declares, quoting Victor Hugo. Martin pays particularly close attention to an
individual’s most expressive features: “Facial emotion is mainly conveyed through the eyes and mouth. I use a technique alternating precise brushstrokes and random blurring that lends the face softness, fragility, and melancholy. Then I tackle the background by scratching, scraping, and scrubbing. Motifs form, deform, appear, disappear, merge, and fade away on the grain of the canvas.” In effect, the demurely painted realistic faces that emerge from Martin’s fractured, fragmented abstraction set up a symbolic relationship between volume and space, between softness and sharpness. This juxtaposition is demonstrated well by his painting Xiao-Chun. “I was moved by Xiao-Chun’s thoughtful expression and mixture of rebelliousness, wisdom, and innocence,” Martin says of this young FrenchChinese girl. “The contrast between the fragile, beautiful face and the deconstructed, shabby, harsh surroundings is what I’m after, as they are metaphors for life: yin and yang, softness and roughness, rest and violence. Everything is about mixing opposites and extremes, confronting the different realities of our world. No matter how chaotic everything seems, beauty is still there.” MARTIN is represented by two Parisian galleries (Frédéric Got and Europia) and by Sakah Gallery (Toulouse). His next solo show opens at Europia on June 3.
BERTRAND MARTIN (b. 1975), Xiao-Chun, 2020, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in., Galerie Frédéric Got, Paris
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B Y K E L LY C O M P T O N
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
A TRULY GLOBAL SALON
F
ounded in 1999 by the New Jersey collectors Fred, Sherry, and Kara Lysandra Ross with several of their fellow scholars, the Art Renewal Center (ARC) is a nonprofit educational foundation that encourages the re-emergence of traditional art and training techniques. The fruits of its labors are becoming ever more apparent as time goes by. ARC is probably best known to readers of Fine Art Connoisseur for its impressive website (artrenewal.org), which contains more than 80,000 high-resolution images by Old Master, 19th-century, and early-20th-century artists, along with artist biographies and related articles. The site has evolved into an invaluable reference for anyone interested in historical realism. ARC is equally committed to bringing this rich heritage up to date by highlighting the booming field of contemporary realism. In addition to its ever-growing roster of recommended ateliers, its registry and 5,000image gallery of “Living Master” artists, and its generous scholarship program for atelier students, ARC organizes the ever more popular International ARC Salon Competition online. Launched in 2004, the Salon concluded its 15th edition earlier this year when ARC announced the latest award winners, honorable mentions, and finalists. Cochair and chief operating officer Kara Lysandra Ross reports that the jurors found it difficult to winnow down
EVGENIY MONAHOV (b. 1974), Girl with a Gun, 2019, oil and tempera on canvas, 39 1/4 x 35 1/4 in., William Bouguereau Award ($3,000) and ARC Purchase Award ($10,000)
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(ABOVE) ROBERT LIBERACE (b. 1967), Spartan, 2020, oil on canvas, 48 x 30 in., Best in Show ($25,000) and ARC Purchase Award ($22,000)
(ABOVE RIGHT) DUFFY
SHERIDAN (b. 1947), Something I Don’t Know, 2019, oil on linen, 22 x 18 in., First Place (Figurative), $2,500
(RIGHT) JULIE BECK (b. 1981), The Hundredth Monkey, 2019, oil
on canvas panel, 23 x 21 in., First Place (Still Life), $2,500
to the approximately 1,155 finalist works — roughly 23 percent of the 4,941 originally submitted from 83 countries. (Submissions surged by 14 percent over the previous edition.) Over 40 jurors and 14 organizations participated in the competition and 208 awards and honorable mentions have been bestowed, including ARC purchase awards for 11 works worth more than $140,000. In addition to the two top prizes (Best in Show and the William Bouguereau Award), the jury awarded first, second, and third place prizes in each of 11 categories: figurative, imaginative realism, still life, portraiture, landscape, sculpture, drawing, plein air, animals, “fully from life,” and work made by teens. These categories encompassed numerous honorable mentions and finalists. A host of special awards were also given, including People’s Choice, Most Ambitious Work, Best Nude, Best Social Commentary, Best Trompe l’Oeil, Best Pastel, and Best Watercolor. The Fine Art Connoisseur Award went to Alla Bartoshchuk, who will be highlighted in a future issue of this magazine, and the very F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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first Figurative Art Convention & Expo (FACE) Award went to sculptor Bart Janssen, whose registration for the next edition of FACE will be underwritten by this magazine’s owner, Streamline Publishing. To make the project more visible to the public, ARC has coordinated multiple exhibition opportunities highlighting winning artworks. This summer (July 16–26), a large number will be seen and
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ARANTZA SESTAYO (b. 1964), Seven Hearts, 2020, oil on canvas, 33 1/2 x 24 in., First Place (Imaginative Realism), $2,500, and FWSD Award
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GAVIN GLAKAS (b. 1975), An Appointment in Siena, 2019, oil on panel, 24 x 16 in., First Place (Landscape), $2,500
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(ABOVE) SHUANG LIU (b. 1981), Maria Antonia in MEAM Art Museum, 2020, oil on canvas, 31 1/4 x 15 1/2 in., First Place (Portraiture), $2,500
(TOP RIGHT) CÉSAR ORRICO
(b. 1984), Fauno, 2018, bronze, 30 1/4 x 24 3/4 x 16 in., First Place (Sculpture), $2,500 (RIGHT) ANNE GOLDMAN (b. 2003), Mother and Daughter, 2020, mixed media, 18 x 24 in., First Place (Teens), $2,500
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(ABOVE) MARIO JAVORAN (b. 1994), Mediterraneo, 2020, charcoal pencil on paper, 79 1/4 x 172 in., First Place (Drawing), $2,500
(BELOW) KYLE MA (b. 2000), Sunlit Pastures,
2020, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., First Place (Animals), $2,500
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ALLA BARTOSHCHUK (b. 1988), Reflections, 2020, oil on ACM panel, 20 x 14 in., Fine Art Connoisseur Award
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(ABOVE) TIM KELLY (b. 1964), Welcome to Manayunk, 2018, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in., First Place (Plein Air), $2,500
(TOP RIGHT) EIRIK ARNESEN (b. 1990), Empyrean,
2019, finished clay, 78 1/2 x 70 3/4 x 19 1/2 in., First Place (Fully from Life), $2,500, and Honorable Mention (Sculpture)
(RIGHT) BART JANSSEN (b. 1960), The Girl from Cape
Verde, 2020, bronze, 18 1/2 x 13 3/4 in., Figurative Art Convention & Expo (FACE) Award
available for sale at Sotheby’s in New York City. ARC has also extended its partnership with Fashion Week San Diego (FWSD) for a third year, through which FWSD designers will create original couture outfits and “looks” inspired by nine artworks. (These will appear at Sotheby’s, too.) More winning artworks will appear at Barcelona’s Museu Europeu d’Art Modern (MEAM) from October 8 through December 12. (On opening day there, a joint awards ceremony will honor winners from the Salon and MEAM’s Figurativas show of paintings and sculpture, which will run concurrently.) MEAM has already purchased a sculpture from the Salon, Albert Kozak’s Behold the Man — Eva. The Salon’s impact is being felt in still other ways. Utah’s Springville Museum of Art has presented an award to Lis Pardoe’s painting The Space Between, and will devote an entire gallery wall to her recent works for an extended period. Finally, Rehs Contemporary (New York City) will mount a selling exhibition of works by eight Salon finalists: Jesús Inglés, Alexandra Klimas, Bruce Lawes, Marina Marina, Roman Pankov, Annie Robinson, Arantza Sestayo, and Anne-Marie Zanetti. Entries for the next edition of the ARC Salon are being accepted from November 1, 2021 through February 16, 2022. Thanks to the Internet’s flexibility, anyone can submit an entry at any hour, day or night. This is a truly global enterprise, one made possible by the Internet, but made real by the dedication of the ARC team. Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur congratulates them, and indeed all of the participating artists. Information: The Salon publication can be ordered, and more exhibitionrelated event details found, at arcsalon.org, where all winners and finalists can be seen as high-resolution scans. KELLY COMPTON 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
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s
BY MAX GILLIES
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
A TIME FOR
TWOSOMES M
any good things come in pairs, including human beings. Though being on your own is absolutely fine, many folks prefer to be part of a couple. That relationship is often romantic, but not necessarily, nor does it necessarily remain so throughout. Moreover, there are plenty of friends, siblings (especially twins), dance duos, and work colleagues who thrive in couple relationships that have no hint of romance at all. And this is not even including animals, who often pair off for various reasons. Artists have long been intrigued by couples not only for their narrative potential (think Romeo and Juliet), but also because the body language of people who are just that comfortable with each other differs noticeably from other pairs’. As inveterate observers, artists get interested when they discern that distinction, and so we are glad to illustrate here an array of recent images revealing the almost infinite possibilities this timeless motif can evoke.
BURTON SILVERMAN (b. 1928), Park Bench, 2004, oil on linen, 32 x 50 in., private collection
MAX GILLIES is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JULIE BELL (b. 1958), You and Me, 2015, oil on wood, 42 x 35 in., American Legacy Fine Arts (Pasadena)
STEPHANIE DESHPANDE (b. 1975), Conversations,
2019, oil on linen, 30 x 24 in., available through the artist
BRENDA BOYLAN (b. 1962), A Lite
Lunch, 2016, pastel on paper, 9 x 12 in., Illume Gallery of Fine Art (St. George, Utah)
SARA
GALLAGHER (b. 1990), Boundaries, 2020, graphite on paper, 4 x 6 in., private collection DAVID TANNER (b. 1969), On the Mend, 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 in., private collection
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(LEFT) MATTHEW BIRD (b. 1977), Hidden Kiss, 2017, watercolor on paper on ACM panel, 30 x 14 in., available through the artist
(TOP)
AIDA GARRITY (b. 1957), At the Museum, 2017, oil on linen, 24 x 18 in., available through the artist
(ABOVE) JAQ GRANTFORD (b. 1967),
Sisters, 2019, oil on canvas, 36 1/4 x 36 1/4 in., private collection
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(LEFT)
AARON
HAZEL
(b. 1984), Forward, 2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in., Frame of Reference Fine Art (Whitefish, Montana)
(RIGHT)
ALEXANDRA
MANUKYAN
(b.
1963),
Drift, 2020, oil on linen, 36 x 36 in., AnArte Gallery (San Antonio)
(ABOVE) JESSE LANE (b. 1990),Undercurrents, 2020, colored pencil on board, 26 x 39 in., RJD Gallery (Romeo, Michigan)
(LEFT)
KIMBERLY
DOW
(b. 1968), Soft on Soft, 2009, oil on panel, 30 x 20 in., available through the artist
(RIGHT)
KAREN
HORNE
(b. 1959), Tango Fire, 2017, pastel on La Carte panel, 16 x 12 in., Horne Fine Art, Salt Lake City
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JILL BANKS (b. 1958), Among Royalty, 2020, oil on linen-lined panel, 10 x 8 in., available through the artist
MARTIN EICHINGER (b. 1949), Bird in
the Hand, 2006, bronze, 29 in. high or 46 in. high (editions of 75 and 100), Quent Cordair Fine Art (Jackson, Wyoming) D.K. PALECEK (b. 1959), Unspoken Bond, 2021, oil on board, 16 x 12 in., Edgewood Orchard Galleries (Fish Creek, Wisconsin) IVAN PAZLAMATCHEV (b. 1968), Comfort, 2020, oil on linen, 24 x 32 in., available through the artist
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(ABOVE) CHRISTOPHER REMMERS (b. 1982), Internal Unity #1, 2020, oil on linen, 52 x 52 in., private collection (to be exhibited at Versailles this October)
(FAR LEFT) GARY ALSUM
(b. 1957), Sealed with a Kiss (maquette for a life-size private commission now in a Virginia Beach park), 2007, bronze on walnut and stone base, 19 x 19 x 12 in., available through the artist (LEFT) WILLIAM A. SCHNEIDER (b. 1945), Olé, 2008, oil on linen, 24 x 30 in., private collection
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(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) JOSEPH LORUSSO (b. 1966), Smooching on the C Train, 2017, oil on panel, 30 x 30 in., collection of the artist
DEBRA HUSE (b. 1959), Day Dream,
2020, oil on linen panel, 14 x 11 in., Huse Skelly Gallery (Newport Beach, California)
J. RUSSELL WELLS (b. 1954), It’s Over,
2016, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in., private collection
JACKIE
EDWARDS (b. 1963), Solidarity, 2017, oil on linen mounted on wooden panel, 27 1/2 x 43 1/4 in., Gallery 1608 (Bushmills, Northern Ireland)
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SHERRI WOLFGANG (b. 1961), Chelsea Morning, 2020, oil on linen, 48 x 60 in., Dacia Gallery (New York City)
SEONA SOMMER (b. 1968), Bugsy H & SaSa, 2021, oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 27 1/2 in., available through the artist
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BY ANNETTE BLAUGRUND
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
SAM ADOQUEI’S
SEARCH FOR BEAUTY AND MEANING
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(RIGHT) Afternoon View of Pomport, France, 2017, oil on linen, 28 x 32 in., private collection
(BELOW RIGHT) Social
Studies, 2014, oil on canvas, 48 x 60 in., private collection
T
he Ghanaian-born, New Yorkbased artist Sam Adoquei (b. 1964) is an author, teacher, philosopher, and mentor — in a word, a polymath. I met him when I directed the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Art (1997–2007), where he was an outstanding member of the faculty. A demanding teacher, Adoquei was appreciated and sought after by the most dedicated and serious students. I valued his energy and his perseverance in imparting not only the essence, but also the rigor and technique essential to the art of painting. It is my goal here to offer new insights into Adoquei’s creations by surveying his unusual life journey and examining his techniques, all of which he has written about extensively in several popular books and articles.1 Measuring 6 feet high and 10 feet wide, Adoquei’s widely admired allegorical triptych Legacy and Burial of Martin Luther King, Jr. uses a historical painting format, demonstrates his interest in current events, and underscores his commitment to humanistic principles. 2 Though it evokes Old Master depictions of the Entombment of Christ, this powerful work is more in keeping with such heroic death scenes as Benjamin West’s famous Death of General Wolfe (1770, National Gallery of Canada), thus positioning Dr. King as a fallen hero and Adoquei as a participant in the continuum of American art. Set in a cemetery in Queens, New York, its figures are people of varied races and religions, dressed in everyday clothing with touches of red, white, and blue to evoke the U.S. flag. Favorably reviewed in The New York Times and other periodicals, this triptych does not even begin to reveal the diversity of Adoquei’s practice, which encompasses light-filled landscapes such as Afternoon View of Pomport, France; narrative figural scenes like Social Studies; sensitive portraits such as Former Miss Denmark Jeanette Christjansen; and vibrant still lifes like The Gift (Sovereign Amaryllis). These works display not only Adoquei’s artistic diversity, but also his dedication to recasting traditional genres in a contemporary vocabulary.
(OPPOSITE PAGE) Legacy and Burial of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1995, oil on canvas, triptych (center 72 x 72 in., each side 72 x 24 in.), collection of the artist
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PERSEVERANCE Adoquei was born in Ghana’s capital, Accra. Growing up in West Africa fostered an intense love of nature and humanity, and also dreams of seeking a life beyond his childhood experiences. Aware of his own artistic abilities early on, Adoquei wanted to earn the money he needed to buy art supplies, so at 15 he landed a job in Nigeria as a commercial artist painting billboards and posters. He returned home to finish his training, and in 1979 he graduated from Ghana’s premier private art school, Ghanatta College of Fine Arts, which today claims him as one of its most successful alumni.
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Pursuing deeper knowledge, Adoquei spent several years visiting ateliers in Italy and traveling in Europe and Africa. He arrived in 1987 in New York City, where he continued his studies at the Art Students League of New York while improving his English-language skills. (Today Adoquei also speaks several African dialects and some French and Italian.) At first, he was unable to secure a teaching job, so he began holding workshops in his studio that became, and remain, very popular. When Adoquei finally started teaching at the League, which has been run by artists since its establishment in 1875, he was following in the footsteps of such renowned instructors as William Merritt Chase and Thomas Hart Benton (who taught Jackson Pollock there). Like his predecessors, Adoquei became an inspirational teacher over many years. Adoquei’s perseverance led him to become the first African to serve on the faculty of four major art schools: the Art Students League, National Academy, New York Academy of Art, and Educational Alliance. His sense of self is formed by—in Adoquei’s own words—”extreme enthusiasm, positive attitude, excitement,” and hard work. As an African, he says he has not encountered the same degree of discrimination that U.S.-born men of color do. He is not
(LEFT) Colonel Cornelius Boye Oddoye, Ghana Armed Forces, unfinished, oil on linen, 24 x 20 in., collection of the artist
(BELOW LEFT) A Gift (Sovereign Amaryllis), 2000,
oil on canvas, 32 x 20 in., private collection
(BELOW) Former Miss Denmark Jeanette
Christjansen, 2004, oil on panel, 82 x 48 in., private collection
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Repose in a Green Kimono, 2011, oil on linen, 24 x 30 in., private collection
usually included in the increasingly frequent exhibitions of African American artists today, yet he embodies this country’s capacity for individual freedom in a larger social context. Over the years, Adoquei’s paintings have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and Europe, reside in major public and private collections, and have appeared on the covers of books, magazines, and newspapers. The Unseen Beauty, a 10-minute documentary about him directed by Gabriel de Urioste, was screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Manhattan Film Festival, and several other U.S. festivals. Today Adoquei no longer teaches in art schools but rather takes on apprentices for intensive study one-on-one or in small groups. He recently joined the board of advisors of the Portrait Society of America, an appropriate choice since a major portion of his output is portraiture. Adoquei has painted many portraits of presidents and other academic dignitaries from Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia universities, as well as entertainers and art world notables. Among his images of acquaintances is the unfinished portrait of Colonel Cornelius Boye Oddoye, a childhood friend who previously served in the Ghanaian armed forces and is now a diplomat posted F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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to New York. The sitter’s body, face, and clothing are captured with brushwork more detailed than the barely delineated background showing a world map. Such dichotomies of finish are characteristic of much of Adoquei’s figural work. Like many other realists, Adoquei paints directly from the figure, as we can sense in Repose in a Green Kimono, where he purposely left the background unfinished. Sometimes, however, background embellishments are more detailed, revealing his ability to describe the sitter through personal attributes. Hanging on the wall behind Ballerina, for example, are her ballet shoes and two feathered masks on either side of a framed print; on the table appear two small sculptures with another mask. This vulnerable-looking dancer is lost in thought, and the elements of her life are juxtaposed with a loosely brushed gray-white shadow that calls attention to the architectural line of the dado behind her. Calligraphic brushstrokes emanating from the shadow of an unseen object draw our eye downward. Such disparities of finish and unfinish are both surprising and intriguing. “Great portraits,” Adoquei says, are about rendering, capturing, and recording a “unique soul with whom I have been fortunate enough to have been aligned.”3 It is in pursuit of this goal that the artist finds new ways of perceiving and understanding people. “Great painters,” he continues, “contribute to these new ways of portraying people through the mastery of economical strokes.”
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Adoquei has been working for some time on what he calls his “skin tone project,” as outlined in his book A Short Story of Skin Tones in Art: From Ancient Egypt to Today’s Portraits. He uses studies of heads to elucidate each person’s unique physical characteristics, distinctions that any artist should and can describe. When we examine skin tone diversity, he believes, a deeper understanding of people ensues. The observing and recording of different skin tones becomes a vehicle for enlightenment as demonstrated by three heads illustrated here: Portrait of Theresa Majeed, Alexandra, and Portrait of a Gentleman (Michael J. Graetz). Adoquei writes, “The celebration of skin tones is essential in an era when many have forgotten the origin of humans and that we are one. The idea is that this beautiful, big rainbow of skin tones we see started off with a few primary colors, tying us all to one origin, and it is worthy of constant acknowledgement and celebration.” PASSION Although Adoquei has been influenced by great painters of the past, he says much of his inspiration comes from musicians. Among those he admires most are the Malian instrumentalist and singer Ali Farka Toure (1939–2006); the Jamaican singer and songwriter Bob Marley (1945–1981); and Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970), the singer, songwriter, and experimental guitarist. He appreciates them not only for their musicality, but also for the emotions they express and even more for their accomplishments in life. Hendrix’s career helped Adoquei recognize the freedom that artists can possess after mastering the tools of their trade. Like musicians around the globe, he aspires to express freely — on canvas rather than instruments — whatever enters his mind and imagination.
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Somehow it is not surprising that Adoquei played a major role in introducing a variety of music to Julian Casablancas (b. 1978), lead singer and songwriter of The Strokes and later The Voidz. (Adoquei has long been friendly with the younger man’s family.) Casablancas says, “Sam is incredible. He taught me that you must have passion, even for practicing, because part of the joy of fulfillment is in the chore. The ideas in Sam’s amazing book Origin of Inspiration: Seven Short Essays for Creative People are what I heard every night from him growing up, just talking about art.”4 Technically, Adoquei deploys a powerful sense of texture and impasto that denotes his love of paint. His vivid brushwork is as much a part of the subject as are the people or things portrayed. In his book Brushstrokes in Painting: Everything You Need to Know to Help You Create Exciting, Spontaneous Paintings, he writes, “Brushstrokes are the most reliable tool for those in pursuit of true color, but in the hands of a master they become tools and ornaments for communication. Like words, grammar, and sounds, they have their own rules. They are the lyrics that make painterly works exciting and charming.” By leaving out details in the foreground of Afternoon View of Pomport, France, Adoquei ensured that this picture’s main subject is defined in the middle ground. The foreground functions almost as an abstraction of energetic brushwork that reveals the artist’s hand. Recently the city of Pomport awarded Adoquei its medal of honor for his contributions and dedication to the arts and culture of the Dordogne region. This was the first time it had so honored either a foreigner or an artist. 5 For Adoquei, painting is the place where we come to understand each other as people. It is the cultural fabric that binds us together; in M A Y / J U N E
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LEFT TO RIGHT: Portrait of Theresa Majeed, 2019, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in., private collection; Alexandra, 2019, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in., private collection; Portrait of a Gentleman (Michael J. Graetz), 2018, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in., private collection Ballerina, 1996, oil on canvas, 54 x 34 in., collection of the artist
our dissimilarities there is homogeneity, a conviction more relevant today than ever before. He explains: “As artists, our challenges and achievements lie in between our means and the needs of the times. Our multicultural, ever-growing environment of beautiful complexions is unique. No culture or society before us has ever been lucky enough to have the means to acknowledge this beauty in the human race. With such a treasure comes responsibilities to use beauty to secure love and harmony among people, which is why we must explore the beauty of humans if we are to secure freedom and peace in the future.” Information: The Unseen Beauty can be viewed free at youtube.com/ watch?v=o8w4Gg1RO4I. Episode 53 of the Art Grind Podcast (Apple) is Art in Service to Humanity: A Conversation with Sam Adoquei. ANNETTE BLAUGRUND is an art historian, author, and former director of the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Art (New York City). She is currently a consulting curator at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site (Catskill, New York) and also board president of ArtTable, a national organization of leading women in the visual arts professions. F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Endnotes 1 See samadoquei.com/books for a summary of his publications. 2 The triptych won acclaim as part of In the Spirit of Martin: The Living Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., an exhibition that opened in 2003 at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center (Washington, D.C.) and then traveled to Memphis and Montgomery. 3 Adoquei’s quotations here come from multiple interviews with the author and from his books. 4 Patrick Doyle, “22 Things You Learn Hanging Out with Julian Casablancas,” Rolling Stone, 29 October 2014. 5 While at the League, Adoquei won gold medals in oil painting and best traditional oil painting, respectively, at the 42nd and 43rd annual editions of the Knickerbocker Artists National Open Exhibition. Other awards followed, including the portrait award in the annual competition mounted by The Artist’s Magazine.
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BY MICHAEL J. PEARCE
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
THOMAS BLACKSHEAR’S
WESTERN NOUVEAU
T
he golden glow of success has gathered around Thomas Blackshear II (b. 1955). Last September his painting Swan Song was a smashing success at the 14th annual Jackson Hole Art Auction, where it sold for $77,350 — more than double its high estimate. That same week, Blackshear’s painting Hunter’s Watch appeared on the commemorative poster of the Jackson Hall Fall Arts Festival and then sold for $37,000. The following month, he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators’ Hall of Fame, an honor previously accorded to such legends as Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, and Dean Cornwell. This past March, three new Blackshear paintings — The Wait, American Nobility, and Native American with Feather — appeared in the Masters of the American West sale at Los Angeles’s Autry Museum of the American West, where The Wait won the Artists’ Choice award.
It is easy to see why. Blackshear’s “Western Nouveau” paintings are light, decorative, and elegant, a romantic and fresh kind of imagery that has captured the imagination of Western art connoisseurs, who always have a sharp eye for a rising star. Born in Waco, Texas, and raised in Atlanta, Blackshear earned a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, but after a year there he transferred to the American Academy of Art nearby. While finishing his education, he was recruited to the Kansas City headquarters of
Swan Song, 1993, oil on board, 28 x 50 in., private collection
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(TOP) Dance of the Wind and the Storm, 1994, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in., private collection
(RIGHT)
Blackshear at work on Thunderbird, to be offered at the Prix de West this June
Hallmark Cards and later became head illustrator at the prestigious Godbold/Richter Studio there. As a freelancer, Blackshear was renowned throughout the world of illustration, but blazing the trail to fame in fine art was not always easy, and he gladly accepted a little help from an old friend to move things along. He recalls, “In 2016 I was going through one of the worst times in my career, and in my life, period. Suddenly I got an e-mail from one of America’s top Western painters, Morgan Weistling, an old friend of mine; we first met when we were both illustrators. I was really surprised because I hadn’t talked with him in a while, so I called him. Morgan said, ‘Look, the Western market has changed. I still do very well with my traditional work, but a lot of the new collectors are going for a more contemporary look. There are a few F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Americas, in the 1890s and 1900s. The subjects of his paintings are distinctly Western, but they are unlike anything else in this genre. They are beautifully designed, some with elegantly carved reliefs glowing in burnished gold, some mingling fantasy with convention, and others with more orthodox subjects. It’s a lovely mixture that blends the accessibility of the ornamental and mysterious work of European masters like Gustav Klimt and Alphonse Mucha with the gritty romanticism of the Old West. At first glance, it is a surprising and counterintuitive hybrid, yet it actually makes perfect sense. Melodramatic stories of the Old West in films and pulp fiction established a mythology that cloaked the hard realities of the violent, colonizing force it took to “win” the West, creating a cowboy fantasia that is a dream-like world strangely separated
Forgiven, 1991, oil on canvas, 33 x 16 1/4 in., Museum of Biblical Art, Dallas
people who really stand out right now. I’ve been following your work for many years, and I always knew that if you wanted to, you could do very, very well in this market. I will introduce you to everyone I can to help you out — to the people who run the museums and galleries. I’ll help with your website; whatever you need, I’m willing to do it, if you want.’” “Naturally,” Blackshear smiles, “I was very grateful to Morgan, who continued, ‘I just want you to paint, Thomas. Come up with some Western paintings. I’ll be checking on you throughout the year, and I want to invite you to the Autry show. I’ve been in it for twenty-something years, and I want to show you what it’s like. We’ll see if we can get you into it next year.’ So, I started working on some images for Morgan.” Those paintings opened a new chapter in Blackshear’s life. A UNIQUE BLEND To create a fresh look, Blackshear combined traditional Western imagery with the decorative impulses of Art Nouveau, which flourished in Europe, and to a lesser extent the
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Native American Nouveau, 2018, oil on canvas, 38 x 48 in., private collection
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(LEFT) Airman’s Inspiration, 2020, oil on canvas, 33 x 29 in., private collection
(RIGHT) A Common Thread, 2015, oil on board with gold leaf, 38 x 25 in., collection of the artist
from history. In fact, the Old West and Art Nouveau both flourished between 1890 and 1910. Outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made their names robbing banks at precisely the same moment the Vienna Secession defied the academy’s confining rules. Blackshear intuitively recognized the intersection of these two rebellions against the established order, and so their convergence feels both fresh and natural. Blackshear’s new mode made a public impact almost immediately. In the summer of 2020, the arena-rock band The Killers put his painting Dance of the Wind and the Storm on the cover of their new album, Imploding the Mirage, and used more of his paintings to adorn their singles. The album hit No. 1, bringing Blackshear’s imagery to the vast audience who also voted it No. 1 on Billboard’s Fans’ Favorite Rock Albums of 2020 chart. The momentum carrying Blackshear has the same driving beat as a Killers song. This June he will be an invited guest artist in the Prix de West exhibition and sale at Oklahoma City’s National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. (For details on this annual event, see page 121.) There he plans to show two new paintings. One is Thunderbird, which depicts a young Native American standing against an adobe wall with his head bowed. Tattooed on his chest is a bird that “spills” over onto the wall’s textured plaster. In Taking Aim, a Native American armed with a bow stands before the gilded nimbus of the radiant sun. Next year, Blackshear will mount a solo show of smaller works at the Ringling College of Art + Design in Sarasota, Florida. “Things took off,” says Blackshear. “Paintings were selling right away, and every time someone asked if I could be in their show, I had to reply that I didn’t have any to send. I was always behind the eightball trying to produce more, and I thought, ‘I just can’t keep going F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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like this!’ I decided 2021 would be the year I wouldn’t do any gallery shows.” The principal reason is that Blackshear works with great care, and he is keenly aware that his dedication to matching the quality of Art Nouveau masterpieces slows him down. Although he is a trained illustrator who knows techniques that can create dramatic effects quite quickly, Blackshear has no wish to compromise his paintings’ excellence. He explains, “The jewelry that Mucha and René Lalique created was so beautiful. There’s a different sensibility and aesthetic — an elegance missing in a lot of art today. No matter what image I paint, I want to give it that elegance and beauty, and that’s why it takes me longer to produce. Sometimes it’s not a matter of painting through the piece; sometimes I just have to sit and live with it, to feel it through, feel past what I’m trying to do. I have to give it time.” DIGGING DEEPER In addition to getting help from influential longtime friends like Morgan Weistling, Blackshear has found divine support. He has a deep Christian faith, and has long enjoyed success selling religious paintings and prints to evangelical churches throughout the U.S. Prayer and painting are closely tied, which makes this body of work a spiritual journey for Blackshear. Gold is the most material of substances, but it also symbolizes God. So, does the gold he paints with have a spiritual component? Blackshear is ambivalent about whether the gilding itself might be spiritual, in the way that monks illuminating their manuscripts once considered their craftsmanship as prayer. He chuckles at the thought that the fiddly practice of gold-leafing might somehow be otherworldly, saying his only concern is to get the leaf down fast and in the
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The Wait, 2021, oil on canvas, 40 x 61 1/2 in., private collection
right place. But once that gold is in place and he is painting, Blackshear admits he does feel a presence within himself: “There has to be a spiritual thing to ever make paintings that go beyond the norm, and I’m always trying to design images different from the norm. One time I prayed for an image, and then saw that entire image before I began to paint it. I didn’t create it. It was given to me, so I just painted what I saw. There are quite a few images — Christian and non-Christian — that came to me that way.” His religious imagery transcends denominations. When a friend set off on a missionary trip to India, Blackshear gave him a selection of his own prints. In Calcutta that friend visited Mother Teresa (1910–1997) and offered her two of them — Forgiven and Coat of Many Colors, Lord of All. She asked him, “May I put them in the room of the dying?” Of course, the friend agreed, assuming she would hang them in a hospice ward. A year later, the friend met a nun from Mother Teresa’s facility who invited him to visit the hospice. Not seeing the Blackshear prints anywhere, he asked what had become of them. His guide replied, “You misunderstood. When Mother Teresa asked, ‘Do you mind if I put it in the room of the dying?’ she meant herself.” In her last days, St. Teresa had kept Blackshear’s prints in her bedroom, which is now a shrine to her memory. In 2010, he was commissioned to design a U.S. Postal Service stamp commemorating her. A lay spirituality is manifest in Blackshear’s paintings of Native Americans, who are elemental guides. Here he follows the conventions of Western art, painting indigenous people as “noble savages” and flavoring their images with romanticism. The men bear smoking incense that curls around them in decorative flourishes that are also seen in Mucha’s gorgeous embellished posters. Blackshear’s Native American Nouveau features a warrior wearing a headdress fashioned as a butterfly’s wing, suggesting the transience and fragility of the tribes. In Swan Song, a resolute warrior gazes into the distance as swans fly in formation around him.
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Blackshear’s A Common Thread echoes the heartfelt plea for racial tolerance that Rockwell conveyed in his famous Golden Rule (Do unto Others) in 1961. Figures representing the four races bear lit candles; they are unified as a community, as light-bearers, as keepers of the flame of decency and truth, which they hold up against the threatening darkness of intolerance. Though decorative, Blackshear’s Western paintings avoid much of the sentimental excess that afflicts the genre. His images of black cowboys are a necessary reminder that the Old West wasn’t actually as white as Hollywood has suggested. Wrapped in rawhide, his rugged black buckaroos chew tobacco and smoke with the same machismo as their white colleagues. The Wait, Blackshear’s latest addition to a series examining African-Americans’ role in shaping the U.S., is a powerful reminder that black Union soldiers also paid the ultimate price in the Civil War: 180,000 black men served in that fight for justice, and thousands died in battle or hospital. Blackshear’s soldier waits for a better world. Moving forward in time, Airman’s Inspiration is a sensitive portrait of a Tuskegee pilot with the wings of Perseus, caught in a quiet, beautiful moment with a hummingbird balanced on the finger of his leather gauntlet. Yes, there is nostalgia and romance in Blackshear’s work, but it is aimed at a broad and inclusive audience, an audience of all Americans. Information: Blackshear is represented by Broadmoor Galleries (Colorado Springs) and Trailside Galleries (Scottsdale and Jackson Hole). MICHAEL J. PEARCE, PHD is the author of Art in the Age of Emergence (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015) and professor of art at California Lutheran University. M A Y / J U N E
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BY PETER TRIPPI
T O D A Y ’ S M A S T E R S
TRAVELING THROUGH TIME WITH LEN TANTILLO
“H
istory is what we all share, like water and air,” says L.F. Tantillo (b. 1946), whose 40-year career creating superb historical paintings is the subject of a retrospective at the Albany Institute of History and Art, on view through July 25. “Len” Tantillo lives 15 miles southeast of Albany, the capital of New York State, and his relationship with the Institute goes back decades; he consults its rich collections often, and in 2016 it acquired its first Tantillo painting, which depicts the British colonial governor George Clinton arriving in Albany in 1748. Its decision to mount Tantillo’s retrospective makes perfect sense because his favorite subjects are the fascinating sites and events that have shaped New York State and
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Manhattan, 1660, 2007, oil on canvas, 20 x 42 in., collection of John and Ann Watkins
especially the area around Albany, which was founded by the Dutch as Fort Orange in 1624. Organized by Institute director Tammis Groft and curator Diane Shewchuk, A Sense of Time: The Historical Art of L. F. Tantillo features 97 paintings borrowed from 53 institutions and collectors, arranged across 5,000 square feet and complemented by preparatory drawings and plein air sketches, physical and digital models, and videos revealing the artist’s studio process. To mark the show’s opening this spring,
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The Galliot of New Amstel, c. 1652, 2016, oil on canvas, 9 x 12 in., collection of Bill and Lisa Pjontek (RIGHT) The Mabee Farm, 2012, oil on canvas, 24 x 40 in., Schenectady County Historical Society
Tantillo wrote, edited, and designed a 234-page book, A Sense of Time: Forty Years of History Painting, which highlights more than 100 paintings, including some not in the exhibition. Each is illustrated on its own page and accompanied by an explanation. This publication encompasses not only historical scenes, but also Tantillo’s luminous depictions of still life, historic airplanes and battleships, and scenic landscapes painted outdoors in such places as England and Italy. DRAWN TO THE PAST Somehow it seems like this exhibition, indeed Tantillo’s whole career, was predestined. He was born in a Poughkeepsie hospital overlooking the Hudson River, and he grew up enjoying colorful stories of the past recounted by customers in his father’s small grocery store. Always artistic, Tantillo studied architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design and spent much of the early 1970s cutting models out of
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Styrofoam to show his architectural firm’s clients how their buildings would actually look. This led to architectural illustration, which required him to read the plans and render them compellingly in two dimensions rather than three. Having enjoyed making a commissioned series of paintings of 19th-century buildings — informed by his M A Y / J U N E
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Kingston, New York, c. 1695, 2015, oil on canvas, 23 x 36 in., Senate House Museum, Kingston
study of archeological artifacts and historical documents — Tantillo left the commercial world to become a fine artist full-time in 1984. Over the years, he has created more than 300 historical paintings and drawings, ones that bypass famous episodes well visualized by other artists (e.g., General George Washington’s resignation as commander of the Continental Army). Instead, Tantillo has traced his region’s evolution, from pre-European contact Iroquois villages to the settlements of Dutch and English colonists (who often owned enslaved people), leading on to construction of railroads and bridges across the Hudson River, which was once a “superhighway” teeming with vessels. Tantillo says he is fascinated by this specific part of the world “under my feet. Under our feet. Who lived here? How was their time and place different than ours? How was it the same?” To transport viewers back in time, Tantillo uses his imagination, of course, but he grounds it in careful research, combing through period maps, prints, photographs, letters, wills, battle plans, inventories, account books, and models. “Many of the details in my paintings are just guesses and probably way off,” he admits modestly, yet he always succeeds in conveying “that all-important ‘texture and tone.’ That’s the art part.” Tantillo’s “guesses” are well informed because he is in frequent contact with a “network of dedicated historians,” eight of whom he invited to contribute brief essays for the new book. Its introduction was prepared by a renowned chronicler of Dutch culture in the Americas, Russell Shorto, who says he knows many historians, though “none are more rigorous in researching the past than [Tantillo] is.” Shorto aligns his own efforts with the artist’s, explaining that “We are both F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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putting together a picture of the past. Telling a story.” Importantly, he uses the word “interpret” rather than “recreate” because the best historians and artists “give the viewer or reader the feeling of experiencing the actual event.” Shorto offers another valuable insight on Tantillo’s paintings: “Each is a kind of play, a theater piece.” By selecting the most compelling moment in the narrative and the most revealing composition, then reinforcing them with the right light and weather, Tantillo “has selected these details, assembled them, like the director of a play.” A particularly fascinating feature of the book are Tantillo’s photographs of his digital models, which allow him to explore historical settings and identify the best angle “with no limitations.” (As suggested above, he had to cut these models by hand out of Styrofoam before digital software emerged in the early 2000s.) Another helpful essay was written by Nicolas Fox, president of the American Society of Marine Artists, of which Tantillo is an active fellow. He reminds us that his friend avoids “the past of kings and generals, though they may sometimes appear in his work,” prioritizing instead the “humanizing and democratizing of the narratives … connecting to the reality of day-to-day life.” This humanity becomes apparent as readers move through the book’s chapters, which address Native people; the colony of New Netherland including New Amsterdam (now New York); the English colony; the perilous early years of the United States; the transformation of the region by steamships and steam engines; and the allure of specific historic buildings. Along the way, Tantillo inserts deep dives into such varied topics as “Sailing the Waters of New Netherland,” “Researching
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(ABOVE) A View of Rondout, New York, 1883, 2019, oil on canvas, 24 x 46 in., collection of Bruce and Jenny McKinney
(BELOW) Winter in the Valley of the Mohawk, 1994,
acrylic on canvas, 20 x 30 in., collection of Colonel Victor and Lesley Riley III
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Ship model, hand-carved in Styrofoam and cardboard, halfway through being embellished with details and ornaments, 2003. Tantillo used the resulting model to paint A View of Fort Orange, 1652, 2003, oil on canvas, 32 x 64 in., Fort Orange Club, Albany.
Colonial Manhattan,” and “Fulton’s Steamboat at Clermont.” A FONT OF KNOWLEDGE Over four decades, Tantillo has become a “go-to” expert on the Dutch colonial project in North America, which stretched from the North River (the Hudson) to the South River (the Delaware). It’s worth remembering that the English-born navigator Henry Hudson considered his groundbreaking voyage up the river now named for him a failure; as an employee of the Dutch republic, he had hoped to reach the Far East’s wealthy trading ports, not the wild interior of North America. What his Dutch bosses came to appreciate, of course, was the fortune to be earned trading for beaver pelts with the Native people, and today the Dutch legacy endures, most obviously in the Hudson River Valley’s place names. (Tantillo lives in the town of Nassau in Rensselaer County — names that couldn’t be more Dutch.) His knowledge has led to Tantillo’s being elected a fellow of the New York Academy of History and his leading role in the New Netherland Institute. He has also been invited to participate in a host of intriguing projects, including much television work because his art helps viewers visualize the past. Just for example, in 1996 Tantillo presented a master plan to construct a one-mile-long canal (very Dutch) running from the Hudson River into downtown Albany; alas, the project was not pursued. Six years later, his art featured prominently in a PBS documentary highlighting folk musician Pete Seeger’s campaign to clean up the Hudson by launching the Clearwater, a sailing ship that still inspires the region’s youth to protect their environment. Around the same time, the Metropolitan Museum of Art commissioned Tantillo to create a painting that helps visitors understand the room it had removed from the Daniel Pieter Winne House (Bethlehem, New York) by showing how the building may have appeared in 1755. A key moment came in 2009 as New Yorkers marked 400 years since Hudson’s famous voyage: Governor David Paterson commissioned a painting that was presented to the Dutch Royal Family, and Steinway & Sons tapped Tantillo to propose a cycle of paintings to adorn one of its pianos. (The instrument did not find a commissioning client for another decade, and is finally being built.) F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Romaine Lettuce, 2001, oil on canvas, 12 x 9 in., collection of Vincent Lepera and Barbara Zaremba
The accessibility of these wide-ranging projects underscores Nicolas Fox’s admiration of the knack Tantillo has for “connecting to the reality of day-to-day life.” Bringing history out of books into the realm of our own experience is important work — perhaps more than ever as the U.S. struggles with uncomfortable aspects of its inspiring, heartbreaking past. Tantillo deserves applause for studying and making visible the thrilling stories of his home region, surely something every corner of this great country deserves from one (or more) of its artist residents. Information: albanyinstitute.org PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.
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BY DANA PILSON
H I S T O R I C M A S T E R S
“WRITE IT LARGE ON THE W ALL!” THE SCULPTORS EVELYN BEATRICE LONGMAN AND DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH
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n December 1900, Evelyn Beatrice Longman (1874–1954) arrived at the New York City studio of sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850–1931). She was clasping letters of introduction, including one from French’s older brother, William, first director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “She wore a grey hat with a curling feather down over her ear which, with the dark eyes beneath, took Mr. French’s eye, quite as much as the reputation she had already acquired as to talent,” recalled Mary Adams French in her 1928 Memories of a Sculptor’s Wife. French wrote his brother immediately, praising Longman as “a very attractive young woman.” Born in Ohio, she was inspired to study sculpture after visiting the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; “I could do such things if I had the chance,” she thought.1 Longman proceeded to take sculpture classes with Lorado Taft at the Art Institute, graduating from its four-year program in just over two. After moving to New York, she worked with Hermon Atkins MacNeil and Isadore Konti on sculptural decorations for the upcoming 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo before presenting herself to French. While Longman’s appearance may have caught French’s eye, it was her talent and willingness to take on difficult challenges that endeared her to him. “I saw some of her work … the other day and it entirely vindicates your recommendation,” French wrote his brother. He sent for Longman to help with the lettering on the bronze doors he was creating for the Boston Public Library, a task he disliked. “She
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did it beautifully and stayed on to do more,” recalled the sculptor’s daughter, Margaret French Cresson.2 Thus French and Longman began their collaboration, which evolved into a mutually beneficial professional relationship as well as a deep personal friendship. She would become his only female studio assistant and a beloved member of his extended family. Longman worked at Chesterwood, French’s summer home and studio in western Massachusetts, from 1901 to 1904. There she modeled a portrait of his niece Louise in 1902 (the 1910 marble version is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and his daughter, Margaret, the following summer (the plaster is at Chesterwood). Longman later recalled, “One day ... he came in (I was doing the bust of Louise French) and said, ‘Make the concaves bigger’ — ‘Write it large on the wall!’ That moment I think I saw real sculpture for the first time — and my work changed from that moment, technically.”3 These two early busts recall Italian Renaissance portraiture in the manner of Donatello and Verrocchio. Also influential was the contemporary American sculptor Herbert Adams; Longman surely admired his polychromed version of the Renaissance-style La Jeunesse (1894) at Chesterwood. French grew to treasure Longman’s portrait of his daughter and displayed it in his Manhattan townhouse and at Chesterwood. For her second depiction in 1912, Peggy (Portrait of Margaret French), she adopted a more active and realistic style to capture the girl’s fun-loving spirit.4 M A Y / J U N E
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Longman at work on her bronze doors for the library at Wellesley College, 1911
French employed Longman as a studio assistant to perform various tasks such as “finishing the wax” for his statuette of Narcissa.5 He also recommended her for commissions, treading carefully so as not to be accused of favoritism. Along with Augustus SaintGaudens and John Quincy Adams Ward, French served in 1904 on the National Sculpture Society’s committee to commission the design of a medal commemorating Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb. Longman was among the three finalists, and French wrote to Ward, “Don’t you think my Miss Longman is pretty smart? Her design was so different from anything that she had ever done before that I did not recognize it at all.” He told Saint-Gaudens: “As Miss Longman [is] an assistant of mine, [I] shall probably be accused of favoritism. In any case, somehow the enemy overlooks the fact that we are interested in these people because of their extraordinary talent.” In return for his encouragement, French sought Longman’s honest advice. As early as 1904, he thanked her: “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the kind things you say about the ‘Alma Mater’ and the Carnegie figure.... It was very sweet of you to reassure me,—and
Relief from the Memorial to Laura Gamble Thomson (1853– 1913), Spring Grove Cemetery, Cincinnati; photo: A.B. Bogart, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
I needed it.” Even after she took her own studio, he continued seeking her input; in 1907 French wrote to her, “I have lots of things to show you and I want your criticism on my summer’s work. I am counting on your liking some of it.” MENTORSHIP’S BENEFITS Longman executed a number of works under French’s supervision, such as the Slocum Memorial (1909, Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts). Recalling French’s Melvin Memorial (1906–08) in nearby Concord, it features an angel cut in shallow relief emerging from a block of granite. French also supervised Longman’s 1906 memorial for Louisa Wells, a Massachusetts millworker who had died 20 years earlier (Lowell Cemetery). The commission had been granted to French, but he passed it to Longman, who carved the 15-foot-tall composition herself in his studio. He reminded the Lowell committee, “You understand that Miss Longman gets all the credit pecuniarily and otherwise of this monument. It has been a great pleasure to me to do what I could to aid and abet her.” Longman’s
Peggy (Portrait of Margaret French), 1912, bronze, 27 1/2 x 12 x 10 1/2 in., National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay, 1986.205, photo: Lee Stalsworth
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1913 relief for the grave of Laura Gamble Thomson features a shrouded woman emerging from deep relief; the allegorical figure also pays tribute to her mentor’s Melvin Memorial. In 1908 French recommended Longman to Frank A. Faxon of Kansas City to sculpt a portrait of his young daughter, Frances: “I really know of no one man or woman in the country who would be likely to give you as satisfactory a result...” French retained two photographs of Longman working on the portrait while the well-behaved sitter plays with a makeshift doll. The completed marble is now in a private collection, and the tinted plaster is at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. In a blind competition, Longman was selected from 32 entrants to create a set of doors for the chapel at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. Although French chaired the selection committee, he had no prior knowledge of Longman’s submission, as she had covered up her model when he visited her studio. He attested afterward, “I did not even recognize Miss Longman’s work myself, though I am very familiar with it.”6 The donor of funds for the doors sent Longman to Italy so she could learn more about bronze casting. As she set off, French wished her “the best time you ever had in your life.” He continued, “And you have earned the right to your enjoyment. You have been the ‘industrious apprentice’, sure enough, and you merit all you have won of honor and fortune and happiness and as much more as can be showered upon you … The fact is that I have come to lean on you so hard, to trust to your judgment about my work so much and, more than all, your high ideals and aspirations and your buoyant enthusiasm are such an inspiration to me ... help me, as I will try to help you, up to the top of Parnassus.” Indeed, French guided Longman through the steps of the Annapolis commission, traveling with her to Providence to inspect the bronze casts being made by the Gorham Company. He told the chapel’s architect, Ernest Flagg, that he was “impressed by the great beauty of the work that Miss Longman has done.” By 1909 he could remind Flagg: “It is amazing that so slight a little woman should have been able to achieve so brilliant a success with so large a work.” In this design, Longman paid tribute to Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling figures of the prophet Jeremiah and the Delphic Sybil with her own Science and Patriotism. Her first collaboration with French had been on the bronze doors for the Boston Public Library; now she was completing the Annapolis doors on her
The Spirit of Communication, 1916, gold leaf over bronze, 24 ft. high, AT&T Discovery District, Dallas, photo © AT&T
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Daniel Chester French in the Chesterwood
studio with the full-size clay model of Spirit of Life for the Spencer Trask Memorial (Saratoga Springs, New York), 1914, Chesterwood Archives, Chapin Library, Williams College, Gift of the National Trust for Historic Preservation
(ABOVE RIGHT)
Longman in her Chiselhurst-on-Farmington studio working on the full-size model of Spirit of Victory for Hartford’s Spanish-American War Memorial, c. 1926; photo: Loomis Chaffee School Archives, Windsor, Connecticut
own, establishing her professional reputation. Close on the heels of the Annapolis commission, she was asked to design a set of bronze doors for the library at Wellesley College.7 French often sat on committees that awarded Longman commissions. In a blind competition, French and two other judges chose Longman’s proposal for a figure on what became the AT&T Building in lower Manhattan. Her winning design was a 24-foot male figure wrapped in electric cables and grasping lightning bolts. Completed in 1916, this work, now called The Spirit of Communication (and informally known as the Golden Boy), is a triumph of youthful energy and swirling lines. It towered over the neighborhood until the 1980s, and was recently installed in AT&T’s new Discovery District in Dallas. THE PROTÉGÉ’S INSIGHTS As Longman achieved greater success, French continued to rely on her help and advice. In 1914, they stood in a field near his Chesterwood studio examining the final working model of his Spirit of Life for the Spencer Trask Memorial (Saratoga Springs, New York), which had been wheeled outdoors on a railroad track. French had written to Katrina Trask just days before, saying “The statue is entirely finished in plaster;—I really mean that the casting of the statue is entirely finished; I have still some work to do on it, here and there.” He was most likely awaiting Longman’s opinion before declaring it complete. In 1916, while working on his seated figure for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., French begged Longman, “Listen to me! I need you and I want you, not because (this time,) you are a charming lady, but because you are a sculptor. Now,—I have sawed Lincoln in two and I have been trying him with different lengths of body and I find I can’t decide what is best, by myself. In fact, as I have F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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said, I need your critical eye to help me to a decision and the decision must be before Monday.” Longman also advised architect Henry Bacon on designs for the Lincoln Memorial itself, and she contributed sculpted eagles, double wreaths, and inscriptions of the late President’s speeches to the building project. She accompanied French and Bacon on trips to view its progress, and following the 1922 dedication she came along to inspect changes to its lighting. In 1927 French felt badly that Longman had taken ill after one journey, so he wrote her, “Although it was a heavy price to pay for it, I hope it will eventually give you some satisfaction to know that you did me so great a service and that your knowledge and your advice and your thoroughness gave me the backing and the brace to get things right … I am sure it will be a source of pleasure, too, to have had a hand in saving the life of my statue, for that is about what the new lighting has done for it!” As most of Longman’s relatives lived in the Midwest and Canada, she considered the Frenches her adopted family. She attended their Christmas Eve dinners in Manhattan, during which poems were recited, melodies sung, and gifts exchanged. One year, French penned this verse: “Sweet Evelyn had a flock of geese / -or ganders – all in tow / And everywhere that Evelyn went / The ganders went also. They follow you too often dear / These geese in human shape / For if their mates ‘catch on,’ you’ll see / Sweet Evelyn wearing crepe.” Of her Christmastime stays, Longman wrote: “What a festive place it was, and how beautifully French and Peggy decorated the studio and the big table!” Even after establishing her own studio, she continued visiting Chesterwood in the summer, and its guest books are filled with records of her extended stays. In 1919, Margaret French wrote about Longman as if she were her sister in a letter to her future husband, William “Penn” Cresson: “Beatrice Longman was here with her fiancé, she is so happy, and he really seems pure gold. He has gone back, but she still stays on, and her enthusiasm is contagious; it is such fun suggesting and planning the details of her wedding…” As those nuptials approached, Margaret visited Longman, who, she told Penn, “got out all her trousseaux, all her pretty lingerie and things, and tried everything on. If any one could have seen us capering around in pink silk
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(LEFT) DANIEL CHESTER FRENCH (1850–1931), Evelyn Beatrice Longman, 1918, marble on a marble plinth with gold leaf, 21 1/4 x 7 1/4 x 7 1/8 in., Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, gift of Nathaniel H. Batchelder, Jr. in memory of his beloved wife, Elizabeth Burnquist Batchelder (Class of 1939)
(ABOVE) Daniel Chester French,
1926, bronze, 50 x 61 in., National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; transfer from Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the artist, 1936
to the wedding and hosted it at Chesterwood, where Margaret served as maid of honor. Longman built her own studio, much like Chesterwood, on the Loomis property and named it Chiselhurst-on-Farmington, where she continued sculpting. In 1921, en route to Boston after a winter in Europe and Egypt, French told Longman that he was “crazy to see you to tell you of the wonderful Egyptian Madonna I am going to make (!) and of the wonderful and foolish things I have done and to enthuse over your new studio and all the things you will have to show me!”
pajamas and yellow crêpe de chine chemises they would have thought we’d gone mad.” In 1919, Longman became the first woman sculptor elected to full membership in the prestigious National Academy of Design. French had backed her candidacy and had solicited the support of other members. The following year, Longman married Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, headmaster of what is now the Loomis Chaffee School (Windsor, Connecticut); they had met when he commissioned her to design a marble portrait relief of his late wife. Mr. and Mrs. French issued the invitations
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DEVOTED COLLEAGUES Perhaps the most evocative evidence of their close relationship are the portraits that French and Longman sculpted of each other. His 1918 marble of her portrays an attractive young woman: her eyes are closed, her expression serene and mildly seductive. There is no indication of her identity as a sculptor. French gave it to Longman as a wedding present; it is now at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, and two plaster versions are in Chesterwood’s collection. Longman’s own marble Elizabeth (sold at Christie’s in 2011) resembles French’s portrait of her, as the girl’s solemn expression and downcast eyes exude a similar modesty. At first French protested Longman’s desire to make a portrait relief of him. “Why spend your strength upon rendering me immortal?” he wrote her in 1924. “Keep it for better things.” Having initially sent photographs of himself, he finally agreed to pose in Longman’s studio. The resulting profile includes bas-relief renderings of French’s greatest works: Benediction, Abraham Lincoln, the Melvin and Milmore Memorials, Immortal Love, Africa (from the Four Continents adorning Manhattan’s U.S. Custom House), and The Minute Man. While French’s portrait of Longman lovingly focuses on her goddess-like beauty and facial features, her relief depicts her mentor as an enthroned god surveying his creations. In his roles as a trustee at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and chair of its sculpture committee, French requested the loan of Longman’s early portrait of his niece Louise for the museum’s 1918 exhibition of American sculpture. Two years later, the Met purchased it from Longman. French also oversaw the acquisition of two of her works evoking Hellenistic precedents: her earliest noteworthy accomplishment, a bronze figure of Victory (1903, cast 1908) that had surmounted a dome at M A Y / J U N E
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the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis and earned her a silver medal, and also Torso of a Woman (cast 1911; Chesterwood also owns a bronze version), which was perhaps inspired by his own Artemis. French relied on Longman’s advice for the rest of his life. In 1930 he wrote her about his monumental Andromeda. “Now I am daily expecting from New York an enlargement of Andromeda—do you recall the sketch? . . . It seems rather absurd for an old thing like me to be making such an ambitious image…” He continued to work on it until his death in 1931, and it remains in the Chesterwood studio. In 1945, as Margaret French Cresson was working on a biography of her father, Longman sent a package of French’s letters prefaced with her own thoughts: “He saw so clearly what was good in both the work and character of his fellow-men that his own beautiful soul magnified it.” French and Longman’s correspondence, like their aesthetic exchange through sculpture, reveals a platonic love story, filled with lofty ideals and illustrated through tactile clay. Longman had arrived at French’s doorstep penniless and emerged as one of America’s foremost sculptors, following in the footsteps of her mentor, colleague, and friend. She flourished under his wing, and when she left the nest, she was ably prepared to soar on her own, to “write it large on the wall.” Information: Chesterwood is a National Trust Historic Site located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts: chesterwood.org. All illustrations are by Evelyn Beatrice Longman unless noted otherwise. DANA PILSON is a curatorial researcher at Chesterwood. Her article on French’s daughter, Margaret French Cresson, appeared in the October 2019 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur. She recently curated an online exhibition about Cresson’s life and art, available at chesterwood.org. Her online exhibition focused on Longman and French’s relationship, illustrated with objects from Chesterwood’s collections and archives, will be launched this month. She thanks Donna Hassler, Pat Hoerth, and Thayer Tolles for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Endnotes
1 Adeline Adams, “Evelyn Beatrice Longman,” American Magazine of Art, May 1928, 239. 2 Margaret French Cresson, Journey into Fame, Harvard University Press, 1947, 210. 3 Longman to Margaret French Cresson, c. 1945, Chesterwood Archives. 4 Versions in bronze, plaster, and marble are at Chesterwood. Additional bronze casts are in various museums, including the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey and the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.). 5 French to patron John Gellatly, 14 May 1903. 6 New York Tribune, 29 March 1906. 7 In 1920, Longman sculpted a bust of Alice Freeman Palmer (1855–1902) for the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, an outdoor sculpture gallery in New York City designed by architect Stanford White. Palmer was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887 and an early advocate of higher education for women. French was commissioned to create a memorial to her for Wellesley’s Houghton Chapel (1908–09).
Torso of a Woman, 1911, bronze, 13 1/4 x 4 3/4 x 4 3/4 in., Chesterwood, gift of the Daniel Chester French Foundation, NT 69.38.567
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I N S I D E T R A C K
BY KEITH DIXON
Philosopher in Meditation, 1632, oil on canvas, 11 x 13 in., Musée du Louvre, Paris, photo: Angèle Dequier
REMBRANDT AND THE PANDEMIC
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he first time I took art seriously was 47 years ago, in Paris. I was gobsmacked by a small painting by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Philosopher in Meditation, an apparition that sort of mugged me when I rounded a corner at the Louvre. I saw in it something about myself I hadn’t faced before: the fact that I was, at bottom, lost, adrift. Having removed myself from Richard Nixon’s America and the toxic fog of Vietnam wafting through the evening news, I was clueless about the requirements of my new marriage and career, flat broke and careening around a foreign land, living on boiled potatoes and vin rouge ordinaire. Rembrandt’s unapologetic melancholy had me in its cold grip, and I couldn’t look away. I recall that encounter whenever I apprehend that sense-making is imperiled — that feeling of becoming lost, unspooled. Like right now, during COVID-19. In 2006, the 400th anniversary of Rembrandt’s birth, the critic Robert Hughes observed that another Rembrandt painting in the Louvre, Bathsheba at Her Bath, is the earliest work of Western art to bestow an interior life upon a female nude. This nude is as far away as possible from the polished nudes of Botticelli, Raphael, or Rubens. Rembrandt certainly shows us her flesh, but her nakedness only amplifies the interior anguish of her terrible options. This work heralded an explosion in painters’ capacity to express what it means to be a sentient, suffering human. In his later self-portraits, Rembrandt unsparingly dissects his personal failings, of which we all partake to some degree or another. “I am you; you are me,” he seems to say from the gallery wall. “Just take a good long look at my face.” While many consider Bathsheba and the late self-portraits to be Rembrandt’s supreme works, in my view his crowning achievement is Lucretia, one of two versions of this tragic heroine he painted late in life. The better of them hangs in my hometown at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MIA). In ancient Rome, Lucretia was raped by a general while her husband was away, so she committed suicide. The MIA’s Rembrandt captures a moment just seconds before her death. Typically, what we seek from a narrative scene are affirmations of a timeless principle or ruminations on the human condition. Here, however, Rembrandt gives us the universality of human vulnerability. Today, Lucretia
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Lucretia, 1666, oil on canvas, 43 1/3 x 36 1/3 in., Minneapolis Institute of Art
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Bathsheba at Her Bath, 1654, oil on canvas, 56 x 56 in., Musée du Louvre, Paris, photo: Angèle Dequier
evokes all those photos of quarantined nursing-home residents gazing out from their sealed windows. If you ponder Lucretia while sitting on the bench placed before her, it eats away at you. It breaks your heart. There is nothing like it in all of Western art, save perhaps the etchings and drawings of Käthe Kollwitz. Contemporary scholars and conservators know quite a bit about Rembrandt’s working methods, but for most of four centuries they were shrouded in mystery because neither he nor his students left any notes. Thus began the myth that he was another lightning-struck genius (like Leonardo or Michelangelo) practicing a mysterious alchemy. Thanks to decades of scientific analysis, we now know that Rembrandt was instead a stolid, methodical craftsman; his process was long, repetitive, and painstaking. It was not alchemy. His studio practice required patience and, to use a modern term, grit. My guess is that Rembrandt’s work ethic outstripped his peers’, and while the basics of what he did were in line with contemporary norms, he experimented with his materials brilliantly. Who before him would dare model Lucretia’s F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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dress with a trowel, gouge it with a stick, or pixelate its semi-dry colors by sanding them with a pumice? A genius? No, an adventurer. During this pandemic, it has often felt like we were losing everything — family, friends, home, job, civility, compassion, democracy, the biosphere. As we struggle to pull out of this, we could benefit from the close company of an adventurer, a small pilgrimage into the heart of vulnerability, a journey to a bench before a painting in my hometown museum. Perhaps you will find Lucretia, as I do, a stand-in for the millions of people destroyed by this pitiless virus or constrained by it in cruel isolation. Go see Lucretia in Minneapolis, if and when you can. But please don’t disturb the old man sitting there, particularly if he seems a bit lost. KEITH DIXON (b. 1950) is a former psychologist and health care executive. A student of the Norwegian master Odd Nerdrum, he is now an oil painter based in Minneapolis.
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BY PETER TRIPPI
(OPPOSITE) FREDERICK SANDYS (1829–1904), Medea, 1866–68, oil on composite wood with gold leaf, 24 1/2 x 18 1/4 in., Birmingham Museums Trust, presented by the Trustees of the Public Picture Gallery Fund, 1925
MAD, BAD, AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW
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urrently on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, the exhibition Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement is more than halfway through its triumphant tour of the United States. This intriguing project focuses on three generations of young and rebellious artists and designers whose response to the increasingly industrial world around them revolutionized the arts in 19th-century Britain. The exhibition has been organized by the American Federation of Arts (based in New York) and England’s Birmingham Museums Trust, which holds the world’s largest Pre-Raphaelite collection inside its Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. This is the trust’s largest touring exhibition ever, encompassing approximately 145 works. The project was co-curated by Prof. Tim Barringer (Yale University), Martin Ellis (formerly Birmingham’s curator of applied art), and Victoria Osborne (Birmingham’s curator of fine art). This team has created a handsome 280-page catalogue that illustrates all of the artworks and thoroughly explores the themes they evoke. Together, the paintings, drawings, watercolors, and decorative artworks illuminate the compelling ideas that preoccupied these artists and their contemporaries — the relationship between art and nature; questions of class and gender identity; the value of the handmade versus machine production; and the search for beauty in an age of industry — all issues still actively debated today. The show’s stars include such artists and designers as Edward BurneJones, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Yet one of its most keenly admired works (Medea, illustrated on the opposite page) was made not by one of these bold-faced names, but instead by Frederick Sandys (1829–1904), who hopefully is becoming more familiar to American art lovers now.
YOUNG MEN ON A MISSION
Led by Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848 with the intent to return modern art to the simplicity, clarity, and honesty of European painting before the time of Raphael (1483–1520). The Brotherhood and its circle drew inspiration from literature, the Bible, and modern life. These themes seem uncontroversial today, yet their paintings were harshly attacked by reviewers when first exhibited at London’s Royal Academy; fortunately, they inspired an impassioned, public defense by the critic and reformer John Ruskin that transformed the Brotherhood’s reception. By the latter half of the 1850s, a younger generation of artists, including William Morris and the Birmingham-born Edward Burne-Jones, had launched a second wave of Pre-Raphaelitism inspired heavily by the rich colors, beauty, and romance of medieval art. It is in the section of the exhibition covering this phase that visitors first discover Sandys, who was powerfully inspired by Rossetti though he was only a year younger. Sandys studied art under his father, a drawing master and painter in provincial East Anglia. By 1851, the year he first exhibited at the Royal Academy, he had moved to London. A precocious draftsman, Sandys became acquainted
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with the Pre-Raphaelites in 1857 while working on a parody of a famous painting by Millais. He visited Rossetti in order to get an accurate likeness for that engraving, and they became friends. Sandys actually stayed with Rossetti for most of 1866, but eventually they fell out and Sandys continued pursuing his own successful career in portraiture and illustration.
A PRE-RAPHAELITE STUNNER
Sandys’s masterpiece, Medea, was created around the time he was most influenced by Rossetti. Indeed, its subject epitomizes the type of women (and the portraits of them) that Rossetti called “stunners,” for obvious reasons. Victorian Radicals co-curator Victoria Osborne says this scene was inspired by the classical myth of the prophetess Medea, who helped her lover, Jason, in his quest for the Golden Fleece, only to be abandoned by him in favor of the princess Glauce. Sandys depicted Medea in an agony of pain and jealousy, casting a spell to create a poisoned garment that will consume her rival by fire. The necessary tools and ingredients — including blood, deadly nightshade, a dried stingray, an Egyptian faience figure, and a pair of mating toads — are laid out on the parapet in the foreground. The shimmering gilded background, reminiscent of a Japanese screen, carries reminders of Medea’s past: Jason’s ship, the Argo, and the Golden Fleece itself, guarded by a dragon in the sacred grove of Colchis. Medea was begun in 1866 in Rossetti’s studio, where the two artists shared both space and props. On completion in 1868, it was selected for the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, but was not hung. After an outcry in the press orchestrated by Sandys himself (and possibly intervention by Academy president Frederic Leighton), it was shown there to great acclaim the following year. Today, Medea entices visitors across the room with her haunted gaze and open mouth, the glittering golden screen behind her, and the weird props arranged before her. This is clearly a dangerous woman, but we cannot help but admire her physical beauty, as well as the gorgeousness of her jewelry and gown. There is something particularly expressive about the way Medea’s right hand clutches at the red necklace, underscoring her capacity to stop at nothing to ruin Jason and Glauce. Indeed, classically minded viewers know that Medea proceeded to murder the two children she had parented with Jason, making her the epitome of a femme fatale. Do try to see Medea in person before she returns to England. But don’t get too close — she’s dangerous. Information: Victorian Radicals is on view at the Nevada Museum of Art through May 30, 2021. It will then move to the Frick Pittsburgh (November 6, 2021 through January 30, 2022). For details, visit amfedarts.org/traveling-exhibitions/victorianradicals and birminghammuseums.org. PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur. M A Y / J U N E
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BY PETER TRIPPI
BARGUE ENCORE
AN ACADEMIC TRADITION REVIVED
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or anyone interested in traditional art instruction, 19thcentury culture, or even just superb printmaking, 2021 is now a year of historical and educational significance. After decades of research and planning, the Bargue Encore project has launched with the publication of 10 exquisite lithographs that replicate 10 of the plates in Charles Bargue’s legendary Cours de Dessin, or Drawing Course. The visionaries who have guided this effort to completion are Daniel Graves, director and founder of the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, and Pierre Alloueteau, director and founder of Signus Publishing in southwestern Switzerland. HISTORICAL CONTEXTS First, an essential bit of background. The original version of Bargue’s Drawing Course consisted of 197 loose-leaf plates (prints) published in three phases A black Bargue Encore portfolio with five of the between 1868 and 1871. Each lithocompleted plates graphic plate measured approximately 24 x 18 inches, and almost all were made by the Frenchman Charles Bargue, who among students of design and the decorative arts and, to a lesser extent, stuwas born in the mid-1820s and died in 1883. The crediting on the title pages dents of fine art. Goupil’s son-in-law was the renowned academic painter of the course’s first and second parts is significant: translated into English, it and teacher Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904), who lent his prestigious reads Drawing Course by Charles Bargue, with the Aid of Jean-Léon Gérôme, name to the project. Member of the Institute, Professor at the School of Fine Arts of Paris, etc. Drawing manuals were nothing new at that time, but this program When this project was initiated circa 1864–65, Bargue was a relatively was by far the most successful one aimed at training younger artists and unknown middle-aged lithographer working for the hugely successful designers, thanks largely to Goupil’s worldwide reach through such distriParisian dealer and publisher of reproductive prints Adolphe Goupil bution partners as the New York City gallery M. Knoedler. A century ago, (1806–1893). Goupil conceived and published this project in response to you would just as likely find a portfolio of Bargue plates in the art schools growing anxiety in France over the poor quality of draftsmanship found
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(TOP LEFT) Bargue Encore’s Plate I-8, The Foot of the Medici Venus, marble at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
(LEFT) Bargue Encore’s Plate
I-13, Hand of Voltaire, possibly by Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828) (ABOVE) Bargue Encore’s Plate I-63, The Belvedere Torso, front view, marble at the Vatican Museums, Rome, after a drawing by J.-J.-A. Lecomte du Noüy (1842–1923)
of San Francisco and Cincinnati as in Paris and Glasgow. If your greatgrandparents studied art, they surely encountered it. Bargue’s Drawing Course is a practical introduction to figure drawing that efficiently trains the eyes of its users, who copy its 197 modèles (good examples) in charcoal on paper. These are ordered, more or less, from the easiest to copy to the most difficult, and are divided into three parts. No instructions were provided because it was assumed that atelier masters would already know how to teach with the plates. Published in 1868, the first part contains 70 plates, progressing from parts of the body toward full figures, both male and female. Most of the plates show casts of antique sculpture, though there are also details from sculptures by Michelangelo, Pierre Puget, and other named masters. It was Gérôme who told Bargue which sculptures to draw. Most of the plates contain two images: a finished drawing of the cast, and an outline of it, formed of points, lines, and angles that help students see the subject in the abstract, and that also make it easier to measure. Bargue offers clues on how to manage the essential forms by building up the outline from points on the principal features, then joining them up with straight lines that are easier F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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to measure than curves. He also relies upon raking light to emphasize the subject’s sculptural quality through a progression from lights to darks. The second part of the course was published in 1870 and contains 67 plates of drawings by Renaissance and 19thcentury masters. Again, it was Gérôme who selected the drawings, which include images by Michelangelo, Raphael, Holbein, Flandrin, Bonnat, and Bouguereau, among others. The course’s third and final part was targeted toward fine art academies, where students were required to master the lessons of all three parts before being allowed to sketch from the live model. It was published in 1871, by which time Gérôme had ceded artistic control of the project to Bargue, partly because Bargue had proved himself so competent, and partly because Gérôme was sitting out the Franco-Prussian War in London. Part III contains 60 académies, or drawings of nude or semi-nude male models, shown as full figures only. Most are outlines, without shading or background, again enabling students to measure more easily. Like so many aspects of rigorous academic training, Bargue’s Drawing Course gradually vanished from the world’s art schools as modernism became fashionable in the second quarter of the 20th century. By 1945, most of the plates had been discarded or forgotten, partly because they had become torn or dog-eared through heavy use by generations of pupils. REDISCOVERY In the early 1970s, the American-born and -trained artist Daniel Graves (b. 1949) first learned about such late 19th-century French academic
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(LEFT) Bargue Encore team members Genta Plasari, Pierre Alloueteau, Anki Eriksson Graves, and Daniel Graves
(BELOW LEFT) The project’s
historic Marinoni & Voirin press (7 1/2 tons) was hoisted into the air during its journey from France to Switzerland.
masters as Gérôme and Bouguereau while reading R.H. Ives Gammell’s groundbreaking book The Twilight of Painting, which was first published in 1946 and reprinted several times thereafter. Like the Bargue plates, these once-popular artists had essentially been forgotten, so Graves began
researching them. In the mid-70s, he stumbled upon several original drawings by Bargue (a superb draftsman and painter in his own right) at New York City’s Shepherd Gallery, which is still a rare champion of academic art today. Even then, Graves found the sheets too expensive for his budget, but he was intrigued when Shepherd proprietor Robert Kashey described the once-famous drawing course Bargue had developed with Gérôme. A few years later, having settled in Italy, Graves found and bought one of Bargue’s Drawing Course lithographs at London’s funky Portobello Market. “This sparked my interest in finding the rest,” he recalls, and in 1983–84 he finally obtained permission from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to photograph its collection of Bargue lithographs himself. Getting the resulting shots printed was expensive, so Graves arranged with a Florentine lab to trade one of his paintings for printing the photos. Alas, when he returned to collect them, the shop had lost his negatives. Fortunately, its insurance coverage underwrote Graves’s next trip to London and the cost of fresh film. “This time,” he laughs, “I photographed all three volumes and the Florentine shop printed them without losing anything.” That same year (1984), the California-based art historian and Gėrôme expert Gerald Ackerman (1928–2016) happened to be studying temporarily at the Florentine atelier Graves then ran with the artist Charles Cecil. Graves suggested to Ackerman a reprinting of Bargue’s Drawing Course, illustrated with plates at their original size and explanations of how each contributes to student learning. Back in America, Ackerman learned his publisher was not interested, so he told Graves he should publish on his own. Alas, Graves could not find a publisher either, but he kept using his own photos to teach pupils, frustrated only that their quality and scale simply did not live up to the originals’.
(LEFT) VICTOR ADAM (1801–1866), Interior of Lemercier's Lithographic Printing House, c. 1846, lithographed on paper by Charles Villemin (active 19th century), image: 13 1/4 x 16 3/4 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, gift of E. Weyhe, 1923, 23.13
(ABOVE) In central Paris, the former Lemercier printing
house is now home to the restaurant Brasserie L’Alcazar.
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A close-up of a plate in the Musée Goupil (left) alongside the corresponding plate from Bargue Encore (right). Bargue probably drew on thin Chinese paper resting upon thicker laid paper, which explains why we see the laid paper’s ridge lines only in darker areas.
The cold-pressure stamp applied to every Bargue Encore plate as proof of authenticity
In 2003, Graves was surprised to learn that Ackerman had published a scholarly book illustrating all of the plates, albeit at reduced scale. Though he had not invited Graves to participate, Ackerman did thank him in the acknowledgments. (In the interest of transparency, I was then directing New York City’s Dahesh Museum of Art, which co-published this volume with ACR Éditions in France.) A KINDRED SPIRIT Fast forward to 2018, when Pierre Alloueteau (b. 1956) arrived at Graves’s Florence Academy of Art to learn more about drawing from the Bargue plates. A Swiss artist whose publisher parents had once supervised 750 employees at their own printing press in France, Alloueteau proved to be the ideal ally in pursuing the Bargue vision because he had dreamed it, too. Long before, his family had published original, editioned lithographs created by contemporary artists, and even a book about lithography itself. Soon after Alloueteau had started making his own original lithographs on a 19th-century press, most of Europe’s lithographic ateliers closed, so he pivoted to oil painting; thanks in part to his friendship with the American entertainer Dan Rowan (of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In fame), he landed his first U.S. exhibition in Sarasota, Florida. By the mid-1990s, Alloueteau had learned computer coding and produced the first French CD-ROM devoted to teaching English as a foreign language. Craving projects more artistic, he ultimately created the first online drawing course in French, featuring 63 illustrated units that are equivalent to a 2,200-page book. Shortly after reading Ackerman’s Bargue book, Alloueteau approached the Musée Goupil in Bordeaux to raise the idea of a CDROM offering Bargue’s Drawing Course. Because French museums are government-supported, the curator declined the opportunity immediately, as he would never help a for-profit firm, even though Bargue’s copyright F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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was in the public domain. In 2006 the Dahesh Museum permitted Alloueteau to photograph the Bargue plates it owned, and in 2015 he finally created nine videos about how to draw the Bargue way. He was still not sure he understood the sight-size method used to copy the plates, however, so he was pleased in 2016 to meet Graves at Barcelona’s Museu Europeu d’Art Modern (MEAM) as it launched its annual Figurativas competition and the Art Renewal Center’s International Salon. (Please see page 72 for details on this year’s editions.) Two years later, Alloueteau spent six weeks at the Florence Academy of Art working from a Bargue plate enlarged from the Ackerman book. Over coffee he and Graves discussed their shared hope to work from full-size reproductions, and soon they were setting the stage to realize this dream. Having received a blessing from Prof. Ackerman’s heir, the pair began slow, complex negotiations with the V&A, Musée Goupil, Dahesh Museum, and various private collections, finally securing formal permission to reprint approximately 20 plates. At this point, Alloueteau invited his friend Genta Plasari, a Ph.D. biologist and artist who had excelled at his Bargue course online, to join the project, and between them these two individuals have devoted more than 6,500 hours since 2018. Plasari has contributed her understanding of technical and scientific matters such as photolithography and analyzing inks and papers, and Alloueteau soon approached Patrick Pramil, a Frenchman who had recently concluded 44 years operating a 19th-century lithographic press, very few of which survive. He soon spotted an advertisement for a used press in a remote area of central France, so Alloueteau and Plasari drove 750 miles in winter weather to see it. Their disappointment with it inspired them to seek a historic press more like the one on which the original Bargue plates had been printed, and a while later they located a suitable press just six miles from the first one they had seen. Driving through snow again, this one (manufactured by the French firm Marinoni & Voirin) was ideal, but it took months to price its essential overhaul and organize its transportation from France to Switzerland. (Illustrated here is a photo of the press, which weighs 7 1/2 tons, being hoisted onto a truck.) Not surprisingly, Alloueteau reveres the oft-forgotten history of printing in Europe. He knew Bargue’s original plates had been printed by a leading Parisian firm, Imprimerie Lemercier & Cie, and he tracked down a historical image of its main printing hall, designed by the celebrated
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engineer Gustave Eiffel. This was not quite enough, so he even visited the building itself, now home to a restaurant that retains the distinctive glass roof and interior columns illustrated here. A TRYING PROCESS After Graves identified the Bargue plates that provide the most pedagogical benefits, the team began studying the digital scans that had been provided by museums and private collectors. Many of those historic plates carry technical annotations and instructions that fascinate print historians but are distractions to art students. On her computer, therefore, Plasari began to “clean away” such marks, and more: for each plate it took her three days to eliminate evidence of the paper’s imperfections, retaining only the drawing executed by Bargue himself. In areas of hatching, for example, she had to drag her stylus between each hatch to remove the paper’s coloring and the tiny shadows of its fibers. For areas where Bargue’s line had been obscured, Plasari had to guess his intention and restore what she dared. Even now, the team is reluctant to describe in detail the complex process that required two years of research and experimentation with historical printing techniques, not to mention sourcing lithographic stones with the “right grain” in several European countries. Ever the perfectionist, Graves sought pristine results from the newly restored press, and when it began to disappoint, Alloueteau and Plasari wondered whether they should pivot to the easier offset or giclée methods; they even tried to produce a Bargue plate on a sophisticated photographic printer. In all cases, the results were merely acceptable, never beautiful. Fortunately, Alloueteau contacted Didier Petit, a French salesman specializing in printing equipment who replaced one key part inside the press. Suddenly the quality of its prints soared, and finally the entire team felt ready to visit the Musée Goupil to compare their creations with the originals. The hosting curator blanched when she saw how infinitesimal the differences appeared to anyone but a paper specialist, but she also knew that her institution had already granted permission for the reproductions to occur. Fortunately, the results are in, and they are superlative. (I have examined a portfolio of five plates.) Each has been inspected by Graves
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Florence Academy of Art instructor Dasha Belokrylova demonstrates how to copy a Bargue Encore plate.
and Alloueteau for accuracy of line, value, and coloring of ink and paper. Both men have signed the portfolio’s cover sheet guaranteeing its quality. To prevent counterfeiting, each plate carries a hologram with a unique number and also a cold-pressure stamp depicting a horse. Purchasers also receive a certificate for each plate, which they should store separately. As of now, anyone (be they atelier directors and private collectors) can visit the Bargue Encore website and purchase any quantity of the new plates they desire. Purchasers also receive complimentary access to two online courses, one introducing Bargue’s program and the other the sight-size method (in English or French). In addition, those eager to help students benefit from the plates should visit the website’s Sponsors page, which explains how to donate plates to an Art Renewal Center-approved atelier of your choice. Sponsors are rewarded for their generosity with plate(s) for themselves as well as prominent crediting on the portfolio’s cover sheet and the project’s website. Such magnanimity reminds us that the Bargue plates are not only captivating objects of desire, but also effective teaching tools that still have the potential to impact the future of art. Just for example, illustrated here is an instructor at the Florence Academy of Art, Dasha Belokrylova, using one of the new plates to inspire her students. This project is cause for celebration, so congratulations to the entire project team, and happy collecting to the rest of us. Information: fineartlithography.com/en. Each plate costs $149, and some still have a discounted pre-order price of $115. (On the website everything is priced in Euros and the values cited here reflect the currency exchange rate as of April 6, 2021.) PETER TRIPPI is editor-in-chief of Fine Art Connoisseur.
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BY M AT T H I A S A N D E R S O N
C O L L E C T O R S A V V Y
FIND THE RIGHT FRAME
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t’s a fact: the right frame serves a painting well, expanding and sustaining its spirit. It’s also a fact that if you notice the frame before the picture inside it, something’s wrong. Of course, the artwork’s innate beauty is always there, but its visual impact can change powerfully as soon as it is reframed more appropriately. Alas, as integral as frames are to making a successful statement, too often they receive less consideration from collectors than the wall color or upholstery nearby. Frame-makers should be better respected for their artistry and skill; most are artisans and craftspeople, not just middlemen. Frames as we know them emerged from Italian altarpiece panels in the 1300s, yet framing methods have changed little since then. The process almost always begins with lumber, which is spliced together to achieve the dimensions desired. For hardwood frames like the one illustrated at the far right, the wood is sanded and stained. For more elaborate productions like the one to the immediate right, the wood is cast and then carvers shape that casting, adding gesso as ornament and sanding it. It is then gilded, burnished, and finished. Alas, historical framemakers too seldom marked their creations unless they also created the painting inside; think, for example, of James McNeill Whistler, who so hated the heavily carved frames of Victorian England that he designed his own simpler ones. But beware: not all artists know how to select the right frame, which means that sometimes the frame your painting arrived in from the studio should not necessarily be kept. There are no absolutes in this field, but there are several useful rules of thumb, most of which foreground the frame’s architectural, even sculptural, characteristics. Light, airy, or impressionistic compositions generally require frames with slimmer profiles, more fluid carving, and subtler finishes. Hard-edged or strongly graphic realist images look better in thicker frames that contain the painting’s shapes and weight. Quite rightly, wealthy connoisseurs cherish those well-made antique (“period”) frames that have managed to survive over centuries, but most of us turn to reproductions; composites (“marriages”) of historic and newer materials; or (more likely) entirely new designs. Interestingly, cost is not always a guarantee of appropriateness: sometimes that rare frame is not as suitable as the $100 model you can buy “off the shelf.” Fortunately, almost every U.S. region now has at least one museumquality framing workshop. As an art capital, New York City is blessed with many, including APF Munn, Art & Frame of New York, Bark Frameworks, City Frame, Diego Salazar Antique Frames, Drummond Framing, Eli Wilner & Company, Gill & Lagodich, The House of Heydenryk, and Lowy (also in Palm Beach). In London there is Arnold Wiggins & Sons, and in Washington, D.C., Gold Leaf Studios. But you can also find great F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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At California’s Holton Studio Frame-Makers, an oil painting by Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) was transformed in visual impact just by changing its frame. During a rough journey, the too-bright gilded frame at left had lost some of its ornament made of “compo,” a standard (and fragile) mix of sawdust, whiting, and glue that adheres the molded decoration to the frame’s wooden core. Holton carved the more rustic frame at right from quartersawn white oak and stained it dark to lead the eye into the (lighter) painting, which was then accentuated with a touch of pale gold leaf at the frame’s sight edge.
workshops in far-flung areas including — just for example — Bitterroot Frames (Hamilton, Montana), Masterworks Frames (Orem, Utah), and Wallis Brothers’ Framing (Nibley, Utah). Illustrated above is an inspiring success story from Timothy Holton at Holton Studio Frame-Makers (Emeryville, California), who has won a national reputation by championing the superiority of hardwood to gold, which — though less ubiquitous than before — is still prevalent. For the past 20 years, scholars have been churning up valuable information on how past generations framed their art. That’s great, but some folks have taken it too far. We should definitely employ our new understanding of historical tastes, but we should also rely on our eyes and visceral reactions to make the right choice. Fortunately, most firms now have digital software enabling you to “drop” a photo of your painting into their frames so that you can see what the visual effect will be. It’s a fascinating process, and anyone who loves art should give it a try soon. MATTHIAS ANDERSON is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.
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ART IN THE WEST
SPRING IS IN THE AIR FROM THE PLAINS AND BEYOND
OGALLALA, NEBRASKA americanplainsartists.com petrifiedwoodgallery.com through May 22
The nonprofit organization American Plains Artists (APA) is presenting its Signature Show in partnership with the Petrified Wood Gallery. On view are representational artworks made with traditional media that depict the Great Plains region — its landscape, wildlife, people, and ways of life in both historical and modern times. The exhibitors are 22 APA Signature Members who live throughout the U.S. When the exhibition opened in March, awards juror Don Dernovich faced a difficult challenge choosing among its high-quality works. Ultimately, he bestowed the honor of Best of Show upon Comfort Mood, an oil painting created by Sherry Blanchard Stuart of Scottsdale. The Arrowhead Award, chosen by the management of the Petrified Wood Gallery, went to General’s Game, a work in colored pencil by Eileen Nistler of Upton, Wyoming. The Signature Members themselves presented the Golden Spur Award to J. I. McElroy of Gurley, Nebraska, for her acrylic painting titled Grand Autumn Day. Finally, the special Ogallala Award was given to Prairie Wind, an oil painting by Barbara Summers Edwards of Smithfield, Utah.
ANNE PEYTON (b. 1952), Rushing Water, 2016, acrylic on Gessobord, 20 x 16 in.
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FORTY-NINE AND COUNTING OKLAHOMA CITY nationalcowboymuseum.org/prixde-west June 7–August 8
The National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum is set to launch its 49th annual Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition & Sale, always one of the field’s highest-quality events. Opening on June 7 will be a display of more than 300 paintings and sculpture created by nearly 100 invited talents, including special guest artists Thomas Blackshear II, Huihan Liu, and Roseta Santiago. These works depict landscapes, wildlife, figures, portraits, and momentous moments in Western history and lore. The real action will get underway on the weekend of June 25–26, when collectors in person and online will enjoy a range of seminars, receptions, award presentation, trunk shows, and of course the live auction. Health safety protocols will be in place for everyone on site. To make reservations, see the full schedule, or to arrange to bid by proxy, please visit the museum’s website.
MATT SMITH (b. 1960), Autumn Moon, 2020, oil on linen, 14 x 18 in.
TWO WESTERN MASTERS SANTA FE manitougalleries.com June 4–26
Manitou Galleries will soon present a show highlighting recent paintings by Jerry Jordan (b. 1944) and Jeremy Winborg (b. 1979). Jordan grew up in west Texas and was inspired to paint professionally while still a teenager through a chance encounter with the older artist W.R. Thrasher. He first visited Taos in 1963 and was immediately impressed by its sweeping landscapes, the architecture of Taos Pueblo, and the region’s remarkable residents. Now a longtime New Mexican himself, Jordan has closely studied the masterworks of the early 20thcentury Taos School and absorbed their lessons in order to make paintings that are uniquely his own. Winborg grew up in Utah working in a studio alongside his illustrator father, and he still lives in Utah. He began depicting Native American figures in earnest when his Navajo niece, Layla, was born. Today Winborg is well known for images like the one illustrated here, which shows a Native woman dressed in authentic traditional clothing and rendered with an intriguing blend of tight realism and bold abstraction.
JEREMY WINBORG (b. 1979), Up in Arms, 2021, oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in.
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WRIT TEN BY DAVID MASELLO
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NIAMH BARRY Lighting designer and sculptor Photo: Simon Watson
Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy DAVID HOCKNEY (b. 1937) 1970–71, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 120 in. Tate, London; presented by the Friends of the Tate Gallery, 1971, T01269 © David Hockney, photo © Tate
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hile some people metaphorically light up a room — as the expression goes — with their personality or sheer presence, Niamh Barry actually does light up a room. In fact, as the Dublinbased designer says of her preferred medium of LED technology, “It allows me to write with light.” Barry’s polished and patinated bronze fixtures are as much sculpture as sources of light, some assuming the presence of abstract objects seemingly floating in space, magically aglow. Not surprisingly, light is something she thinks about whenever she’s looking at art; she says, “Light in my life is very important and I’m always drawn to it.” Even as a young girl she was drawn to a rectangle of daylight that pours through an open window into a bedroom in one of her favorite paintings, David Hockney’s Mr. and Mrs. Clark and Percy (1970–71), which hangs at Tate Britain in London. Barry first saw it in an art book in her parents’ house, and even then she knew it reflected something about her own household at the time. “I grew up in a bohemian, creative home,” she recalls, “with my mother and my father equally successful creatives. There was a dynamic between the two figures in the painting that I could relate to, though I didn’t understand it then. The painting represents to me some of the ways I grew up in a home.”
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Hockney depicts two friends of his, Ossie Clark (1942–1996), at the time a noted dress designer, and his wife, Celia Birtwell (b. 1941), an equally noted textile designer, along with their (indifferent) cat, Percy. Despite their successful creative collaboration and their appearance in a bedroom, the couple divorced shortly after Hockney completed the painting. Barry notes that her own parents divorced when she was 13, not long after she first spotted Hockney’s image. “The stance of Mrs. Clark looks assertive, while Mr. Clark is laid back — that dynamic between the two of them is something I can relate to.” When Barry finally saw the real painting in London, she was astonished that it is nearly life-size. “Because of its scale and the way the figures look out, the viewer is immediately engaged,” she says. “You feel you are actually a part of it, drawn into their room. To see the painting is to have an experience of being inside, as opposed to observing the room and the figures.”
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As an active artist and artisan herself, Barry appreciates that David Hockney, now 83, remains productive. She cites his ready embrace of new technologies, notably his iPad drawings. “I admire his ingenuity and his engagement with life and making art.” While perusing a photo of the painting she has pinned to her studio wall, Barry remains entranced by certain details — “the way Ossie’s toes are anchored deeply into the rug, the physicality of his legs, how he’s positioned in the chair, the way the cat is perched and in command.” And in assessing the light coming from the balcony through the louvered shutters, Barry is aware of how “the light is balanced, with backlighting and light coming directly across Ossie.” Barry is convinced that the Clarks want viewers to be a part of the dynamic between them, whatever that might be. As she says, “Given the scale and gazes of the subjects, you’d never be lonely if you owned this painting and had it hanging in your home.”
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A RT EV E RY W H E R E Eakins’s Hauling the Net, Gloucester, 1881, photograph with drawing (above) and Shad Fishing at Gloucester, 1881, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art (below) Julio Reyes (b. 1982), Firefly, 2021, egg tempera on panel, 14 x 16 in.
Natalie Dark (b. 1990), Take Me to Capri, 2020, colored pencil on paper, 15 x 22 in.
Lifting the Sky
American Women Artists National Online Juried Show americanwomenartists.org May 20–August 21 The nonprofit organization American Women Artists (AWA) is hosting its National Juried Show online this year. More than 2,200 entries were received from 675 artists, and the resulting exhibition features 155 paintings and sculptures by artists living across the U.S. and Canada. The show opens on May 20 with a virtual walkthrough, followed two days later by the awards ceremony. On offer online during its run will be demos, talks, studio tours, a reception, and even a paint-and-sculpt-along. A digital catalogue is also available. AWA has offered encouragement to female artists since it emerged from the Women Artists & the West exhibition series mounted by the Tucson Museum of Art (TMA) between 1991 and 1994. Since then, AWA has expanded beyond the Western genre to embrace representational and abstract artists from all regions of the U.S. and Canada.
Julio Reyes: Recent Paintings Arcadia Contemporary New York City arcadiacontemporary.com May 22–June 13
The artist Julio Reyes is celebrating his 10th anniversary with Arcadia Contemporary with a show of new paintings. Both partners moved recently: the gallery from California to Manhattan, and the artist from California to Texas with his wife (and equally gifted fellow artist), Candice Bohannon. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Reyes is of Mexican heritage: his father was born to immigrants in the U.S. and earned an Ivy League education, eventually becoming a doctor. Reyes’s mother picked grapes upon arriving, and many members of that family experienced oppressive poverty. Earning his B.F.A. from Laguna College of Art and Design was not an obvious career choice for Reyes, but one that has yielded extraordinary artworks ever since.
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Often depicting lone figures in a landscape, Reyes depicts, in his own words, “intimate dramas, revealing brief moments of unnoticed grandeur, tender souls grappling with the pressures of modern life.” Even his landscapes and still lifes evoke hidden meanings that intrigue yet somehow do not necessitate explanation. Reyes writes, “I have always been moved by the human capacity to love, dream, and persevere, with great courage and sincerity, in spite of what can seem like a vast and unsympathetic Nature. To a cynical art world, that may sound silly, but to me it is one of the miracles, and beautiful mysteries, of life.”
Lisa Lebofsky (b. 1978), At Sea II, 2020, oil on aluminum, 6 x 8 in.
Shades of Blue
Portraits, Inc. and Beverly McNeil Gallery Birmingham, Alabama portraitsinc.com and beverlymcneilgallery.com through May 21 The color blue offers endless possibilities to visual artists, no matter their subject matter or style. On view at Portraits, Inc. are oils, watercolors, and drawings that highlight its expressive impact, psychic depth, evocations of sea and sky, and much more. This theme was addressed in a 2015 show at the New York City outpost of Portraits, Inc., and more recently at New York Artists’ Equity Gallery. The current presentation is so large that it spills over to the Beverly McNeil Gallery nearby.
Thomas Eakins in New Jersey John F. Peto Studio Museum Island Heights, New Jersey petomuseum.org May 1–June 27 M A Y / J U N E
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Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), the great realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and instructor, is closely associated with Philadelphia. But he also spent time in New Jersey, using his brush and camera to record activities he enjoyed in its marshlands, as well as the rigorous labor undertaken by its shad fishermen. The circle of male students around Eakins included Edward Boulton of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, who later received a group of photographic prints and oil studies from Eakins and his wife, Susan. Now Boulton’s descendants have loaned these treasures to the John F. Peto Studio Museum, where curator Harry Bower has partnered with Roy Pedersen of Pedersen Galleries (Lambertville, New Jersey) to organize the first presentation anywhere about Eakins’s New Jersey works. Particularly fascinating are the juxtapositions of Eakins’s photographs and paintings, as suggested by the pair illustrated here. The museum is an ideal venue for this project as it was the home of Eakins’s near-contemporary John Frederick Peto (1854–1907), the renowned painter of trompe l’oeil still lifes. Adorned with Peto’s artworks and original furnishings, it stands in the historic center of Island Heights.
The Sleeve Should Be Illegal & Other Reflections on Art at the Frick delmonicobooks.com and artbook.com
In New York City, well-justified praise has gone to Frick Madison, the Frick Collection’s new temporary pop-up in the brutalist building originally designed for the Whitney Museum of American Art. Comparatively under the radar has been the latest creation of the Frick’s inventive editorin-chief, Michaelyn Mitchell, a 168-page book in which 62 noteworthy individuals explain why a Frick-owned artwork holds personal significance to them. The idea was sparked by the artist Darren Waterston, who recalled over dinner his annual visits to commune with Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert. The book’s unusual title is lifted from writer Jonathan Lethem’s intriguing contribution about Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, whose sleeve appears on the cover. 2 0 1 7
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An Irish immigrant who became a widow with four children in New York City, Greatorex rolled up her sleeves and worked hard. During her long career she became a member of the Hudson River School, co-founded an artists’ colony in upstate New York, documented architectural landmarks that were being demolished, visited Colorado to hike and sketch in the Rockies, and traveled from Germany to Morocco painting what she saw. Ultimately Greatorex was elected the sole living female member of the National Academy of Design, and exhibited at the Paris Salon long before Mary Cassatt. At last, these achievements are summarized and analyzed for everyone to appreciate.
Among the other contributors are — as you might expect — artists (e.g., John Currin) and writers (André Aciman), but also musicians like Rosanne Cash and Bryan Ferry, choreographers Bill T. Jones and Mark Morris, fashion designers Carolina Herrera and Victoria Beckham, and — to our delight — Fine Art Connoisseur contributing writer David Masello. The foreword has been written by critic Adam Gopnik. Mitchell says their texts are “by turns confessional, contemplative, academic, even comedic. All are engaging testaments not only to the authors’ affection for the Frick and for specific artworks in the collection but, more generally, to the deep emotional response, inspiration, and enrichment that can come from connecting with a work of art.”
Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery and Imagination in American Realism Georgia Museum of Art Athens, Georgia georgiamuseum.org through June 13
Ivan Albright (1897–1983), The Mirror: Self-Portrait in Georgia, 1971, oil on panel, 16 x 12 in., Myron Kunin Collection of American Art, Minneapolis
Alfred H. Barr, Dorothy C. Miller, and Lincoln Kirstein. Richmond-Mall’s catalogue is a welcome addition to the literature that his forerunners would surely have appreciated.
Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex ucpress.edu
Eliza Pratt Greatorex (1819–1897) was the most famous woman artist working in late 19th-century America, yet her name has been forgotten by scholars and the public. During ongoing research on Gilded Age culture, art historian Katherine Manthorne kept finding references to Greatorex, so she has spent decades tracking her to produce this 352-page biography.
Jeffrey Richmond-Mall, curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art, has truly pulled off a trick: mounting the first exhibition and publication devoted to American “magic realism” since the 1943 Museum of Modern Art show that established it as a genre. From the 1930s onward, an eclectic mix of artists turned to the mysterious, supernatural, and hyperreal in order to examine such pressing issues as workers’ rights, wartime trauma, and environmental damage. They embraced the strangeness and wonder of everyday life, not to escape reality but as a way to engage more directly with it. Though it’s tempting to conflate their sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity, and uncanniness with European surrealism, the two movements were not the same. The works on view have been borrowed primarily from two private collections, though many come from the museum’s collection. Among the better remembered names represented are Paul Cadmus, Philip Evergood, Jared French, and George Tooker, but there are also works by such unfairly overlooked women as Honoré Sharrer and artists of color like Hughie Lee-Smith. The exhibition opens with several paintings that appeared in MoMA’s 1943 show and addresses the ongoing role that museum’s curators played in defining this genre, among them
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Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), Smoko, The Human Volcano, 1933, watercolor on Masonite, 36 x 48 in., Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, on loan to the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
The Virtual Village
New York City southofunionsq.villagepreservation.org/cities/nyc The nonprofit organization Village Preservation has launched The Virtual Village, an interactive app offering nearly 40 free self-guided walking tours and archival photos that bring to life a unique area of Greenwich Village. Almost 200 buildings covering six blocks south of Union Square lack landmarking protections, which leaves them vulnerable to demolition by the tech industry now seeking more office space. This area was a creative nexus where major American artists got their start in now-forgotten rooms and studios. Among them were Willem De Kooning, Jane Freilicher, William Michael Harnett, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Julian Alden Weir. Jackson Pollock lived here in 1931 while selling art on the sidewalk, and the social realist Reginald Marsh was also here in the 1930s leading the “Fourteenth Street School.” Enjoy the app and learn more about the preservation campaign now underway.
Henry Scott Tuke
Watts Gallery Compton, Surrey, England wattsgallery.org.uk and yalebooks.yale.edu June 7–September 12 Opening soon at the Watts Gallery is a rare exhibition highlighting Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929). Famous in Victorian and Edwardian Britain for depicting young men bathing on sunny shores, he learned to paint outdoors M A Y / J U N E
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Henry Scott Tuke (1858–1929), Ruby, Gold & Malachite, 1902, oil on canvas, 46 x 62 1/2 in., Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London
while traveling in Italy and France after study in London. Like many contemporaries, Tuke was drawn to the Newlyn colony in Cornwall, where he recorded the seafaring life endured by local residents. An avid sailor, he eventually moved 30 miles away to the village of Falmouth, where he converted a 60-foot brigantine into a floating studio. Tuke arrived at a unique fusion of plein air painting, vivid coloring, and almost Impressionistic handling, focusing on vaguely homoerotic scenes of un-self-conscious boys swimming and messing around on boats. The resulting pictures capture the chromatic effects of sunlight on skin and won applause at London’s Royal Academy; several works were acquired for Britain’s national collection. Today these images evoke complex interpretations ranging from pastoral to erotic. These ideas are explored in the show’s 160-page catalogue, which features essays by six scholars, including Watts Gallery chief curator Cicely Robinson. On offer this season are talks, discussions, and workshops in drawing and painting the figure en plein air. Watts Gallery — Artists’ Village is the perfect place to organize this project. The site was established in 1890 — when Tuke’s career was flourishing — by the even more famous painter George Frederic Watts and his wife, Mary. The Tuke show will move on to Cornwall’s Falmouth Art Gallery, which Tuke co-founded and which holds a major collection of his art.
Michelle Jung (b. 1964), Kiss Me in the Morning, 2019, oil on linen panel, 36 x 58 in., available through the artist
ultimately earned an M.F.A. from San Francisco’s Academy of Art University. Jung has noted, “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.” Armed with the small studies she has made outdoors, Jung returns to the studio to design and execute her final, larger paintings. Michelle Jung: Making Waves will be accompanied by both a catalogue and a video, and the date of her talk will be announced soon.
The Santa Paula Art Museum is set to open an exhibition of seascapes painted in oils by the Northern California artist Michelle Jung, one that can be enjoyed in the museum and on its website. A decade in the making, its paintings reflect Jung’s fascination with the relationship between earth and water, as well as her passion for the sea. “Every day,” she explains, “I paint from 7:30 until 3:00, with no lunch break, then clear my head with a five-mile run.” That jog often takes her along the Pacific, so it makes sense that the exhibition design will evoke the ocean’s sights and sounds. Born and raised in Connecticut, Jung earned a B.A. in art history from Colorado State University, then interned at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and worked at various galleries. Eventually she co-founded a California insurance agency, from which she has retired. Jung began painting, at age 40, in workshops and F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Larry Hughes: A Walk in the Parks
Customs House Museum & Cultural Center Clarksville, Tennessee customshousemuseum.org through July 18 The Customs House is highlighting the impressive watercolors, drawings, and oil paintings created by Memphis artist Larry Hughes during residencies at six National Parks and Monuments. He recalls his experiences there as “magical,” and that sensibility pervades these luminous visions of the desert’s pinkish tones, the green and gold grasses flanking riverbeds, and more. Having spent much of his life in Arizona and California, Hughes has always gravitated toward the grandeur of Western wilderness, particularly the Grand Canyon, Sonoran Desert, Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas, and Northern New Mexico. Thanks to his earlier career in exploration geophysics, he fully understands what he sees in nature — not only the appearance, but also its essence. After developing studies outdoors, he returns to the studio to make finished works. The Customs House exhibition will guide visitors through that entire process.
Michelle Jung: Making Waves Santa Paula Art Museum Santa Paula, California santapaulaartmuseum.org June 5–September 12
Larry Hughes (b. 1953), Kiva, Oak Tree House, 2017, watercolor on paper, 14 1/4 x 12 in.
Kristy Gordon (b. 1980), Whisper, 2020, oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in.
Kristy Gordon: Planetary
The Langham Kaslo, British Columbia, Canada thelangham.ca through June 6 The Langham is exhibiting recent oil paintings by the British Columbia artist Kristy Gordon, who interweaves motifs from disparate genres and time periods and blends aspects of “high” art, decoration, and illustration. The results are fantastical, sometimes unsettling, scenes that feature unexpected interactions among people, animals, and hybrid creatures in ambiguous settings. Here “camp” motifs such as flowers, unicorns, and fairies conjure a sense of magic and of fluid identities, yet the results are always more thought-provoking than merely “pretty.”
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A Brush of Time: Mario Andres Robinson Paul R. Jones Museum Tuscaloosa, Alabama paulrjones.museums.ua.edu May 7–July 30
The art museum at the University of Alabama will soon exhibit recent and older works by Mario Andres Robinson. Born in Altus, Oklahoma, he moved with his family to New Jersey at age 12. Having earned a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Robinson shifted to watercolors in the mid-2000s and five years ago published the popular book Lessons in Realistic Watercolor: A Contemporary Approach to Painting People and Places in the Classical Tradition (Monacelli Studio). Robinson has become well known for tranquil, sometimes melancholy, scenes of people and places that evoke, yet never mimic, comparably timeless works by
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Mario A. Robinson (b. 1970), Charlestine, 2006, watercolor on paper, 9 x 12 in, collection of the artist
in public since 1906 and complemented by additional loans from the Musée National Gustave Moreau in Paris. Waddesdon is a logical place to show these treasures because it was built late in the 19th century by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in the style of a 16th-century château to showcase his collection of 18th-century furniture, porcelain, and portraits. In 1957 the estate was bequeathed to the National Trust, though the Rothschilds still run it through a charitable trust. The project has been organized by Waddesdon curator Juliet Carey, whose accompanying book has been published by Paul Holberton (London). Jill Brabant (b. 1962), Spring Serenade, 2020, oil on board, 16 x 20 in.
Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Especially insightful are the portraits of African American sitters, who gaze back seriously yet without suspicion. Many live in Alabama, where Robinson’s mother grew up, and where he has spent ever more time in recent years.
Principle Gallery is about to open the 4th Best of America Small Works National Juried Exhibition, organized by the National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society (NOAPS). On view will be approximately 150 paintings, all measuring 320 square inches or smaller. On the opening weekend, exhibitors and guests will enjoy a plein air painting competition and demos by artists Donna Nyzio and Patrick McGannon, as well as a luncheon, awards presentation, and reception. NOAPS was founded exactly 30 years ago by a group of enthusiastic artists and arts advocates including James Baumgartner, Betty Fitzgerald, Kenneth Gerardy, Martha Mitchell, William R. Mitchell, Joseph Orr, Rita Orr, Pete Peterson, Donald Ruthenberg, and Dennis T. Yates. Nicole M. Santiago (b. 1976), Father, 2020, oil on linen, 35 x 35 in.
Nicole M. Santiago First Street Gallery New York City firststreetgallery.org May 25–June 19
Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), Allegory of Fable, 1879, watercolor and gouache with gold metallic paint on paper, 11 1/2 x 9 1/8 in., private collection
Gustave Moreau: The Fables
Waddesdon Manor Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, England waddesdon.org.uk June 16–October 17 Going on view soon at Waddesdon Manor are major works by Gustave Moreau (1826–1898). In the late 1870s, the great French Symbolist was commissioned by the collector Antony Roux to create 64 watercolors illustrating the 17th-century Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. The results were exhibited to acclaim, with one commentator enthusing that Moreau “was a jeweler before he was a painter and who, drunk on color, had ground up rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topazes, pearls and mother-of-pearl to make his palette.” The series was acquired by a member of the Rothschild banking dynasty, but nearly half was lost during the Nazi era, when this Jewish family was persecuted. Now the surviving 34 watercolors are on display, unseen
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Nicole M. Santiago will soon exhibit recent paintings in her third solo show at First Street Gallery. On view will be scenes related to her life and family, always featuring harmonious color and intelligent design. She explains, “I’m always striving to defy the stillness of the painting, to portray a layered narrative where residues of the past and suggestions of the future swirl around the present, creating a kind of ‘thick time.’ To accomplish this, I use the scattered signs of daily existence to reveal indirect insights into the rhythm of everyday life. But that sense of rhythm also depends on the formal structure of the picture itself, where the underlying abstraction must work in tandem with discernible imagery to deliver an engaging image.” Santiago earned a B.F.A. in studio art from Indiana University and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of New Hampshire. For the past 15 years she has taught studio art at Virginia’s College of William and Mary.
4th Best of America Small Works National Juried Exhibition National Oil & Acrylic Painters’ Society Principle Gallery Charleston noaps.org and principlegallery.com May 7–June 1
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Christopher Zhang (b. 1954), Tibetan Girl, 2019, oil on canvas, 16 x 12 in.
Oil Painters of America 2021 Salon Show
Quinlan Visual Arts Center Gainesville, Georgia oilpaintersofamerica.com and quinlanartscenter.org June 10–August 7 Oil Painters of America (OPA) is busy preparing its 2021 Salon Show — more than 225 paintings in a range of styles 2 0 2 1
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and subjects, created by OPA members from across the U.S. and Canada. Approximately 1,500 works were submitted for consideration by the jury, and the awards juror will be two-time OPA Gold Medal winner Charles Young Walls. He will announce $15,000 in cash and merchandise awards during the reception and ceremony on June 10. All of this is occurring at the Quinlan in Gainesville, Georgia, a town of 40,000 residents in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. OPA is a nonprofit organization founded by the artist Shirl Smithson in 1991 and has more than 3,600 members.
William Morris’s Red House (1859–60) in Bexleyheath, London; learn about it on July 10. The Salmagundi Club’s home is in the vulnerable historic district described on page 124.
Augustus St. Gaudens, N.C. Wyeth, E.L. Blumenschein, Thomas Moran, and Maynard Dixon.
than sitting idle, its enthusiastic faculty members have recorded fascinating slide lectures that can now be enjoyed online by anyone after free registration. On May 8, Prof. Richard Guy Wilson will explore the architecture of Louis Comfort Tiffany, and on May 29 Julian Holder will discuss his new book on Arts & Crafts architecture. Edward R. Bosley will highlight the Pasadena architectural firm of Greene & Greene on June 12, and Joanna Banham will explore “The Pre-Raphaelites at Home” on July 10. Ten days later, Pauline Metcalf will speak on the interior decorators Catherine Beecher, Candace Wheeler, and Elsie de Wolfe, while Marta Wojcik will consider Frank Lloyd Wright on August 2.
Warren Chang: Social Realism in California Luis Alvarez Roure (b. 1976), Ondine, 2020, oil on linen, 44 x 44 in.
Luis Alvarez Roure: Music and Muse Stone Sparrow Contemporary Art Gallery New York City stonesparrownyc.com through May 22
Stone Sparrow is exhibiting recent paintings by Luis Alvarez Roure, a New Jersey artist who is also a classically trained pianist. Gallery director Marina Eliasi describes them as “compositions that explore the deep connection between visual arts and music, as well as the influence of one upon the other. Among them are portraits of such renowned musicians as Philip Glass and Steven Isserlis, as well as actors and other artists transformed into visions adopted from classical mythologies.”
Annual Members Exhibition Salmagundi Club New York City salmagundi.org May 3–20
The Salmagundi Club’s talented members will soon exhibit their latest artworks in a range of mediums including oils, watercolors, pastels, graphics, sculpture, and photography. The participants range from seasoned award winners to freshly emerging talent. This organization has fostered creativity since it was founded in 1871. Established as the Salmagundi Sketch Club in the Manhattan studio of sculptor Jonathan Scott Hartley (1845–1912), it has owned its Greenwich Village brownstone since 1917. Among the club’s many famous alumni are William Merritt Chase, Louis Comfort Tiffany, F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
Han Wu Shen (b. 1950), Spring Thunder, 2020, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in.
Han Wu Shen: Out of the Pandemic Quent Cordair Fine Art Jackson, Wyoming cordair.com through June 30
Han Wu Shen has exhibited his oil paintings at Quent Cordair Fine Art since 2003, when Quent and Linda Cordair helped him immigrate to the U.S. Previously he had held a prestigious teaching post at the art academy in his home city of Wuhan. In January 2020, the artist and his wife, Lili, were spending Chinese New Year with their elderly parents, who still reside in Wuhan. Soon COVID-19 began its reign of terror in this city of 11 million people, then spread worldwide. Tuning out the horrors all around him, Han Wu Shen spent his long quarantine focusing on art and brought home six new oil paintings now on view at Quent Cordair. In the face of rising bigotry against Asians and AsianAmericans, the gallery continues to champion artists like Han Wu Shen who illuminate in paint the universally recognizable joys, cares, and hopes that connect all people everywhere.
Victorian Society Summer Schools Online
Triton Museum of Art Santa Clara, California tritonmuseum.org May 22–August 29
Barring another lockdown, the Triton Museum of Art is set to open an exhibition of recent paintings by Warren Chang, who was born, bred, and still resides in Monterey, just 75 miles to the south. This group focuses on homeless people, though there will also be several scenes of California’s industrious agricultural fieldworkers, who have become his signature subject. After spending two years at the University of California, Chang transferred to Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, where he earned a B.F.A. in illustration with honors. He thrived for two decades as an award-winning illustrator in both California and New York, and started to reconnect with fine art in the early 1990s while attending a class led by Max Ginsburg at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts. Chang shifted to painting full-time in 2000, when he returned home to California permanently.
Warren Chang (b. 1957), Essential Worker, 2020, oil on canvas, 32 x 24 in.
victoriansociety.org/lectures
For two summers in a row, the pandemic has compelled the Victorian Society in America to cancel its popular Summer School programs in London, Newport, and Chicago. Rather M A Y / J U N E
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nyartistsequity.org/the-portrait-studio info@nyartistsequity.org
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WILLIAM A. SCHNEIDER
Revealing the Soul AISM, OPAM, PSA-MP, IAPS-EP
“My Wild Irish Rose” 20 x 16 Pastel on Archival Support
Please see website for blog and workshop information
WWW.SCHNEIDERART.COM
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CAROL STROCK-WASSON
PSA • AWA • CPPM
C O W G LO W 12 X 24 PA S T E L
STRO CK WASSON S T U DIO
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317 N Columbia • Union City, IN 47390
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carolstrockwasson.com
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937.459.6492 Cell Phone
CHANTEL LYNN BARBER Capturing Life in Acrylic
Snow Shower 8x6 inches, acrylic on panel Available at NOAPS Best of America Small Works Show, Principle Gallery, Charleston, SC www.principlegallery.com/charleston
To view more of Chantel’s work and for workshops: chantellynnbarber.com | 901.438.2420
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Sara Jane Reynolds FINE ART
Painting the Lowcountry Landscapes of South Carolina SaraJaneReynolds.com 843.442.6929 sarareyn@mac. com
Egrets Nesting 12x16 oil on linen
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DAVID RIEDEL
CATHERINE HILLIS Preserving a moment in time... traditional art with a twist!
Water Jug 26” x 22” oil on linen
Contemporary Still Life & Classical Beauty Leeward Lady, 26” x 19”, Watercolor
Howard/Mandville Gallery howardmandville.com 425.488.8212
Anderson Fine Art Gallery Saint Simons Island, Georgia
ArtzLine artzline.com
davidriedelfineart.com F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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J EAN S C H WAR T Z w w w. j e a n s c h w a r t z p a i n t i n g s . c o m
Rough Surf (detail), 36x36 oil on canvas
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Shades of Blue:
Oils, Watercolors, & Drawings Presented by Portraits, Inc., Equity Gallery, & RayMar Art April 19 - May 21, 2021 2801 6th Avenue S, Birmingham, AL 35233 | www.portraitsinc.com 21-04 Shades of Blue FAC ad.indd 1
4/7/2021 9:07:32 AM
www.nancytankersley.com 410-253-3641 Commissions accepted
Low County Cottage, 36 x 36 oil
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with more precision, notably his railroad crossing signals and semaphores still in active use and directing us toward some unknown destination. - Eric Aho
RICHARD BOYER RED TROLLEY OIL ON BOARD, 30” X 30” Available through MARY WILLIAMS FINE ARTS
Virtual Exhibition begins May 31st at marywilliamsfinearts.com
www.richardboyerart.net
Charlie Hunter: SEMAPHORE Brattleboro Museum, Brattleboro,Vermont June 19-October 11, 2021 Charlie Hunter is known for his time-stained pictures of America’s neglected industrial infrastructure including its railroads - trains, tracks and bridges.The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, which makes its home in the former Union Station built in 1915, is especially well-suited for this long-awaited focused presentation of Charlie Hunter’s paintings. When asked to organize this exhibition my focus went not to his popular loosely handled subjects, but rather to those elements he renders with more precision, notably his railroad crossing signals and semaphores still in active use and directing us toward some unknown destination. - Eric Aho, show curator
Charlie Hunter Instagram: @CharlieHunterArt Facebook: @CharlieHunterStudio
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www.CharlieHunter.art www.brattleboromuseum.org
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Painting distinctive portraits for 30 years
BURTON SILVERMAN www.burtonsilverman.com burton3@gmail.com
detail: Jack and Suzy Welch 48x54 in.
“The swamps, woods, fields, and marshes of the Lowcountry, I could paint it forever and not get tired of it.” “The light and color of the big sky, the calls of the birds, the smell of the marsh, and the breeze off the ocean..”
To see more visit marygilkerson.com Marsh, May Evening, oil on panel
MARYBE NTZ G ILK ERSO N STUDIO@MARYGILKERSON.COM | 803.386.1702
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SUSAN NEESE
KATHIEOD OM.C OM
The Hint of Spring 11 x 14, Oil
SUSANNEESE.COM
AIDA GARRITY www.aidabgarrity.com aida.garrity@gmail.com 614-832-1422 Taking commissions on paintings and drawings
Veronica, 17x14, Charcoal
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Chesapeake Pride, ARC Salon Finalist Watercolor on paper 30 x 22 in. $6,500
Matthew@MatthewBird.com • 410-581-9988 F I N E A R T C O N N O I S S E U R · C O M
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Description: Fine Art Connoisseur half page ad Modification: March 31, 2021 11:23 AM Client May/June Issue
Contact Gina Ward
Version 1
Prints: 4C, CMYK, bleeds full Size: 7.625” x 4.875” Stock:
DON RANKIN www.donrankinfineart.com
Works also on view at BARBARA MOORE FINE ART Chadds Ford, PA
Creek Village 20” x 30” transparent watercolor on paper. Available via artist $9600.
Susan Hediger Matteson
Across the Fields II
F irst P lace • P lein Air Salon • Oct/Nov 2019
12 x 36 Oil
w w w. s u s a n m a t t e s on . c om
Represented by: www.kilgoreamericanindianart.net • www.marywilliamsfinearts.com
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Spring Light 30x30 inch, $5500
Devin Michael Roberts
ONLINE VIDEO LESSONS
W W W.PATR EON.COM / DEV INMICH A ELROBERTS
The Artful Deposit Gallery Celebrating our
35th
Anniversary artfuldeposit.com Bordentown City, NJ Gallerist, CJ Mugavero artfuldeposit@gmail.com (609) 298-6970 Rosie Sparacio - Rosie Pose Photography
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Gary Alsum Bronze Sculpture H O N O R I N G H E RO E S A M O N G U S! A QUARTER CENTURY SCULP TING MEMORIALS & MONUMENTS. CONTACT GARY ABOUT CRE ATING A L ASTING TRIBUTE TO A HERO OR LOVED ONE IN YOUR LIFE . Unsung Heros 27”H 18”W 14” D (Maquette study for larger than life commission.) Honoring Bauxite miners and their families for their invaluable contribution to the victorious WWII effort. Installed at the Bauxite Historical Association Museum in Bauxite, Arkansas. (Both sizes available) GALLERY PARTNERS: Nationalsculptorsguild.com (NSG Fellow since 1992) Knoxgalleries.com
garyalsum.com gary@garyalsum.com
EXPERIENCE ART FROM BEHIND THE SCENES
Waltz Through the Art Treasures of Vienna, Berlin, and Dresden With Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine Fine Art Connoisseur Editor-in-Chief Peter Trippi and Founder Eric Rhoads will lead the magazine’s 11th annual art tour through Vienna and Berlin, with an optional post-trip to Dresden. Fine Art Connoisseur is known for its exquisite behind-the-scenes art trips for collectors and those who deeply appreciate art. See art differently, from the perspective of our editors, who have unparalleled access to places and professionals to make your experience a lifetime memory, Plus you’ll develop deep friendships with like-minded art aficionados. Your Hosts, Publisher Eric Rhoads and Editor Peter Trippi
ATTENDANCE IS LIMITED TO 25 COUPLES OR 50 PEOPLE TOTAL, SINGLES AND COUPLES. BOOK NOW. RESERVE YOUR SPOT NOW
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MAIN PROGRAM: VIENNA, AUSTRIA AND BERLIN, GERMANY • OCTOBER 16-30, 2021
Contact Gabriel Haigazian with The CTP Group / telephone: 818.444.2700
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e-mail: gabriel@thectpgroup.com
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d i r e c t o ry o f a d v e rt i s i n g American Tonalist Society....... 19
Hassard, Ray............................. 61
New York Artist Equity............. 130
American Women Artists......... 27-33
Hillis, Catherine........................ 133
NOAPS...................................... 36-41
Anderson, Kathy....................... 50
Hines, Nancy............................ 67
Portraits, Inc............................. 135
Anikis, Nik................................. 56
Holtzclaw, Paula....................... 50
Postmus, Barron....................... 53
Arcadia Contemporary............ 7
Hotard, Susan.......................... 52
Quent Cordair Fine Art............. 24
Art Renewal Center.................. 54
Hunter Studio........................... 136
Rankin, Don.............................. 140
Artful Deposit, The................... 141
James J. Rieser Fine Art........... 44
Reuter-Twining, Diana.............. 148
Barber, Chantel Lynn............... 131
Jensen, Ryan............................ 14-15
Reynolds, Sara Jane................. 132
Beauty Refined......................... 144
Jill E. Banks Art, LTD................. 6
Riedel, David............................ 133
Bird, Matthew........................... 139
Jonker, JuliAnne....................... 60
RJD Gallery............................... 8-9
Booth Western Art Museum..... 46
Keating, Kathleen..................... 66
Roberts, Devin Michael............ 141
Boyer, Richard.......................... 136
Keefe, Shelby L........................ 129
Rogo Marketing & Communications..... 25
Bradham, Jon........................... 52
Keeler, Brian (North Star Art Gallery).... 51
Schmidt, Ana........................... 60
Bramham, Barbara................... 60
Kirkpatrick, Diana..................... 63
Schneider, William A................ 130
Brinton Museum, The............... 34
Kleinberger, Carolyn C.S.......... 58
Schwartz, Jean......................... 134
Budan, Karen............................ 62
Koch, Philip.............................. 139
Shapiro, Eugenia...................... 67
Buffalo Bill Art Show................ 42
Krimon, Olga............................ 10
Shelton, John........................... 64
Buxton, John............................ 53
Larivey, Chuck.......................... 51
Silverman, Burton.................... 137
C.M. Russell Museum............... 13
Le Clerc, Jess........................... 59
Sneary, Richard........................ 132
California Museum of Fine Art.4
Lee, Joyce................................ 65
Stolper, Luba............................ 67
Camhy, Sherry.......................... 147
Maitz, Don................................ 66
Stratton, Thalia......................... 53
Cannon, Larry.......................... 59
Mangi, Johanne........................ 65
Strock-Wasson, Carol............... 131
Cannon, Larry.......................... 2
Mark Shasha Studio Gallery..... 11
Tankersley, Nancy.................... 135
Clement, Tobi........................... 143
Marrucchi, Alessandra............. 61
Teare, Brad............................... 43
Coulson, Shar........................... 35
Mary Williams Fine Arts............ 47-49
Ten One Gallery........................ 23
Crain, Kay................................. 52
Matsumoto, Edi........................ 58
Van De Slijke, Shahnez............. 57
Customs House Museum & Cultural
Matteson, Susan Hediger........ 140
Vienot, Joan............................. 143
Center...................................... 134
McGraw, Kate........................... 65
Visscher, Kari............................ 66
Diment, Kim............................. 62
McVicker, Jim........................... 55
Vovk, Liliya Muglia.................... 18
Drewyer, Christine................... 5
Murfee, Chelsie........................ 63
Wagner, Jill Stefani................... 51
Frein, Tracy............................... 63
National Cowboy & Western Heritage
Wells, J. Russell........................ 129
Garrett, Tina............................. 45
Museum.................................... 17
Werneck, Daniela..................... 64
Garrity, Aida............................. 138
National Museum of Wildlife Art
Gary Alsum Bronze Sculpture.. 142
National Sculpture Society...... 26
Gilkerson, Mary........................ 137
Neese, Susan............................ 138
Griffin, Patricia A...................... 21
Nentwig, Judith........................ 52
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West, Mary K............................ 62 Xu, Sarah Weizhen................... 64
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C L A S S I C
J O H N P. L A S A T E R I V ( b . 1 9 7 0 ) , A l l I N e e d , 2 0 1 9 , o i l o n muslin, 24 x 18 in., private collection
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SHERRY CAMHY
“Cinderella” silverpoint sherrycamhy.com
sherrycamhy@gmail.com
C u t t i n g H o r s e 11” H x 24” W x 15” D (28 x 61 x 38 cm) Bronze (Cire perdue) Available as trophy or monumental size
www.bronzed.net | dreutertwi@aol.com | 803-824-9123