Fine Art Connoisseur Nov/Dec2022

MARK WHITE FINE ART

Mark White, Malibu Broad Beach 24 x 36, Oil on Canvas

To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line; drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that.

— Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867)

Celebration of fine art

Visit celebrateart.com

Live Event: Jan. 14–Mar. 26, 2023 | Open Daily 10am–6pm Loop 101 & Hayden rd, Scottsdale, Az 480.443.7695

Learn about our juried artists, view their work and add to your collection by experiencing our show virtually at celebrateart.com.

Where Art Lovers & Artists Connect

Pete Tillack, Stolen Moment, 34 x 40 in.

Pete Tillack Stolen Moment 34 x 40 in.

PUBLISHER

B. Eric Rhoads bericrhoads@gmail.com Twitter: @ericrhoads facebook.com/eric.rhoads

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917.968.4476

Brida Connolly bconnolly@streamlinepublishing.com 702.665.5283

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Matthias Anderson A llison Malafronte

Kelly Compton Da vid Masello

Max Gillies Louise Nic holson

Daniel Grant Char les Raskob Robinson

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Kenneth Whitney kwhitney@streamlinepublishing.com 561.655.8778

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EDITOR, FINE ART TODAY

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Topaz Sapphire

Garnet

through May 14

Old Lyme, CT • FlorenceGriswoldMuseum.org

Edmund Greacen (1876-1949), The Lady in the Boat (detail), 1920. Oil on canvas. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of the Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company

Painting the Faces of Chautauqua

by Katherine Galbraith, PSS

Opening Reception November 11, 2022 from 5-8pm

The Westfield Train Station, Westfield, New York 14787

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The exhibition will showcase more than 30 portraits of residents of Chautauqua County, NY, including fire fighters, teachers, lawyers, farmers, children, and grandparents. All are people who ordinarily would never have their portraits painted. Each portrait is 14x11”, on wood panel, painted from life in one 3 hour sitting.

Enjoy the art, conversation, and ambiance of the historic train station. For more information, please contact: Katherine@KatherineGalbraithFineArt.com

katherinegalbraithfineart.com

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Rick Reinert

Olga Krimon

Nancy Seamons Crookston (OPA Master) Sculpture Garden Gallery Reinert Fine Art proudly hosts

005 Frontispiece: Alexandre-JeanBaptiste Hesse

018 Publisher’s Letter

022 Editor’s Note

025 Favorite: Suzanne Tucker on Henri Matisse

107 Off the Walls

130 Classic Moment: Burton Silverman

045

ARTISTS MAKING THEIR MARK: FIVE TO WATCH

Allison Malafronte highlights the talents of Marc Anderson, Varvàra Fern, Danny Glass, JuliAnne Jonker, and Angie Redmond.

050

DRESSED TO IMPRESS

By Max Gillies

062

NICK BENSON: STONE CARVING & BEYOND

By Thomas Connors

066

NORDIC REFLECTIONS: THE MARINE PAINTINGS OF EMIL CARLSEN

By Valerie Ann Leeds

074

MARGUERITE LOUPPE: ON HER OWN

By Lilly Wei

079

GIVING IT AWAY

By Daniel Grant

083

GREAT ART NATIONWIDE

We survey 8 top-notch projects occurring this season.

087 IN LONDON, THE COURTAULD GLOWS BRIGHTER

By Louise Nicholson

093 DISCOVERING DUTCH OLD MASTERS IN THE HAGUE

By Peter Trippi

097

FLORENCE: WHERE PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE CONVERGE

By Michael J. Pearce

ADRIAN GOTTLIEB: INSPIRATION & HARD WORK

By Peter Trippi

J O V E W A N G

LPAPA Gallery / Artist In Residence / Solo Exhibition

“The Great American West”

Signature Member Jove Wang

Exhibiton Dates: Nov 3rd - Nov 28th, 2022

The sun casts golden light on the mountains near Ghost Ranch as the day fades into the tranquility of night. Painted from a plein air sketch, the radiance is captured in thick, textural strokes of vibrating color.

BRAD TEARE discovered his love for thick paint at a Van Gogh exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. Fascinated by the impact of the paintings, Teare began exploring texture and now travels the west painting the landscape in glowing, textured color.

Closeup of texture and multiple colors in each stroke.

Above: Fading Light, oil on canvas, 24” x 24”

WHAT ARE YOU BUYING, REALLY?

Why is it that an “artwork” designed by a well-known artist — fabricated by a studio of apprentices and untouched by the artist until he signs it — can be sold for millions of dollars?

Is it the concept that makes these works valuable? The signature? The materials? The artist’s “brand”? And why is it that two artists of equal skill and experience can end up so far apart in pricing and collectability?

I have asked around and found that no one can answer these questions definitively, though there are lots of opinions out there. At face value, a painting is worth only what its materials cost at the art supplies store — a canvas, a stretcher, and a few ounces of paint. In fact, that is all the Internal Revenue Service allows a living artist to deduct on her tax return if she donates her painting to a nonprofit organization, like a museum. Where, then, is the value?

Though I cannot speak for other collectors, I believe the artist’s brand is preeminent; it’s about whether experts and collectors harbor that almost emotional degree of trust in the artist’s quality, importance, and consistency. The higher the price, the greater the intangible value above and beyond that sum, and the greater the potential return when it comes time to sell.

Yet it’s so much more than that.

Plein air artists are often asked why their prices are so high when the potential buyer may have watched them paint that very canvas in just two hours. With apologies to Whistler, the correct response is, “You’re paying for two

hours of work and 40 years of experience.” But, of course, the artist’s brand and following also influence that pricing.

Though it’s impossible to specify exactly why an artwork sells, I do know that when you buy a piece of art, you’re usually buying what author Malcolm Gladwell calls the “tipping point” — the accumulation of 10,000 hours of experience or more. You’re buying the artist’s personality and passion, years of mentorship, study, and experimentation, thousands of failures, moments of frustration and joy, and worries about how to make a living.

Today more than ever, we tend to get caught up in status and resale values, when we should actually focus on the fact that art is personal, reflective of the artist who created it, and appropriate for the collector buying it. Unlike most non-essential purchases, artworks are forms of expression and intercommunication that live on long after the maker and the consumer.

Artists are still a special breed, and we must support them if our culture is to endure. Buying their works literally buys them more time to explore, create, and ultimately give other buyers the same pleasure you’re experiencing. And if you buy a historical work, you’re probably supporting a gallerist who has spent his or her life sourcing pieces to enhance clients’ lives.

You’re also buying what that artwork does for you. Its stimulation of an emotion or a memory surely is worth more than its investment value, though it’s nice to imagine that someday your heirs may benefit tangibly from that value. (In the meantime, they can enjoy

living with something that delighted you, or they can sell it on and replace it with an artwork they prefer.)

Decades later, I still recall several artworks I failed to purchase promptly. Some I simply could not afford at the time, while others I just never got around to buying. Many times I’ve changed my mind and returned to a gallery, only to find the object of my desire has gone to another collector. Those that I have acquired have made my life richer, which is why I’ve never regretted an art purchase yet.

So what are you buying, really? I’m not sure it can be articulated definitively, but you’ll know it — and feel it — when it happens.

B. ERIC RHOADS Chairman/Publisher

bericrhoads@gmail.com

facebook.com/eric.rhoads @ericrhoads

Publisher B. Eric Rhoads, painted by JOSHUA LAROCK (b. 1982), 2018, oil on linen, 16 x 12 in., courtesy of the artist

Wild Now. WILD FOREVER.

The Departure

RYAN KIRBY

SEWE 2023 Featured Artist

FEBRUARY 17-19, 2023 | CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA | SEWE.COM

For more than 40 years, Charleston has hosted one of the most beloved events in the Southeast. SEWE is a celebration of the great outdoors through fine art, live entertainment, and special events. It is where artists, conservationists, collectors, and sporting enthusiasts come together to enjoy the outdoor lifestyle and connect through a shared passion for wildlife. This Is SEWE.

SEEKING AMERICA’S TOP COLLECTORS

Most of the artworks illustrated in this issue have been owned, or will soon be owned, by a living, breathing collector. It is, first and foremost, collectors that Fine Art Connoisseur aims to serve and inspire, and for that reason we have been running lengthy Hidden Collection articles ever since this magazine was founded.

In addition, since 2015 we have highlighted America’s leading collectors of contemporary realist art in a shorter format — two pages dedicated to an individual collector or a couple. So far, this unique initiative has covered 82 separate

collections, and now we are busy planning our next crop, to appear in the March/April 2023 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur.

There are great collections — many still being formed — in every region of this country, and no one person could possibly know all of them. Though our research is well underway and we already have some terrific names in hand, I hereby invite you to send me suggestions or nominations for other collectors. Our criteria are simple: they must be U.S. residents (still living) who have collected, or are continuing to collect, superb contemporary realist art created any time after 1980.

Ideas are welcome from everyone: the collectors themselves, their friends, families, dealers, advisers, curators, etc. Please just send me an e-mail (my address appears on page 8) and I will move it forward. Rest assured that our team is discreet; all communications with collectors will be virtual, and we will not turn up unannounced at their homes to take photos! The individuals selected will have an opportunity to fact-check everything, and in fact they themselves will provide the photos to be illustrated. That said, it ’s our editorial team’s decision who goes in, and who doesn’t.

In every field of human endeavor, role models are essential. Art collecting is no different, and we fully expect to be inspired by what our next group of connoisseurs have accomplished. Thank you for giving this request some thought; we look forward to sharing our findings with you next March.

PHOTO: FRANCIS HILLS

Fond memories: The cover of the first issue (February 2015) that contained a large group of collector profiles.

11.20 - 12.10

MODEL J BY BRANDON SOLOFF [RA 2021]

HORSE FELL WITH RIDER TO THE BOTTOM OF THE CLIFF BY NEWELL

CONVERS WYETH (18821945) [NRA 19081945]

THE JESTER BY WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE (18491916) [RA 18771916]

COME ON OVER DO THE TWIST BY MARSHALL JONES [RA 2007]

ONE OF UNCLE SAM’S ASSETS BY NORMAN PERCEVEL ROCKWELL (18941978) [NRA19211978]

Henri Matisse’s scene of a window open to colorful boats bobbing in a Mediterranean harbor opened a window, of sorts, for Suzanne Tucker. The San Francisco–based Tucker, one of America’s leading and most prolific interior designers, recalls the first time she saw the work known as Open Window, Collioure, as an undergraduate at the University of Oregon. She evokes the classic setting for an art history class, with a slide projector clicking away and flashing images on a big screen in a dimmed room, dust motes dancing in the vector of light. “I was taking notes in the dark, and when this image appeared, I was gobsmacked by Matisse’s use of color.”

While she doesn’t exactly cite the painting as the impetus for changing her major to interior architecture and transferring to UCLA, it does seem as if this scene mirrors much of what Tucker does as an interior designer: her reputation has been earned in part through an exuberant embrace of color, texture, and pattern. “I also remember being struck by the coffee klatch of artists working at that time in the early 1900s,” she continues. “They were all so ingrained with what each other was doing — painting together, showing together, just being jealous of each other. That was such an interesting time

because the whole world of art was changing so quickly. A work like this, revered now, was criticized fiercely then.”

Often cited as an iconic example of fauvism, this particular Matisse, is, indeed, characterized by applications of that movement’s unmixed colors — expanses of the purest shade — and a variety of brushstrokes, some appearing almost haphazard. But Tucker, who works daily choosing color schemes for clients, discerned something else, years later, upon first seeing this painting in person at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, where it resides.

She possesses an uncanny ability to read colors and lighting effects, as if they were words or musical notes. “I love Matisse’s play with the color wheel — his juxtaposition of opposing hues of the wheel.” She points, for instance, to the fuchsia pink wall on the right side and then to the jade green wall opposite. “Those two hues are on opposite sides of the color wheel,” Tucker emphasizes, adding that throughout the work,

color opposites appear on opposite sides of the canvas.

“I first saw Open Window, Collioure in person probably 30 years ago, and then again about a decade ago,” Tucker recalls. “I am still mesmerized by the layers and the textures, how light was captured, and how light plays off the painting. I’m very layered and textured in my own design work, so looking at an artist’s way of treating such variables always fascinates me.”

Tucker’s newest monograph, Extraordinary Interiors (Rizzoli), her third such book, reveals her penchant for creating elegant interiors, many accented with namebrand artworks. While she admits to helping her (typically wealthy and enlightened) clients choose art, and is honored when asked to do so, she prefers to collaborate rather than dictate. “When clients ask me to ‘do’ the art for them, my quick answer is, ‘Sure, but I would prefer you be involved, too.’ Art is so subjective, obviously, and while I recognize that what might not resonate with me does for the client, I am able to respect their choices and understand the purpose the art holds for them. But I really do stress the need and desire to work together on choosing art.”

Many of Tucker’s commissions involve homes with views. “We live in our houses, we live in our apartments, but we don’t live in our views.” Tucker always takes into account those exterior elements as influences for what goes inside the rooms. “You look through Matisse’s window to see the boats in the harbor and the vista beyond, and you realize that we live with our views.” Though his colors are not realistic, she thinks of Matisse’s painting as “a brave use of color which makes for a delightful, happy work.” She says, “Certain favorite artworks are like visiting old friends. You get familiar with each other. You realize you like each other.”

SUZANNE TUCKER

Interior designer

Photo: Roger Davies

Open Window, Collioure HENRI MATISSE (1869–1954)

1905, oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 18 1/8 in. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., collection of Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney, 1998.74.7

F ounded in 1928, The American Artists Professional League is dedicated to the advancement of traditional realism in American fine art, through the promotion of high standards of beauty, integrity and craftsmanship in painting, sculpture and the graphic arts.

San

415.387.9754 | www.landseaandskygallery.com

ROBERT STEINER

Francisco, CA

Glacier, 16 x 24 in., acrylic on aluminum Point Lobos, 16 x 24 in., acrylic on canvas

Represented by Land, Sea and Sky Gallery, San Francisco, CA

LAUREN ROSENBLUM

Marlboro, NJ

Cherished, 48 x 24 in., oil on wooden panel laurensart@yahoo.com | 917.708.0817

www.laurenrosenblum.com

ANNIE STRACK, ISMP, IPAP

Kennett Square, PA Fishing Buddies, 12 x 16 in., watercolor on paper info@anniestrackart.com

www.anniestrackart.com

Visit website for gallery representation

LIN YANG

Brooklyn, NY

Michael D. Green, 24 x 18 in., oil on linen

Self Portrait, 24 x 24 in., oil on linen www.linyangstudio.com

AGHASSI

Glendale, CA

Remorse, 10 1/2 x 19 x 14 1/2 in., bronze info@aghassi.art | 747.272.4796 www.aghassi.art Gallery inquiries welcome

LEE ALBAN

Havre de Grace, MD

Two Cookie Buy In, 18 x 24 in., oil on panel leealban@comcast.net | www.leealban.com

Visit website for gallery representation

AKI KANO

Katonah, NY

Maki, 12 x 9 in., watercolor aki@akikano.com | www.akikano.com

Gallery inquiries welcome

HENRY BOSAK

Gilbert, AZ

Coffee with Close Friends, 11 x 14 in., acrylic on canvas henrybosakdesign@gmail.com | 602.677.0094 | henrybosak.com

Represented by 9 The Gallery, Phoenix, AZ

CATHERINE D. HAFER

Westport, MA

Framed by Forgiveness, 11 x 14 in., charcoal on mounted watercolor paper catherine@haferstudios.com | 774.320.5010 | www.haferstudios.com

Gallery inquiries welcome

PAMELA JENNINGS

Brooklyn, NY

Henry, 23 x 15 in., oil pjenn41694@aol.com | www.pamjenningsart.com

Crystal River, FL

Cougar Rising, 48 x 10 x 20 1/2 in., cast bronze (lost wax) bevdavisart@gmail.com | 914.433.8900 | www.beverlycrymesdavis.com

Gallery inquiries welcome

PATSY LINDAMOOD

Huntsville, TX

Alleyway, 36 x 24 in., graphite on cradled Ampersand Claybord

lindamood@lindamoodart.com | 352.339.2353 | www.lindamoodart.com

BEVERLY CRYMES DAVIS

LARRY A. GERBER

Bellingham, WA

End of the Day, 44 x 34 in., acrylic on canvas gerberart@aol.com | 561.602.0432

www.gerberfinearts.com

JEAN LIGHTMAN

Concord, MA

Emergence, 28 x 36 in., oil on linen jeanlightman@gmail.com | 978.502.4418

www.jeanlightman.com

MITCH CASTER

Denver, CO

Egret’s Water Dance, 20 x 20 in., oil on canvas info@mitchcasterfineart.com | 720.333.1959

www.mitchcasterfineart.com

Represented by Heritage Fine Arts, Taos, NM; Spirits in the Wind Gallery, Golden, CO; Marta Stafford Fine Art, Marble Falls, TX

DIANE R KELTNER

Santee, CA

The Bribe, 19 x 10 x 8 in., bronze drkeltner1@gmail.com | 619.318.9000 | www.dianekeltnersculpture.com

Represented by White Sage Gallery, El Cajon, CA

Everyone has one, so everyone is interested, to a lesser or greater degree. I’m referring to the human body, surely the most important touchstone in the history of art. Artists have been depicting the figure for millennia, sometimes in exacting detail and sometimes vaguely, but always with the understanding that every viewer has a direct connection with the subject — and also a way of assessing the rendition’s accuracy. The ongoing renaissance of realism means that figure drawing and painting have not looked this good in North America for more than half a century. For this issue’s Figurative Showcase, we have really mixed it up stylistically, and we hope you will enjoy this diverse array of approaches.

Nashville, TN

A Moment’s Breath, 16 x 16 in, oil on panel jess@jessica-lewis.com www.jessica-lewis.com

Gallery inquiries welcome

Tustin, CA

Enchanting, 9 x 12 in, oil on panel bakerli63@gmail.com www.echofineart.com

@echofineart

Peter Trippi, Editor-in-Chief

JESSICA LEWIS

ECHO BAKER

MARC ANDERSON (b. 1987) has called the Midwest home since he was a child, having been born and raised in the Rockwellian town of Wild Rose, Wisconsin. The young artist studied illustration at the University of Wisconsin-Stout and then went to work as a freelancer for several clients and publications. Eventually he decided, however, that fine art was more his speed and spent the next several years teaching himself how to paint through a lot of reading, workshops, and practice.

When the artist discovered plein air painting, he found his true passion. Painting outdoors was a far cry from the commercial illustration life and a welcome reprieve from endless hours in the studio. Right in his native state of Wisconsin, Anderson finds all the inspiration he needs, whether he’s painting industrial scenes, local lakes, or sprawling mountain vistas. As he has advanced in his perception and interpretation of his surroundings, the artist has found himself focusing on more conceptual elements. “I’ve been very interested in how light affects color lately,” Anderson shares. “Every scene has unique properties and infinite subtleties that I take great pleasure in trying to capture.”

Take, for instance, Giants of Little America, illustrated here. The foggy sky casting a misty pall on the structures below certainly took

a lot of attention to subtle value and color transitions, as well as compositional accuracy to convey the street-level, wide-angle view. This painting advertises a signature Anderson motif, in that it is about light and atmosphere but also a statement about a sense of place. “Giants of Little America is all about scale and atmosphere,” the artist says. “These feed mills are indicative of small, Midwestern towns, and the juxtaposition of these massive structures and rural communities has always piqued my interest.”

Today Anderson resides in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, where he runs the M. Anderson Studio as a showroom, studio, and instructional space for workshops. His next solo show is set to open at Charleston’s LePrince Fine Art on December 2.

ANDERSON is represented by Bell Street Gallery (La Pointe, Wisconsin), Edgewood Orchard Galleries (Fish Creek, Wisconsin), LePrince Fine Art (Charleston and Naples, Florida), Lily Pad | West (Milwaukee), and Wantoot Gallery (Mineral Point, Wisconsin).

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

MARC ANDERSON (b. 1987), Giants of Little America , 2022, oil on board, 24 x 48 in., Lily Pad | West, Milwaukee

JULIANNE JONKER (b. 1957) was primed from a young age to become the innovative painter, sculptor, and photographer she is today, as she grew up in a family of jazz musicians and creatives who encouraged experimentation, improvisation, and sensitive interpretation. She pursued both classical and contemporary training — first at the Minnesota River School of Fine Art and then with several professional artists in the U.S. and Europe — and today she combines many different disciplines and styles with her own creativity to best honor the subject she is capturing.

“My intention for my art is to serve as a conduit, a visual language for our ability to see and be seen,” the Minnesotabased artist says. “I hope to impart to the work the same beauty I catch a glimpse of when I view a scene or an individual.”

Currently, Jonker is making her works with encaustic, cold wax, and oil paints. This combination of materials allows her to achieve a sculptural quality, creating depth and texture while providing a soft matte patina. “Combining classical and contemporary styles, I use these materials to capture the nuances of each subject’s likeness,” she says. “Working in a rhythm layer by layer, wax and oil combined, I build then excavate, create then destroy, using an array of tools to evoke the history and depth that defines the texture of wax paintings.”

Jonker’s current series, Gods and Goddesses, began during the pandemic, when the artist was deep in introspection considering how to bridge the disconnect and invisibility people experienced during that prolonged period of isolation. Within that collection is her reinterpretation of Bouguereau’s masterpiece Cupid and Psyche (1889), seen through a new lens of inclusion. “The original painting had two little pink cherubs, probably taken from French models since Bouguereau was French,” the artist explains. “My granddaughters and other little people of color rarely see themselves depicted as cherubs, princesses, heroes, or in this case a butterfly/ moth. It’s so important for all children to see their own reflection in the real world around them, as well as in art and media.”

Jonker continues, “I created the little moth/cherub out of my imagination. She represents many ethnicities of brown-skinned little girls. The moth’s symbolist meaning is resurrection and transformation. A moth represents tremendous change, but it also seeks the light. Thus, the spiritual meaning is to trust the changes that are happening, and that freedom and liberation are right around the corner.”

This November Jonker will open a solo exhibition showcasing recent paintings, drawings, etchings, and sculpture, as well as

alternate processes and image transfers, at D Anthony Gallery in Wausau, Wisconsin.

JONKER is represented by D Anthony Gallery (Wausau, Wisconsin), Grande Gallery (Minneapolis), and Jonker Portrait Gallery (Apple Valley, Minnesota).

JULIANNE JONKER (b. 1957),  Cupid and Psyche , 2022, cold wax and oil on raised birch panel, 36 x 24 in., available through the artist

The diverse compositions, colors, and activities of urban street life and the human condition have held the attention of Florida painter DANNY GLASS (b. 1991) for well over 10 years. His portfolio of large-scale multi-figure paintings, individual portraits conveying psychological depth, and drawings in charcoal, graphite, and penand-ink tell of his desire to understand and make sense of the world through the work of his hand.

“Each of my paintings begins with my perception of contemporary society and my experience of truths revealed by that perception,” Glass says. “I invite viewers to empathize with my desire to express today’s truths and encourage viewers to recognize and explore their own truths and emotions as they view my work. I deeply believe that expressive, figurative art can clearly and emphatically communicate with viewers emotionally and intellectually.”

In Crossing, illustrated here, Glass tells a symbolic story through the eyes of someone who is confined to a chair at a busy city intersection. Her countenance is content and watchful, while the expressions of the others show telltale signs of anxiously being on the move to the next moment of their scheduled days. Color plays a significant role here, although only the artist himself likely knows its true symbolism. All the men are depicted in bright blue while the women,

including the woman watching, are in diluted shades of red. Glass asks the viewer to find and ruminate on just these kinds of subtle clues in his visual narratives.

Relatively new to professional painting, in 2015 Glass completed the dual degree program offered by Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he majored in art history and painting. After working as a research intern at the RISD Museum and participating in residency programs, he moved to New York City and earned a Master’s degree in art business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art while maintaining a consistent studio practice.

Today Glass is more committed than ever to using his skills to create images with care and intention that require the viewer to pause and reflect. “In a time when countless images flash before our eyes only to be quickly forgotten, we risk losing touch with the important intuitions and feelings we each have that guide our understanding of the world,” the artist observes. “The choice to commit to images is thus daunting, but for me it is more important than ever.”

GLASS is represented by Beddington Fine Art (Bargemon, France) and Gallery Piquel (New Hope, Pennsylvania).

DANNY GLASS (b. 1991), Crossing , 2020, oil on canvas, 38 x 38 in., available through the artist

ANGIE REDMOND (b. 1987) has been giving a voice to black experience and cultural individuality in America since long before Black Lives Matter rose to prominence. Her figure paintings and portraits have always celebrated beauty in all forms and championed the strength of selfidentity, while calling out injustices and misconceptions with intelligence and positivity.

“I use my art as a means to promote social change, encouragement in oneself, and resilience,” Redmond says. “I use the subject of social justice to insist on change in stereotypes of cultures through the concept of emotions, particularly with the negative way the black body is often viewed and treated in society. I use the psychology of color to emphasize the complexities of human emotions and behaviors.”

Redmond is based in Chicago, and prior to living in the Windy City she earned her B.A. in studio art and oil painting from Michigan’s Albion College, an M.F.A. in painting from Northern Illinois University, and an M.S. in digital art from Knowledge Systems Institute in Illinois. Assimilating the art approaches she encountered during her education, Redmond now uses heavy textural applications of oil paint and bright color to bring to life unseen aspects of her subjects. In Can’t Hide, Won’t Hide My Black – It Starts Here, for instance, the artist’s statement is clear: “This painting is about unapologetically loving yourself and where you came from and not living with the identities placed on you by others.”

Redmond often works in series to convey a cohesive message she feels strongly about, and she is currently developing a body of work titled Who Do You See?, which holds a mirror up to long-held

societal perceptions and judgments. “In a society often consumed with negativity based on different political views, racial identities, or financial statuses, my paintings will continue to emphasize the need for peace,” Redmond says. “My work is focused on people and the beauty in just being, released of the identities placed on them by others. It is not limited to the voice of one culture, but is speaking to all within our community, our society, our human race while we respect our differences and honor our similarities.”

REDMOND is self-represented.

ANGIE REDMOND (b. 1987),  Can’t Hide, Won’t Hide My Black – It Starts Here, 2020, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in., collection of Ceata E. Lash

VARVÀRA FERN (b. 1999) is a sculptor who grew up in Moscow. She studied classical figuration at the Moscow Academic Art Institute and then bravely embarked on a new life in America when she relocated to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Today she continues to live and work in Philadelphia, where she maintains a studio and is completing her M.F.A. at PAFA.

Fern has been a world traveler since the age of 13, and those voyages have greatly shaped her life and art. Her work today is inspired by the idea of movement and travel, in particular roadways and railways, as a means of shifting one’s life and perspective in a new direction. “Traveling is not only a process of going from one place to another, but also an emotional journey,” the artist says. “A person can always find something new in a journey, maybe even happiness. In my work I show people beginning their travel from trauma and unhappiness to finding themselves and reaching harmony.”

The artist’s most recent series, Travel, fully expresses these sentiments. In Travelers, shown here, three figures make their way uphill along a winding railroad track, with luggage and hopes for a new horizon in tow. “This work was inspired by my own travel experience and my love of road landscapes,” Fern says. “It’s also a reference to trainhopping, which I feel is one of the most beautiful, albeit dangerous, ways to travel. It

requires absolute trust and spiritual freedom, as train-hoppers never know exactly where a train is going to bring them. Sometimes a person has to be at a certain level of risk or even despair to make this kind of journey. At the same time, travel always helps one find something new, and maybe this will be harmony and happiness.”

Aesthetically, the artist also finds railroads fascinating because of their mesmerizing, sculptural shapes. To create her interpretations of these structures, Fern opts for working in oil-based clay, a medium that she has used since childhood and therefore is second nature to her. “This material is like a language that I can speak fluently,” Fern explains, “so it allows me to give full form to all of my ideas and imagination.”

FERN is self-represented.

VARVÀRA FERN (b. 1999),  Travelers , 2022, resin, acrylic, and steel, 23 x 18 x 22 1/2 in., available through the artist

BY MAX GILLIES

DRESSED TO IMPRESS

Depicting the human figure convincingly is a challenge that confronts many realist artists on a regular basis. After all, the body is at the center of our very being, and we can all see when a hand doesn’t look “right” or a head seems out of proportion to the body. Artists who do it well deserve our admiration, and even more so when they complement the figure with a costume — a garment other than the usual “street clothes,” that is in some way performative or staged, that helps a “mere” person transform into someone else.

The artist’s challenge here is not so much selection of the costume — for example, we all expect a clown to wear a red nose — but to ensure that the essential humanity of the person is not drowned out by that garment. In the fashion world, they sometimes say, “That outfit is wearing you,” and they don’t mean it as a compliment.

In this portfolio, then, we present an array of recent artworks that deftly balance all of these competing factors. Diverse as they are, all reveal how clothing helps us to discern a person’s identity more clearly, to better appreciate both their uniqueness and their fundamental connection to the rest of humankind.

MAX GILLIES is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur.

TODAY’S MASTERS

HEATHER ARENAS (b. 1969), Belly Dancer, 2020, oil on birch, 20 x 16 in., available through the artist

KEN CADWALLADER (b. 1971), It's All in the Cards , 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 24 in., Hildt Galleries (Chicago)

(CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE) CHANTEL LYNN BARBER

(b. 1970), Come and Find Me , 2021, acrylic on panel, 20 x 16 in., private collection

ANDREAS CLAUSSEN

(b. 1988), Ready for the Flood, 2022, oil on canvas, 63 x 47 in., private collection

TERRY STRICKLAND

(b. 1960), Phoenix Rising , 2022, oil on panel, 16 x 12 in., 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago)

ALEXANDRA

MANUKYAN (b. 1963), The Wrinkled Sea Beneath Her Crawls , 2022, oil on linen, 36 x 18 in., Abend Gallery (Denver)

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) DARYA DOLGAREVA (b. 1991), Tempting the Virtuous , 2022, oil on wood, 25 4/5 19 3/4 in., available through the artist KIMBERLY DOW (b. 1968), Charlie Steals the Show, 2020, oil on panel, 29 x 14 in., 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago) NANETTE FLUHR (b. 1965), Autumn , 2022, oil on Masonite, 21 4/5 x 18 in., 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago)

ROSE FRANTZEN (b. 1965), Attending , 2022, oil on linen, 72 x 48 in., available through the artist

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) ADRIAN AGUIRRE (b. 1980), Control de Tráfico , 2020, oil on canvas, 42 x 32 in., private collection VINCENT N. FIGLIOLA (b. 1936), Gregory, 2022, oil on canvas, 26 x 28 in., available through the artist VICTOR GADINO (b. 1949), Pandora , 2021, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in., available through the artist BARBARA HACK (b. 1957), It’s a Man’s World , 2020, oil on canvas, 22 x 21 in., available through the artist

(TOP) CARA DEANGELIS (b. 1985), Out of Falling Water, 2020, oil on linen, 48 x 70 in., MM Fine Art (Southampton, Long Island) (LEFT) CORNELIA HERNES (b. 1979), Storyteller, 2016, chalk and charcoal on toned paper, 24 x 18 in., available through the artist (RIGHT) GEOFFREY LAURENCE (b. 1949), The Brother, 2016, oil on canvas, 38 x 28 in., available through the artist

(ABOVE) CHRISTOPHER LOPRESTI (b. 1983), French Maid in Drag , 2018, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in., private collection (FAR LEFT) JILL BANKS (b. 1958), Joyful Dance , 2022, oil on linen, 36 x 24 in., available through the artist (LEFT) KEVIN MACPHERSON (b. 1956), Tibetan Mama , 2022, acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in., available through the artist

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) LORENA LEPORI (b. 1974), The Barbie Doll , 2021, oil on canvas, 78 3/4 x 47 1/4 in., 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago) TRACI WRIGHT MARTIN (b. 1980), Huntress , 2022, charcoal and pan pastel on paper, 18 x 18 in., 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago) DOUG WEBB (b. 1946), Daughter of Woman , 2022, acrylic on linen, 20 x 16 in., 33 Contemporary Gallery (Chicago) LINDA H. POST (b. 1950), Soliloquy, 2021, oil on panel, 16 x 16 in., available through the artist

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) DEBBIE KORBEL (b. 1964), Wings of Thunder, 2017, mixed media sculpture (including steel, copper, aluminum, and resin), 8 ft. x 8 ft. x 24 in., Ernie Wolfe Gallery (Los Angeles) VAL SANDELL (b. 1952), Canary Islander Descendant, 2020, oil on linen, 32 x 20 in., available through the artist WILLIAM SCHNEIDER (b. 1945), Robber Baron , 2018, pastel on sanded support, 20 x 16 in., collection of the artist MARK R. PUGH (b. 1979), November, 2021, oil and ink on linen, 20 x 30 in., private collection

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) YVONNE MELCHERS (b. 1948), Siena Palio XVIII (Tartuca/ Turtle) , 2021, oil on linen, 15 3/4 x 19 3/4 in., available through the artist JENNIFER STOTTLE TAYLOR (b. 1967), Ted Clayton , 2021, oil on linen, 30 x 10 in., private collection ZHIWEI TU (b. 1951), A Hope , 2022, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in., Reinert Fine Art & Sculpture Garden Gallery (Charleston)

(LEFT) DIANA CAROLINA LOPEZ (b. 1982), Ariel: Valiant Awakenings , 2020, oil on canvas, 40 x 23 1/2 in., available through the artist (TOP) J. RUSSELL WELLS (b. 1954), Raven , 2022, oil on linen, 20 x 16 in., available through the artist (ABOVE) R. GREGORY SUMMERS (b. 1957), Pushmataha: Final Breath , 2020, oil on canvas, 18 x 14 in., Rice Gallery of Fine Art (Overland Park, Kansas)

TODAY’S MASTERS

NICK BENSON STONE CARVING & BEYOND

As any visitor to Newport, Rhode Island, knows, Thames Street is where the action is. Hugging the waterfront, chock-a-block with shops, restaurants, and bars, it’s the money-making heart of town, a place plenty of residents avoid if they aren’t running a business there. At its end, in a neighborhood of 18th- and early 19th-century houses called The Point, retail and hospitality give way to sidewalks that may not see more than a few pedestrians all day.

There is one notable business here, though: the John Stevens Shop. A stonecarving enterprise founded in 1705, it was operated by six generations of the Stevens family until Newport native John Howard Benson (1901–1956) bought it in 1927. His son, John Everett Benson (b. 1939), started working there at age 15, departing only long enough to earn a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. In 1964, he was commissioned to design and carve the inscriptions for the John F. Kennedy Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. His own son, Nicholas Waite Benson (b. 1964), took up the mallet and chisel at 15; after studying drawing and design at the State University of New York at Purchase (followed by a year at Basel’s Schule für Gestaltung), he returned to the workshop, eventually taking it over in 1993.

In its early years, most work at the John Stevens Shop was devoted to tombstones. But under the stewardship of successive Bensons, institutional and civic projects have grown into a key part of the business. John Howard did work for the Groton School, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. John Everett counted the National Gallery of Art and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange among his clients. He also made his mark with

large-scale commemorative commissions, including Washington’s Vietnam Veterans and Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorials.

Nicholas (“Nick”) Benson has sustained that tradition, designing and executing the lettering for, among others, the Dwight D. Eisenhower and Martin Luther King, Jr. memorials in the nation’s capital and the FDR memorial in New York City. In 2010, his excellence in this arena won international attention when he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation (“Genius”) fellowship.

Nick lives and breathes tradition, not only that of his family, but of his craft. He traces the essence of the Stevens style to inscriptions found at the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome, a lettering his grandfather embraced and altered, experimenting with the weight and proportion of the characters to devise a singularly satisfying letter form. “My grandfather had this crazy strong artistic bent that shone through in everything he did,” Nick says. “Going to a cemetery today, I will spot a stone he did and what I immediately see is the aesthetic value. I think, that’s a beautiful thing. Only then do I consider what’s written there.”

As a teen, Nick Benson couldn’t wait to get out of Newport. He had some vague idea of becoming an artist (his uncle was the noted photographer Richard Benson and his brother, Christopher, is a painter), but after studying with type designers André Gürtler and Christian Mengelt in Basel, he returned to his father’s shop with a deeper, more informed appreciation of the aesthetic and communicative power of hand-carved lettering.

The Portrait , 2019, digital scan (pixelated image) printed on 8 1/2 x 11 inch printer paper

As soundly beautiful as the family’s work is, Nick does not claim for it the mantle of art. “My grandfather’s friends spoke of him as a great craftsman. Though he also made art, it was the craft, and his attention to process, that most people recognized. They saw his craft for what it was. What we are doing is conveying the client’s message. We design it very carefully and make it beautiful, but when John Q. Public sees it, what he sees first is the information the client wants conveyed. That is craft. I am being hired for that purpose. The aesthetic is secondary.”

Even though people still marvel at how the Bensons make such sweeping strokes with rough tools, or at how their letters (which can evoke anything from gravitas to whimsy) help convey the meaning of the words they spell, public appreciation of hand-carved stone inscription as craft is fading. “All this picking away with mallets and chisels isn’t really understood anymore, because there isn’t any context for understanding it,” Nick asserts. “Years and years ago, guys were great carpenters, they were blacksmithing, women were making beautiful quilts. In any town, people knew how to make stuff. People aren’t making by hand anymore in a way that the public is used to

seeing. And over the past 20 years, the entire digital realm has had a dramatic effect on our perception of aesthetics and of the physical world.”

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Though still devoted to craft and to putting his “soul” into it, Nick has followed in the footsteps of his father (who retired from the shop to concentrate on his own figurative sculpture) by making time to exercise a purely creative muscle. The same intellectual curiosity that has led Nick toward deep understanding — of how the physical expression of language in stone is immediate, complex, and profound — also propels his work as an artist.

Nick’s artistic journey began in 2014, when his computer spewed out a mess of confusing, unreadable text. Having spent his life working with words and symbols, he was immediately drawn to this letterdriven image. “I recognized it as a giant piece of computer code, basically the lingua franca of today. So I thought, okay, this is symbolic of the evolution in human communication. I am going to take this stuff and make calligraphic interpretations of it. I am going to carve it in stone to highlight this radical shift from what was to what is. And I will ask, ‘Where is this all going? And what does it mean?’”

The building block of Nick’s endeavor is Base64, a computer code used for transmitting images over the Internet. It comprises the letters of the alphabet (upper and lower case), numerals 0 to 9, and the symbols + and /, with = at the tail end of a string. Cut into slate and then gilded, the seemingly random panoply of characters in one of his early pieces reads initially as a page from a calligraphy primer. But as our eye adjusts, taking in the stems and crossbars of the letters,

The Portrait , 2019, string of Base64 code, printed on 8 1/2 x 11-inch printer paper

The Portrait (full-scale layout of 22 panels), 2019, calligraphy written in Magic Marker on handmade brown paper, 5 feet, 4 inches x 12 feet. (This step in the process is not formally a part of the triptych, which consists of the original digital image, the code, and the carved slate panels.)

Princeton University dedication tablet (unique), hand-carved cleft slate, 48 x 48 in.

the serifs’ extravagant sweep and the almost bubble-like profile of the numbers three and five, the whole begins to assume, not intelligibility, but the intimation of a message.

More recently, Benson has employed code to ponder portraiture, running a photograph of himself through the Base64 algorithm, then interpreting those coded characters on paper with a broad-edge brush before incising them on stone and carving into it. (This is the same ageold technique used in his commercial work.) Once completed, the final self-portrait will comprise 22 panels that can be arranged in various ways — as a grid, or a line around a room’s perimeter — as long as they are in sequence. Taken together, the photograph, code, and carving form a triptych, one in which Benson tussles with the complexity of visual language to reclaim his likeness. “The machine, the computer, takes a face, takes humanity and turns it into a code. I take back the humanity by making a calligraphic version of that code, which says ‘This is me.’”

At the moment, Benson — who admits to getting “all hung up on extreme perspectives in science” — is working on a cosmically driven piece. It has been inspired, in part, by Particle Fever (a documentary that chronicles experiments at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva) and by images from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope capturing the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, in which the gravity of massive galaxy clusters containing dark matter distorts the light of even more distant galaxies.

Benson explains, “I get very interested in the subatomic and the cosmic and this incredible span between the two; in the fact that humanity — we have tremendously huge egos — is so wrapped up in this skin of atmosphere and the little rock we inhabit in a vast void. So I am going to make panels depicting the gravitational lensing effect; in the middle I will carve a piece of mathematics proposed by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs that describes the entire universe according to particle physics. This is meant to represent how our incredible human knowledge amounts to very little in light of the universe. I am going to use a broad range of metals — palladium, gold leaf, rose gold — to describe the universe, and I will oil the slate to get it even darker.”

The Portrait (full-scale, in progress), 2020, hand-carved slate panels, 7 x 48 in. each. (These are the first seven of 22 panels expected to be completed by 2023.)

Nick Benson (right) at the National World War II Memorial, Washington, D.C., 2004, photo: Richard Latoff

Derived from a less complex source, an earlier piece encapsulates the tension inherent in Nick’s endeavor — the collision of an ancient craft with contemporary modes of communication within the rarefied universe that is the art world. Pointing to a luxuriously inscribed slice of slate hanging in his shop, he remarks, “It’s not easy to read, but it’s a quote from painter Anthony Terenzio, when he was being interviewed by some art muckety-mucks in New York City in the ’70s. They wanted to talk about

conceptual art and he replied, ‘Of course, no so-called style can continue forever, because then human consciousness would have to remain static. But on the other hand, you can’t pretend nothing ever happened.’”

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Nick Benson’s art is driven by a desire to address the complexity of communication and the permutations of expression, and to understand how his skills might make sense in a world defined by instantaneity and digital hegemony. Neither caught in the past nor fully committed to the present, he seeks a middle ground, a space in which multiple sensibilities and practices coexist, a dialogue in which each voice contributes to mutual understanding.

“Years ago, when I went to the National Gallery to add benefactors’ names to the walls, there were people there at their easels, copying the masters. Everybody flocked around them. They would say things to each other like, ‘Why are you adding this green layer? That doesn’t look like the sky. ‘Well, that’s the underpainting.’ So people would get engaged in the process. I want to do that in a museum — to carve on site and engage with the public. That’s the demystification art needs right now.”

Until then, Nick continues his novel explorations on that quiet block in Newport. “Art,” he explains, “is a huge part of my life now, and I think about it all the time. Thankfully, I am able to make it in a vacuum of creative freedom. I can head down this path of mystery to see where it leads. It can lead anywhere. It can lead to immediate failure. But you have to take a risk in order to make something that means anything. It’s a gamble, but one worth taking.”

Information: johnstevensshop.com, nicholaswbenson.com

THOMAS CONNORS is a Chicago-based art and design journalist who contributes regularly to The Magazine Antiques and Aspire Design and Home

(ABOVE LEFT) Nick Benson hand-carving inscriptions on the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, 2019 (ABOVE) Breathe , 2020, string of Base64 code hand-carved on a slate tablet (unique), 19 x 18 in. (BOTTOM LEFT) @ , 2017, hand-carved slate tablet (unique), 28 x 28 in.

NORDIC REFLECTIONS THE MARINE PAINTINGS OF EMIL CARLSEN

Lyricism, quietude, subtlety — these are the defining qualities of the landscape paintings of the Danish American artist (Søren) Emil Carlsen (1848–1932). In his lifetime, Carlsen was far better known for still life subjects, and the misconception that this was his primary genre has prevailed.1 In fact, landscapes represent a significant aspect of his production, including exceptional marine scenes painted throughout his career.

Warranting particular reappraisal are Carlsen’s compositions picturing open seas, coasts, and falls, which earned critical acclaim and bound him artistically to his Nordic seafaring heritage.2 Indeed, his lifelong connections to Denmark supplied an essential foundation for his art and especially informed his marine paintings.

Carlsen was born in Copenhagen and studied architecture at the Royal Danish Academy for four years. He then turned to art, and although the circumstances prompting this shift are unknown, art was

Nantasket Beach , 1876, oil on canvas, 15 1/4 x 26 5/16 in., Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of the American Art Collection, 1940.1087

(RIGHT) Summer Cloud s, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 39 1/8 x 44 15/16 in., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Joseph E. Temple Fund, 1913.5 (BELOW) Open Sea , 1909, oil on canvas, 48 x 58 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of George A. Hearn, 1910, 10.64.1

part of his heritage, as his mother and brother were painters.3 Carlsen studied under the marine painter Christian Vigilius Blache (1838–1920) from 1866 to 1869, but in 1872 he immigrated to the United States and settled in Chicago, where he trained with another Danish-born marine painter, Lauritz Holst (1848–1934). He also studied in Paris in 1875, and returned there from 1884 until 1886.

Although Carlsen developed a unique style, the influence of the two older Danes and the traditions of his homeland are evident in the emphasis he gave to the natural world (especially open space, water, and sky), in his minimal and harmonious compositions, and in their entrancing light and atmosphere. All are features found in much Scandinavian art.4

EARLY MARINE SCENES

In 1876, the earliest published account of Carlsen’s marine paintings appeared in the Boston Evening Transcript (he moved to Boston that year after living in Chicago for four years): “Carlsen … has two or three pictures nearly completed which will soon be placed on exhibition in one of our galleries. They are marine and shore views and are remarkably effective.”5

His most noteworthy early water composition is a Massachusetts scene with a boat wreck on Nantasket Beach (1876). Created when he was only 28, it is arguably Carlsen’s first mature painting and possesses many of the hallmarks that became essential to his seascapes — the open and spare composition, wide expanse of sky, and horizontal stripe of land. The subtle palette and thin application of pigment are also typical of the technique seen in his early landscapes, but differ markedly from the dark, somber tonalities of his still life paintings.

Duncan Phillips, the critic, philanthropist, and (Carlsen’s later) patron who founded Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection, explained how the artist’s interest in landscape developed, noting that his early landscapes were executed in a manner that was “rather thin and tight, but of a fine tonality and sensitively observed. In those days, no one cared for ‘still life’ and he could not sell his canvases. The world might never have known his landscapes and ‘marines’ if the struggle had not become precarious, so that his friends advised him to abandon ‘still life’ for more popular subjects.”6

Carlsen had painted maritime subjects even while in Denmark, as early as 1870. Once in America, he attempted to establish his reputation with still lifes; in fact, he submitted them almost exclusively to major annual shows at the National Academy of Design and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through the turn of the century. Yet, he continued painting waterscapes, as noted in 1883 in the Boston Sunday Globe: “It will be a loss to one branch of art if Mr. Carlsen gives up his still lifework [sic], but if he succeeds as well with marine subjects the gain will quite evenly balance the loss.”7

After 1900, Carlsen became increasingly engaged with landscape and marine compositions and began showing fewer still lifes. It is possible that this shift was influenced partly by his friendship with American impressionist J. Alden Weir (1852–1919), which commenced around the same time. The two artists shared a poetic and suggestive approach to painting nature, although with different results.

Beginning in 1907, Carlsen presented his waterscapes more publicly, entering them in major annual exhibitions at the National Academy, Pennsylvania Academy, Corcoran Biennial, Carnegie International, and Art Institute of Chicago. Among those who observed the similarities in how he conceived waterscapes and still lifes was Phillips, who commented that “in many pictures, both of the sea and of the land, both by sunlight and moonlight, he has shown a power to stir our emotions as only great art can do…. Always his canvases seem to have been conceived and composed as still life.”8 Indeed, tranquility is as much a mark of Carlsen’s landscapes, especially his coastal views, as of his still lifes. In general, he maintains the same even-handed and tempered emotional tenor across all genres.

This subdued mood can also be traced to the Danish cultural temperament and the influence of Carlsen’s training, especially by Blache, who painted open coastal views, often with boats, that are defined by delicate light, a modulated tonal range, and restrained technique. Nantasket Beach and a much later scene, Summer Clouds (c. 1910), both resemble

The Surf, 1907, oil on canvas, 64 x 74 in., Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio

works by his mentor. Summer Clouds trades the shipwreck for fishing vessels grounded on a stretch of beach. This stark, calm beachscape, which uses paler hues and an even more vast expanse of sky, became a crowning achievement for Carlsen in 1913 when it won the Pennsylvania Academy Lippincott Prize for an oil painting by an American artist. These compositions, which both adopt the expansive sky and low horizon format, underscore a key to Carlsen’s methodology — that of repeating thematic variations.

Carlsen embraced his life in America but made frequent visits back to Denmark, including its coastal areas, surely reinforcing the cultural bond with his homeland. The Jutland Peninsula and Kattegat were among his favorite sketching places and inspired copious sea and coastal paintings. He was also drawn to Skagen, where an art colony had taken root; Blache had been among the first painters to visit there in 1869.9

In America, Carlsen sought out comparable settings: the rocky coastline around Ogunquit and York, in southern Maine, is featured in a sizable number of views, often with roiling blue surf and white foam pulsing against russet-colored rock formations. Indeed, that scenic region may have reminded Carlsen of Denmark’s coastal cliffs and stirred his imagination. His aquatic subjects encompass areas farther afield, too, including Charleston, Cape Cod, Niagara Falls, St. Thomas, New Hampshire, and Venice.

Carlsen’s well-received The Surf (1907) depicts the coast near Ogunquit.10 Here the surf hurtles toward and pummels the rocks, something many other artists working in Maine also enjoyed capturing. What is notable about Carlsen’s interpretation is the impact’s hushed quietness, not tumultuousness. Fellow landscapist and art critic Eliot Clark observed that there is a “feeling of radiant gentleness and kindliness [that] pervades [Carlsen’s] work, the true emanation of his own character. Nature is never harsh, austere, or powerful. In his marines, it is the sea in quiet, undulating motion under a blue sky . . . . We have nothing of the power of [Winslow] Homer as seen in his rugged resisting rocks, turbulent water and onrushing waves. Carlsen’s work projects the serenity of nature.”11 This association of tranquility with the artist’s character and cultural heritage was noted by other commentators as well.12

The Surf was widely exhibited, beginning in 1907 at the Corcoran Biennial, then in such cities as Buffalo, Boston, Pittsburgh, and New York.13 When the Ohio industrialist and philanthropist Joseph G. Butler, Jr., finally purchased The Surf in 1923, he was concluding a sixyear struggle to own what he believed was one of the finest American seascapes.14 Carlsen had been extremely reluctant to part with it and had changed his mind about selling it several times, believing it to be one of his most important marine scenes.15

OPEN SEA

Carlsen soon followed in 1909 with another monumental seascape, Open Sea, enhancing his growing reputation for marine painting. This was a subject he would present in various versions over the next 10 years, with the original (now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art) being the largest at 48 x 58 inches. One critic described it as “a study of the open sea from the coast line” of the Jutland Peninsula, from the northernmost

part of Denmark around Kattegat or Skagerrak.16 Other versions (with the same title) date from 1911, 1914 (two), and 1919, and Carlsen produced many other variations with different titles into his later years.17

The 1909 painting represents an archetypical composition for Carlsen — a near-square devoid of humanity with a low horizon line that separates frothy swells from a cloud-swept sky. He consistently deploys a diffuse and pearly, opalescent light countered by vivid, cobalt-blue seawater. His approach was extolled regularly by critics who perceived in it specifically Nordic traits. In response to a 1909 solo exhibition in New York, one writer said that “it is in the large pictures of the sea that Carlsen lives up to his Danish blood, in the presentation of what may be called his own seas.”18

When the Metropolitan’s version of Open Sea appeared in a 1910 solo exhibition in New York, it prompted one writer to note its “cold blues and the keen cold sunlight of the North.”19 Critic Elisabeth Luther Cary asserted that “Denmark was in [Carlsen’s] blood, in his vision, and in his craftsmanship” and that his “work is eloquent of the special quality of the Danish people, their poise at the middle point between coldness and emotionalism.”20 She also perceived a mystical quality shared by Carlsen and the well-known Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), while noting the simplicity and sincerity of Carlsen’s landscapes. A static quality, a minimal approach to the subject, and a cool palette link these artists, and, indeed, these are elements that characterize much Scandinavian art.21

In 1910, as Carlsen’s merit as a marine painter became better appreciated, one writer remarked that “Carlsen, good painter as he has always been, has only ‘struck his true gait,’ as it were, the past four years.”22 This observation coincided with his move toward the large-scale landscapes he showed and sold with growing success.

Niagara , c. 1912, oil on canvas, 35 x 30 in., Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach

NIAGARA

A separate subject for Carlsen was Niagara Falls, which inspired at least eight compositions picturing different perspectives of that enthralling natural spectacle. The earliest work dates to 1912, when it is believed he first traveled there.23 Many artists have been moved to paint this uniquely American subject, including Rembrandt Peale, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, Frederic Church, Jasper Cropsey, John Kensett, and John Twachtman.24 Its visual splendor is best conveyed by two Carlsen canvases, Niagara (Norton Museum of Art) and the larger Mist and Rainbow, now in the Owen-Yost Collection. The artist usually submitted his latest works to annual exhibitions right away, yet for some reason, the Niagara scenes were not exhibited publicly until about seven years later.25

Mist and Rainbow is the largest of them (39 x 45 inches) and is noteworthy for its direct, head-on perspective of the falls from below. Its dramatic impact is the result of the view upward as the falls seem to rise out of the spray capped by a rainbow, effecting an impressionistic, nearly abstract, vision of the scene. Few other artists portrayed it from this vantage point, with the exception of Church.26 Carlsen often expressed

his spiritual and religious faith through his art, frequently in suggestive ways; this is particularly evident in Mist and Rainbow, which highlights the transcendent quality of nature at its most sublime. (He also made more overt religious references in a number of seascapes that include spectral figures of Christ.27)

LATER CAREER AND LEGACY

Carlsen reprised his essential seascape compositions late into his career: for example, Moonlight and Sea (c. 1910) and The Heavens are Telling (c. 1918) are redolent of the 1909 masterwork Open Sea. Both focus on the moonlit sky and ethereal reflections on water, evoking a higher spiritual power in their majesty and serenity. In the 1923 Coast of Maine, Carlsen summons up his 1907 success, The Surf. The later effort elevates the horizon line, driving our attention toward the calmer sapphire blue water and the coppery-brown rocks through pure, jewel-like tones and diffuse light. Inaccurately characterized as an impressionist, Carlsen painted views that are both idealized and naturalistic, with his technique and approach becoming increasingly refined over time. His canvases are marked by a radiant light, lustrous surface, and a particular

Mist and Rainbow (Niagara Falls with Rainbow), 1912, oil on canvas, 39 x 45 in., Owen-Yost Collection

opalescence he created by scraping and building up thin layers of pigment, along with a liberal use of white.28 His best paintings glow with a diffuse ambient light he achieved with a matte impasto facture, supple brushwork, and velvety hues.

After his death in 1932, Carlsen was lauded as a “great painter” by Elisabeth Luther Cary, and his prestige seemed assured.29 Yet the defining traits of his art — refinement, understatement, and poetic lyricism, as well as a style that defies classification — may have partially contributed to the decline in popularity it underwent from the 1940s. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in Carlsen, prompting both new scholarship and commercial attention.30

Today, Carlsen’s still lifes, landscapes, and seascapes come up regularly — in nearly equal numbers — at auction and through dealers such as Debra Force Fine Art, Thomas Colville Fine Art, Cooley Gallery, and Taylor Graham. His market is relatively stable, although somewhat undervalued considering how highly regarded his work was in his day. Lesser works can be found in the four-figure range, with more

important examples going for five or six figures depending on size, quality, and subject. (American scenes fare more successfully than foreign ones.) Carlsen’s record at auction is $325,000, paid for a still life in 2018.

In the context of the art market’s current vigor, these prices are modest, so it is the hope that the exceptional beauty and exquisite technique of Carlsen’s art will ultimately gain the appreciation it so richly deserves.

VALERIE ANN LEEDS is an independent scholar and curator specializing in late 19th- and early 20th-century American art. She has organized more than 50 exhibitions, and published and lectured widely on various topics in the field.

Moonlight and Sea, c. 1910, oil on canvas, 32 1/4 x 34 1/4 in., collection of Mr. and Mrs. James Dicke

Endnotes

1 See Duncan Phillips, “Emil Carlsen,” International Studio 61 (June 1917): cv–cx. Also see Arthur Edwin Bye, Pots and Pans, or Studies in Still-Life Painting (Princeton University Press, 1921), who called Carlsen “unquestionably the most accomplished master of still-life painting in America today.” For a more modern viewpoint see, for example, Richard Boyle, American Impressionism (New York Graphic Society, 1974), 135–36, who states that “Carlsen’s special concern was still life” and does not mention his landscapes. Also see William Eric Indursky, “Emil Carlsen: An Overview of the Artist’s Life and Work,” in Emil Carlsen’s Quiet Harmonies, exh. cat. (Yellowstone Art Museum, 2018), 21, in which he states that “of the 887 catalogued examples of his work, 447 are landscapes, 209 are waterscapes and only 313 are still life, with the remaining split between portrait and genre.”

2 Ca rlsen received a number of awards for landscapes, outnumbering those received for still lifes. This is perhaps not surprising as, in the art historical hierarchy, still life was considered a lesser genre than

landscape. For sources on Carlsen’s life and art, there are few letters, no diary, and few primary sources apart from the paintings themselves. The most relevant publications include Kim Lykke Jensen, Søren Emil Carlsen: The Hammershøi of Manhattan (Narayana Press, 2008), a translation of which can be found on the important research website created and managed by William Eric Indursky, emilcarlsen.org. Also see The Art of Emil Carlsen, 1853–1932, exh. cat. (Wortsman Rowe Galleries, 1975); Phillips, “Emil Carlsen,” cv–cx; F. Newlin Price, “Emil Carlsen— Painter, Teacher,” International Studio 75 (July 1922): 300–308; Gertrude Sill, “Emil Carlsen Lyrical Impressionist,” Art and Antiques 3 (March/April 1980): 88–95; John Steele, “The Lyricism of Emil Carlsen,” International Studio 88 (Oct 1927): 53–60; Eliot Clark, “Emil Carlsen,” Scribner’s Magazine 66 (Dec 1919): 767–70. There has been a resurgence of interest

The Heavens Are Telling , c. 1918, oil on canvas, 32 x 38 in., Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia

and recent scholarship that includes Ulrich W. Heisinger, Quiet Magic: The Still Life Paintings of Emil Carlsen, exh. cat. (Vance Jordan Fine Art, 1999); William H. Gerdts, William Eric Indursky, and Robyn G. Peterson, Emil Carlsen’s Quiet Harmonies, exh. cat. (Yellowstone Art Museum, 2018); and William Eric Indursky, Emil Carlsen: Conscious Painting (Emil Carlsen Archives, 2017).

3 See Indursky, “Emil Carlsen: Conscious Painting,” based on the essay by Kim Lykke Jensen, emilcarlsen.org/essay.

4 See Clark, “Emil Carlsen,” 767; Steele, “The Lyricism of Emil Carlsen,” 60; and “An Artist of Our Time, Emil Carlsen, 1853–1932,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, undated clipping, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Papers, Archives of American Art.

5 “Art and Artists,” Boston Evening Transcript, May 7, 1876.

6 Phillips, “Emil Carlsen,” cx. Still life was considered less important than landscape in the hierarchy of subject matter.

7 “Art and Artists,” Boston Sunday Globe, October 21, 1883, 10, cols. 6–7.

8 Phillips, “Emil Carlsen,” cvi. Also see Samuel Isham, The History of American Painting (1905; reprint, MacMillan Company, 1936), 450.

9 It has been asserted that Carlsen made frequent trips back to Denmark, including in 1875, 1877, 1890, 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1917, 1918, 1919, 1922, and 1925, and possibly other occasions. It is, however, curious that Carlsen was able to travel back to Denmark so often as he was thought to have had little money until success came late in his career. He revisited Skagen and Vejle among other places, and was known to have stayed at Brøndum’s Hotel in Skagen during the 1908, 1909, and 1910 stays at least, sometimes with his family. See emilcarlsen.org.

10 “ Emil Carlsen Made Journey To Maine To Finish Painting,” Washington Times, April 7, 1907. The painting was first shown at the Corcoran Biennial in 1907, no. 280.

11 Clark, “Emil Carlsen,” 769–70.

12 For example, also see Elisabeth Luther Cary, “A Survey of the Art of the Late Emil Carlsen: Quietness and Slow Time,” New York Times, Jan 10, 1932, sec. 8, 11.

13 See emilcarlsen.org/portfolio/emil-carlsen-surf-1907.

14 In 1919, Joseph Green Butler, Jr. (1840–1927) established the first art museum dedicated solely to American art, in Youngstown, Ohio.

15 Robert McIntyre to Joseph G. Butler, Jr., Jan 26, 1923; and Butler to Henry A. Butler, Jan 27, 1923, Butler Institute of American Art archives.

16 “ Exhibition of Works by Emil Carlsen, Childe Hassam, and Frederick Ballard Williams,” Academy Notes (Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, Albright Art Gallery) 5 (April 1910): 21.

17 For the versions, see emilcarlsen.org. The Met painting was exhibited at the Carnegie International in 1910. Other versions were shown at Chicago in 1910 and 1912; Pennsylvania Academy in 1912; Corcoran in 1914, 1919, and 1923; National Academy in 1916 and 1919; 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition in San Francisco; and at the Carnegie in 1921.

18 “ Emil Carlsen at Bauer-Folsom’s,” Independent 66 (April 29, 1909): 896–97.

19 “Carlsen at Folsom’s,” American Art News 8 (March 5, 1910): 6.

20 Ca ry, “A Survey of the Art of the Late Emil Carlsen,” 11. She added that Hammershøi’s work and this manner of painting was considered part

of a revival “linking . . . subtly nuanced aestheticism to a space, protomodernist classicism.”

21 In his Northern Light: Nordic Art At the Turn of the Century (Yale University Press, 1988, 21, 24), Kirk Varnedoe observed that Scandinavian artists tended to cultivate a sense of nationalism in their work and that “young Scandinavian painters were encouraged both to study the techniques of the Parisians and to isolate and depict the special conditions of light, topography and physiognomy that characterized their Northern homelands.”

22 “Carlsen at Folsom’s,” American Art News 8 (March 5, 1910): 6. His solo show was at Folsom Galleries in New York, a noted venue for American art.

23 This point may have been clarified in Carlsen’s papers, which were inadvertently destroyed. Only one Niagara paintings is dated: Above Niagara (1912, 15 x 18 in., Christie’s, Dec 1986). Other works are Moonlight on Niagara (14 1/2 x 14 1/2 in.) and Niagara Falls from Terrapin Point (25 x 30 in.; formerly George Pratt), both unlocated; and Niagara River and Goat Island (15 x 18 1/4 in.; Scripps College, California). The Scripps painting and Above Niagara do not depict the falls, but the Niagara River.

24 For example, see Jeremy Elwell Adamson, Niagara: Two Centuries of Changing Attitudes, 1697–1901, exh, cat. (Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985).

25 They appeared at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1919, National Academy in winter 1921, and Chicago in 1924.

26 See Adamson, Niagara, 60, 67. The Norton Museum painting shows the falls from Goat Island.

27 See People-Religious subjects at emilcarlsen.org.

28 See Price, “Emil Carlsen—Painter, Teacher,” 308. As Price observed in 1922: “Gradually he developed a quality of surface that is an outstanding characteristic . . . the surface which he built and painted so carefully only to cut it down and paint again, and scrape and paint to make the canvas fine and still finer.”

29 Ca ry, “A Survey of the Art of the Late Emil Carlsen,” sec. 8, 11.

30 See recent publications listed under References at emilcarlsen.org.

Coast of Maine , 1923, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 in., Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine

HISTORIC MASTERS

MARGUERITE LOUPPE ON HER OWN

Women artists of talent have too often been overlooked. This is something not yet banished to the past, although, yes, times have changed, and for the better. A gratifying number of women — still not enough — have emerged from undeserved obscurity, some once eclipsed by a more successful husband, lover, or son. A nowfamous example is Suzanne Valadon, whose son was Maurice Utrillo. Marguerite Louppe (1902–1988) is another: her life spanned almost the entire 20th century, a period of enormous transitions of unparalleled rapidity.

Louppe’s husband was Maurice Brianchon (1899–1979), an artist celebrated in his day both in France and abroad. She was his active collaborator on many projects and managed his career. He, in turn, was surprisingly supportive of her as an artist in her own right, unusual in the context of the times and within a traditionally patriarchal society. By all accounts, they had an exceptionally close relationship that seamlessly merged the professional and the personal. (Even Christo and Jeanne-Claude, one of history’s most famous art couples — and from a later, more progressive generation — did not officially become a collective until 1994, three decades after they began to collaborate.)

Louppe was born in Commercy, in northeastern France, to a family of prominent engineers that included her father and an uncle, Albert Louppe, who guided construction of a strategically important bridge near Brest that was later named in his honor. Her parents moved to Paris soon after she was born and settled in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, where she was raised.

Rather than enrolling her in a Catholic school, her parents sent her to the Lycée Molière. This was the first French public school to accept girls; its rigor and high standards, as well as its more diverse

MAURICE BRIANCHON (1899–1979), Portrait de Madame Brianchon (Marguerite Louppe), 1939, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 1/10 in.

student body, suited Louppe and served her well later. There she studied literature, turning to art after graduation by taking classes for the next six years at several of the private art academies that abounded in Paris: the Julian, Grande Chaumière, Scandinave, and André Lhote.

These academies were quite progressive; both men and women (who were not yet accepted at more established art schools) flocked to them. The Académie Julian was noted for its radicalism and encouragement of independent thinking, which no doubt reinforced Louppe’s experimental inclinations and interest in the new. Among the fledgling artists there with her were Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, and Louise Bourgeois. Julian’s older alumni included Pierre Bonnard, André Derain, and Édouard Vuillard. Louppe met Brianchon at a Julian function through the family of a friend; they married in 1934 and the following year their only child, Pierre-Antoine, was born.

Louppe mounted her last show in 1985 and died three years later in Paris, a decade after her husband. For many years their artworks were stored in a warehouse by their son, largely unseen, although now and then he sold some of his father’s paintings. Pierre-Antoine died in 2012, and, since he never married, he bequeathed his parents’ estate to relatives with whom he was close. Their son, David Hirsh, began to make inquiries in consultation with William Corwin, an artist and art historian. Now their estate is represented by Rosenberg & Co., the powerhouse gallery of modern art established in Paris more than a century ago and forced to

Le violon rouge (The Red Violin ), oil on canvas, 31 1/2 x 38 3/4 in (RIGHT) Nestor au salon ( Nestor Plant in the Living Room ), oil on canvas, 31 7/10 x 25 3/5 in.

Pot de fleurs ( Flowerpot ), oil on canvas, 36 2/5 x 28 7/10 in.

relocate to New York during the Nazi occupation. Thanks to its efforts and those of others, Louppe’s oeuvre is enjoying its moment in the sun, the focus of a string of exhibitions and overdue critical attention.

SEPARATE & TOGETHER

Louppe and Brianchon seem to have had an ideal marriage, if any relationship can be completely free from complications. She frequently exhibited where he did, no doubt at his urging, but that would have gotten her only so far without her considerable skills, even if they were not recognized as equal to his. At the time very few women artists were appreciated by critics, institutional power brokers, or the public, even when, like Louppe, they were showing at highly regarded galleries such as Charpentier, Charles Auguste Girard, and René Drouet, alongside artists like Bonnard, Georges Rouault, Georges Braque, and Maurice Denis.

Among the couple’s documented collaborations were three murals for Paris’s Conservatoire National de Musique et d’Art Dramatique, of which later renovations have left no trace. Louppe also made illustrations for a novel by Georges Duhamel, the celebrated critic, Nobel nominee, and member of the Académie Française — another indication that she was respected by others beyond her husband.

Louppe and Brianchon enjoyed a full social life and hosted salons for cultural luminaries — a power couple, we might say. But in 1959, after decades at the center of the Paris art world, they bought a property with a commodious farmhouse and garden in Truffières, a village in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. It simplified their life and gave them more time and space to devote to their work, something many artists long for at a certain point in their careers. Louppe got her own studio for the first time and no longer needed to juggle her workspace time with Brianchon’s. She doubled down on studio paintings of

still lifes, their house and garden, and the village, all filtered through her idiosyncratically diagrammed compositions.

Alas, Louppe did not date her works, although she signed them with a confident flourish in a distinctive lowercase imprint. Because of this, painstaking research has been necessary to establish a tentative chronology for her output. The timeline that has emerged is often based on stylistic evidence as well as content (e.g., was it painted in Paris or Truffières?), and linked to dated photographs and other archival documents. Even basic facts about Louppe are not always easily confirmed. Since there were no diaries and little correspondence between her and Brianchon, much of their relationship is based on the gathering of related data, from which an idea of their life together can be sketched.

EXPERIMENTS & EVOLUTION

Like many artists of her generation, Louppe’s earliest work was indebted to Vuillard, Bonnard, and other post-impressionists. Inevitably, it includes Parisian street scenes, women at their toilette, and still lifes, the latter a genre she explored throughout life in a range of styles. She was an adept draftsperson and painter, as well as a natural colorist, her earlier works enriched by a full-spectrum palette. The School of Paris was also a great influence.

Louppe’s next phase was based on a fascination with the radical theories of cubism. At first glance, Le violon rouge (The Red Violin), a painting in multiple shades of red that sometimes clash, appears to be cubist-derived, yet she never became a true cubist, even if her vision grew increasingly geometric, abstracted. Translating a threedimensional object onto a two-dimensional surface so that all its facets were simultaneously visible was less interesting to Louppe than mapping the space, diagramming it with an engineer’s eye. In her

(LEFT) Guéridon et dessin ( Pedestal Table and Drawing ), oil on canvas, 39 4/10 x 31 9/10 in. (RIGHT) Compotier et vases bleus ( Compote Dish and Blue Vases), oil on canvas, 35 3/4 x 28 1/3 in.

investigation, rearrangement, and reconstruction of space, her work can be linked to that of Jacques Villon (the nom de plume of Gaston Duchamp), an artist who moved in the same circles as Louppe and Brianchon.

Purism, as proposed by Le Corbusier, Amédée Ozenfant, and Fernand Léger, prioritized the power of stripped-down forms, technology, and the machine, a point of view that echoed Louppe’s predisposition toward the analytical, derived from her family’s engineering background. Her art suggests she was innately precise, organized, inquiring, keenly aware of how an engineer or architect might assess space and the positions of objects within it. Appropriately, one of the props most recurrent in her still lifes is a drafting triangle.

From the late 1930s, Louppe began depicting lines radiating from objects and slashing the picture plane. She made multitudes of studies that turned objects into simplified geometric and cubist forms, like an architect’s rendering, recalling Renaissance artists’ intoxication with linear perspective and its rational, if not realistic, organizing of space.

Louppe staged her favorite props (which often included studio implements) into arrangements that were determined by formal concerns, avoiding the sentimental or romantic. All were offered for visual parsing, to be appreciated for the relationship of the objects to each other as well as their color tonalities, and also for spatial complexities that were, at times, enigmatic. Unlike the conventional interpretation of still lifes as metaphorical, Louppe’s were not about transience and mortality but about the interconnections of objects in space, the reality and solidity of form.

After moving to the Dordogne in 1959, Louppe veered even more toward still life — and landscapes. Glimpses of her studio, with canvases and easels in the background, took precedence. In works such as Pot de fleurs (Flowerpot) and Guéridon et dessin (Pedestal Table and Drawing), she presents a variety of brushes, a palette, and other artists’

tools, including that drafting triangle. These still lifes seem to pose concrete questions, not metaphysical ones: How is a painting constructed? How is a three-dimensional object translated onto a flat surface? How is space envisioned in two dimensions? And, from there, what should the subject of a painting be? Louppe’s answer: tangible things.

Her later landscapes were also conceived as experiments in optical construction, with muted colors adopted from the palette of analytical cubism — earthy beiges, greys, black, and white — to emphasize structure and its linearity without distractions. For example, Vue des buis à Truffières (View of Boxwood at Truffières) sees the village as if through sharply angled, fractured glass, as if probed by the piercing shafts of a searchlight. The scene has been etched into a kind of permanence, the ephemeral transformed, though a massing of quick yellow strokes softens the crystallinity of the picture, which, for all its denatured permanence, seems fragile. The different vanishing points are unsettling, a kind of push-pull effect that adds an energizing tension, held together by the overall spatial framework.

Despite failing health — she eventually became blind — Louppe continued to work until nearly the end of her life. She believed that art demanded devotion, as well as all the time she could give it. And so she did.

Information: rosenberg.co. Unless noted otherwise, all works illustrated here were painted by Marguerite Louppe in the 1950s or ’60s. All images © Estate of Marguerite Louppe and Maurice Brianchon.

LILLY WEI is a New York-based independent curator, art critic, writer, and journalist whose area of interest is global contemporary art. She has an M.A. in art history from Columbia University.

Vue des buis à Truffières (View of Boxwood at Truffières ), oil on canvas, 32 3/10 x 39 3/5 in.

GIVING IT AWAY

By most measures, giving to charity is a good thing. Donating cash to nonprofit organizations, books to libraries, clothes to the Salvation Army, child care items to homeless shelters, or artworks to museums helps the public in general and those in need particularly. Moreover, donors receive a tax deduction equal to the value of the donation. Win-win.

Yet there frequently are times when prospective recipient organizations do not want your gift. Cash is rarely a problem unless the donor’s money is ill-gotten (e.g., the Sackler family’s name has been removed from numerous institutions in light of their role in the opioid epidemic). But libraries increasingly turn down book donations (they have too many already), the Salvation Army only wants items that are “gently used” and in full working order, and pre-owned cribs, plush toys, and car seats are now refused by all child-related organizations regardless of their condition.

Giving art to an art museum should be a no-brainer, but, in fact, many museums reject far more proposed donations than they accept. “Ninety to ninety-five percent of material that is offered to museums is declined,” says Michael Duffy, national head of art and collectibles planning in the private banking division at Bank of America. (He acknowledges these numbers are anecdotal, since no one has formally tallied the objects offered to, then accepted or rejected by, U.S. museums, but they correlate with his experience working with art collectors.)

This reality often comes as a surprise to collectors or their heirs who, in Duffy’s words, “think of their objects as assets.” Museums, by contrast, often view new accessions to their permanent collections as “liabilities.” (After all,

every item a museum owns takes up valuable “real estate” and needs to be secured, insured, catalogued, and stored in a suitable environment.)

REASONS TO SAY NO

Let’s start with the most basic reason a museum might turn down an artwork: the piece is not in line with the institution’s mission. For instance, a

Like many institutions, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art cannot guarantee that objects donated will be placed on exhibition or that they will be exhibited or stored intact as a single collection.

venue devoted to contemporary art has no need for an impressionist painting, regardless of the work’s quality or importance. Even if the institution does collect and display artworks consistent with what a prospective donor is offering, it may still demur if it already has pieces just like the one being proffered. Or the proposed donation may not be as good — in condition or aesthetic quality — as others already in the collection. Moreover, proposed artworks that will need substantial conservation are a red flag.

Then there are the more subtle problems that museum directors do not want to take on. For example, the attribution may be questionable. Is this painting  by Rembrandt or just  attributed to Rembrandt? Perhaps it can only be designated as Studio of Rembrandt or School of Rembrandt. In each case, the determination moves further and further away from something definitive, requiring costly research by the museum that accepts the painting and then a diminution of value for the donor whose charitable tax deduction drops accordingly.

Other issues are title (does the collector have full ownership of the piece, unencumbered by liens or claims of theft by former owners or foreign governments?) and provenance, the chain of ownership that is ideally an unbroken line from the artist’s studio to the current owner’s home. In cases where these matters are unclear, the institution needs to devote staff time and money to research. Gaps in the chain of ownership, or the possibility of future claims that the artwork was looted or connected to money laundering (using ill-gotten gains to purchase artworks then sold on to produce “clean” money), also might result in expensive legal challenges to the museum.

Prospective donors may also have expectations about what a museum will do for them that the institution cannot meet. For instance, a collector may stipulate that all of his donations must be exhibited together (reflecting his own vision of the entirety), that some or all must be displayed regularly, or that none can ever be sold. Some even insist upon all of these conditions. “Almost every museum has established accession policies that bar conditions on gifts,” says New York City art adviser Todd Levin. This is in large part because curators and directors don’t want to tie their successors’ hands with binding agreements.

Some institutions make this quite clear from the outset when communicating with prospective donors. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art, for example, solicits gifts of objects, but

its website states, “All acquisitions should be outright, unconditional, and irrevocable upon transfer to the museum. The museum cannot guarantee that objects donated will be placed on exhibition or that they will be exhibited or stored intact as a single collection.”

On a more informal basis, professionals representing collectors urge their clients who are looking to donate to “be realistic,” says Boston-based lawyer Nicholas O’Donnell. “If I represent a donor who wants everything to stay together, and for nothing to ever be sold, I tell that person, ‘No one will agree to that.’”

In general, museum officials are more interested in “cherry-picking” — selecting from a private collection only those individual works that complement or differ from pieces already in the permanent collection — than in accepting many works, some of which may be ill-suited for the institution. “With very few exceptions, most collections are not donatable,” O’Donnell says.

Quite understandably, collectors may be in love with what they have purchased over the years, but they’ll probably discover that museum professionals have other priorities and interests. Levin recalls a couple of collectors of American craft who had built their collection over 25–30 years. At a party they met the director of a local museum, who “was very excited to hear they were interested in donating their collection. Not long afterward, he visited their home, took one look and saw that it wasn’t of the right caliber for the museum. He was very gracious to them, but wasn’t interested. The collectors were crestfallen.”

Because museums look at gifted objects as liabilities, officials regularly seek to offset their conservation, insurance, research, and storage costs by requesting cash donations to accompany the objects. Duffy says he once advised “a client who wanted to donate a small Monet painting to [Atlanta’s] High Museum, which considered it secondary or tertiary to Monet’s masterworks," though it would have been more willing to accept it were the gift accompanied by some cash. But “the donor did not want to also contribute $50,000.” Another Bank of America client had “an early Van Gogh, painted before this artist’s work became more colorful.” The first museum he approached would only take it if it came with $100,000. “The donor was offended,” Duffy explains, “and ultimately found another museum that wanted only $50,000.”

STRATEGIES TO CONSIDER

Collectors may spend a lifetime assembling artworks that represent a certain theme or are particularly meaningful to them. But then the process

This autumn, the Miami-based collectors Mera and Don Rubell opened the Rubell Museum DC, which highlights their large collection of contemporary art. Illustrated here is an architect’s rendering of the 32,000-square-foot building, formerly a public school located not far from the U.S. Capitol.

of estate planning, or the finality of death itself, can result in these pieces flying off in different directions — some donated to museums, others taken by heirs, others sold commercially.

Generally, there are three things collectors can do with artworks, antiques, or other collectibles as part of their estate planning. Option 1 is to bequeath everything to your heirs and let them worry about it; no inheritance tax is due as long as the entire estate falls below the Internal Revenue Service’s current $12.06 million threshold. (If the estate is worth more than that, the federal tax on inherited items ranges from 18 to 40 percent, and state taxes may also be due.) Option 2 is to have the pieces sold off upon your death; this can incur a capital gains tax of 28 percent, or even 39.6 percent, depending on how long the objects were in your collection. Option 3 is to have the pieces donated to a museum or other charitable institution upon your death, thus reducing your estate’s overall value while obtaining a charitable deduction. Understandably, quite a few collectors prefer this third option.

In order for a donor to receive a full “fair market value” income tax deduction, the recipient organization must prove that its use of the artwork will further its own tax-exempt purpose, referred to by the IRS as “related use.” If there is no related use, the donors’ charitable deduction will be limited to their “cost basis” in the work — what they origi-

nally paid for it. In this case, a painting purchased for $50,000 that is now worth $500,000 would provide the donor with only a $50,000 deduction.

Additionally, if a charity — art museum or otherwise — sells the donated work within three years of receiving it, that sale must be reported to the IRS and the donor’s fair market value deduction may be retroactively lowered to his or her original purchase price, plus certain expenses. As a practical matter, donors should clarify with the recipient institution that the gift must be kept for at least three years. This is especially relevant with charities that solicit artworks they intend to sell off during benefit auctions that generate operating funds.

For some owners of large, valuable collections, there is one more possibility: establishing their own foundation or museum, which will keep the art together long-term. You get all the benefits of the charitable deduction, control over how and which objects are displayed, and the gratification of seeing your own taste memorialized by an institution with your name on the door. Examples created fairly recently include the (Peter) Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Manhattan and Greenwich, Connecticut; the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio; The Broad (established by Eli and Edythe Broad) in Los Angeles; and the (Mera and Don) Rubell Family Collection in Miami and Washington, D.C.

Collector Joseph Shapiro (1905–1996) with Enrico Baj’s Punching General (1969), which Shapiro and his wife, Jory, donated to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992; photo © MCA Chicago

For some of these donors, it is control that may matter most. “It’s really not tax-driven,” says Diana Wierbicki, a partner at the law firm of Withers LLP, where numerous clients have set up such museums. Usually these entail collections worth more than $100 million: “You need enough value and volume to make it worth doing,” Wierbicki explains.

OTHER OPTIONS

For those not quite as well-heeled, finding a home for your artworks is a task that many professional art advisers can undertake for you, charging either by the hour (usually in excess of $200 per hour) or on a negotiated per-project basis. Lela Hersh, a Chicago-based adviser for whom collection management is as much a part of her work as helping clients buy and sell pieces, is proud to have helped Joseph and Jory Shapiro. Ultimately, they donated a group of paintings to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), works on paper to the Art Institute of Chicago, and other works to Rosary College, Spertus College, and the University of Notre Dame. “Eclectic collections can’t go to just one place,” Hersh notes.

A firm launched early last year, Museum Exchange (museum exchange.com), specializes in placing artworks in museums, hospitals, universities, and libraries, helping collectors determine where and when to donate their objects. Chief growth officer Michael Darling (formerly MCA’s chief curator) says, “We have 160-plus museums and over 300 donors participating throughout North America and as such have a great

chance of finding a good fit.” Its process is straightforward. Museum Exchange publishes quarterly catalogues of artworks being offered by collectors, viewable by museum staff who submit proposals to receive the artworks as gifts. Donors then select one museum from those various expressions of interest. After a match is made, Museum Exchange manages the donation process through its digital interface, streamlining the potentially complex and cumbersome logistics of a charitable gift.

With or without an adviser’s help, it makes sense for collectors planning their estates to contact museum curators and directors now to indicate what they own and to ascertain if the institutions would be interested in receiving those objects as donations. Too often, Michael Duffy says, collectors just indicate in their wills that their objects should go to a specific museum, leaving their heirs to discover that the objects are actually unwanted and thus require disposition in some other way. The harsh reality that museums reject so many proposed gifts is not limited to the largest and most prestigious institutions; it happens at smaller, regional ones, too. “Collectors shouldn’t mistake their local museum for Goodwill, donating unwanted tangible personal property without first speaking with the museum’s curator or other staff,” Duffy concludes.

DANIEL GRANT is a contributing writer to Fine Art Connoisseur and author of The Business of Being an Artist (Allworth Press).

Museum Exchange recently coordinated collector Sue Stoffel’s gift of this photograph by James Casebere (b. 1953) to the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln: Monticello #3 , 2001, digital C-print mounted on aluminum. 48 x 60 in.

GREAT ART NATIONWIDE

94th Annual Grand National Exhibition Salmagundi Club of New York New York City aaplinc.org and salmagundi.org

November 7–18

A TALENTED TRIO

The American Artists Professional League is set to mount its 94th Annual Grand National Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club of New York. This juried show will contain 147 pieces encompassing landscapes, still lifes, florals, figures, portraiture, and sculpture. During a reception on November 12, AAPL will award more than $20,000 in prizes selected by the independent curator Marilyn Symmes.

Founded in 1928 to foster traditional realism, AAPL is open to all U.S.-based artists working in oil, water media, pastel, graphics, and sculpture. Prominent past members include Jasper Cropsey, Alden Bryan, and Frank J. Reilly. The organization’s mission is to encourage and protect artists’ interests, to promote high standards of beauty, integrity, and craftsmanship, and to emphasize the importance of educational support for young artists.

Broadmoor Galleries Colorado Springs broadmoorgalleries.com

November 10

In 2021, Broadmoor Galleries launched an intriguing initiative, Broadmoor Galleries Art Academy, through which renowned artists come from around the country to teach multiday workshops at the historic Broadmoor resort. The next edition of this successful program, titled Icons of American Art, is set to run November 6–11, when master artists Thomas Blackshear II and Ezra Tucker will offer four days of instruction, plus one lecture alongside their gifted colleague Dean Mitchell.

These three artists will also mount an exhibition featuring their latest paintings, allowing workshop students to study techniques up close, relating what they see there to

the concepts they have just been taught. All of the artworks will be for sale, and on November 10 the general public is welcome to visit and enjoy a festive reception, too.

The Broadmoor is an inspiring place to learn about art. Located 6,230 feet above sea level, its hotel, conference, sports, and spa buildings are set around Cheyenne Lake. The original hotel was completed in 1918 to designs by the New York firm Warren and Wetmore using a stucco façade typical of the Mediterranean Revival style, and the grounds were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

Founder Spencer Penrose and his wife, Julie, were avid collectors, and many of their artworks and antiques still grace the Broadmoor’s interiors. Spencer helped build the road to the 14,115-foot summit of nearby Pikes Peak, a drive that offers vistas no visitor to the area should miss. Be sure to stop by the Penrose Heritage Museum, which displays a range of artifacts associated with this remarkable couple, including 30 carriages and 15 race cars.

AMERICAN ARTISTS PROFESSIONAL LEAGUE

ART FROM ACROSS AMERICA

RECENT PAINTINGS BY THOMAS BLACKSHEAR II, DEAN MITCHELL & EZRA TUCKER

OCEANA RAIN STUART (b. 1969), Eternal Bliss , 2015, cast bronze [50], 27 x 15 x 9 in.

DEAN MITCHELL (b. 1957), Preacher, 2022, acrylic on watercolor board, 16 1/4 x 25 in.

LOOKING BACK, AND FORWARD

Though his art is often described as “Southwestern,” the gifted realist painter Clark Hulings (1922–2011) actually created images drawn from a lifetime of extensive travel, beginning with his childhood years in Spain and then ranging from the Arctic Circle, Mexico, and Romania to North Africa and Central America. Most of his scenes depict regular people — their hard work, home life, street culture, even their working animals.

Established in 2013 and based in Santa Fe, where Hulings lived for many decades, the Clark Hulings Foundation (CHF) promotes his legacy by equipping artists to become self-sustaining entrepreneurs, as Hulings was. It does this by delivering a suite of integrated learning services via live events, digital channels, and portable media formats, all building professional networks of opportunity.

To mark Hulings’s centenary, CHF will host his 100th Birthday Party at Santa Fe’s famous La Fonda on the Plaza on November 20. While this benefit gala celebrates one century, it will also launch a second: in development for 2023 are virtual exhibitions organized with venues including the

New Mexico Museum of Art; the relaunch of in-person art-business education programming; and finalization of a new scholarly monograph authored by James D. Balestrieri.

On the 20th, guests wearing festive attire will mingle with Hulings family members, writers, collectors, curators, gallerists, and working artists as they bid on silent auction items. They will also watch five Santa Fe artists complete paintings to be sold off their easels, and they will see the director of Georgia’s Booth Western Art Museum, Seth Hopkins, launch its presentation of the Clark Hulings virtual reality exhibition. Special room rates are available at La Fonda.

If you cannot make it to Santa Fe, don’t worry: the virtual event will be streamed on December 1 with an MC hosting live online. A portion of every ticket includes a taxdeductible contribution to CHF, and all celebrants will receive a commemorative NFT featuring Hulings’s beloved donkey and cart with the centennial logo — yet another example of his forward-facing legacy.

Lily Pad | West is set to present an exhibition of recent landscape paintings by the Wisconsin artist Steve Gerhartz, many of them created in plein air. A dedicated observer of nature, he excels at capturing the unique look and mood of a locale at a specific hour, day, and season.

“Painting outside,” Gerhartz explains, “has been a great experience. I am constantly learning from nature and understanding what happens in certain lighting conditions. I paint on location in all sizes… There is nothing quite as emotional for me as working on a large painting outdoors, trying to capture all that form and space.”

Gerhartz’s creative efforts started when he was 14, during a November snow squall that he experienced with his brother, Dan, also a gifted artist. That episode inspired Steve’s first landscape painting, and he went on to study painting at the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Connecticut, a location that enabled him to inspect master landscape paintings up close in the Northeast’s leading museums.

Gerhartz appreciates equally the benefits art offers his viewers: “Paintings bring life and the beauty of nature into people’s homes, granting them an opportunity to escape into a place they may not normally have the chance

to see, allowing for reflection, growth, and understanding.” This concern for viewers may help explain why Gerhartz hand-carves every frame, each of which perfectly complements the picture inside.

Alan Perlstein and Terry Hamann opened Lily Pad | West in 2015, naming it after the much-loved Lily Pad Gallery in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, which they had supported as collectors for more than 20 years.

STEVE GERHARTZ (b. 1971), Birch , 2019, oil on linen, 36 x 18 in.

CLARK HULINGS’S 100TH BIRTHDAY PARTY

Clark Hulings Foundation Santa Fe clarkhulingsfoundation.org November 20

STEVE GERHARTZ: SUNLIGHT OF THE SEASONS Lily Pad | West Milwaukee lilypadgallery.com

CLARK HULINGS (1922–2011), Wash Day— Cuernavaca , 1975, oil on canvas, 34 x 41 in.

BEFORE IT’S GONE

Greenhut

Portland, Maine

greenhutgalleries.com

November 1–30

Greenhut Galleries is exhibiting the latest paintings created by the Pennsylvania-based artist Jeff Bye. Most are scenes of New York City, though they are neither touristic nor observed from the usual perspectives. Notably visible are often-overlooked neighborhoods, as well as the patinas and textures Bye evokes by scraping away areas of paint and then reworking them.

Bye is particularly fascinated by old buildings — from motels and mom-and-pop storefronts to abandoned theaters and factories. There is something exciting, he feels, about entering a building that has been boarded up for decades, discovering its faded opulence and how it once fulfilled its intended functions. Some of the sites depicted in this show are under threat of demolition, making Bye’s artistry a valuable form of documentation that somehow evokes even more than it describes.

PAINTING AS PROCESS

Laguna

lpapa.org

November 3–28

Operated by the Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, the LPAPA Gallery has opened an exhibition devoted to one of its Signature Artist Members, Jove Wang. On view are major studio paintings and the plein air field work that inspired them. Together they reveal that creation of a large studio painting necessitates hours of research to find the right location, time in the field to paint plein air studies, weeks of designing as the idea percolates in the artist’s mind, and then days (sometimes months) of brushwork.

Born in China, Wang entered the world of art at age 7 when he was apprenticed to the master painter Gang Gu. Later he studied at what is now the China Academy of Art and then the Tokyo Academy of Fine Arts. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1990 and has become not only a widely exhibited master, but also an experienced and popular instructor. In fact, Wang will be teaching a workshop at LPAPA early in his exhibition’s run (November 7–11).

LPAPA was founded in 1996 with a mission to preserve the legacy of the plein air artists who established a colony at Laguna Beach in 1903, to support the plein air tradition as it exists today, and to foster a network among plein air painters nationwide.

Members of the original Laguna Beach Art Association opened their first art gallery in 1918 and started a permanent collection that ultimately became the Laguna Art Museum.

Today’s LPAPA Gallery sustains all of these traditions by publicly displaying artworks by such leading talents as Jove Wang.

JEFF BYE (b. 1971), East Village , 2022, oil on linen, 18 x 27 in.

JOVE WANG (b. 1962). Catalina Bisons in Spring , 2022, oil on canvas, 26 x 38 in.

JEFF BYE: VANISHING POINTS

Galleries

JOVE WANG: THE GREAT AMERICAN WEST

LPAPA Gallery

Beach, California

PAINTING THE WORLD

3–January 3

Located in Clarksville, Tennessee, the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center is an ideal venue for an exhibition of more than 25 new paintings by Lori Putnam, a native Tennessean who lives just 40 minutes to the south. The Customs House was built, in part, to process foreign mail pouring into the tobacco boomtown of Clarksville, so it’s only appropriate its galleries highlight an artist who has worked and taught in nearly 20 countries.

On view are scenes Putnam has painted during her recent travels, from New England to New Zealand, from the American Southwest to southwestern England. Whether they are smaller pieces created in plein air or larger ones made back in the studio, all reflect the artist’s ability to capture places at specific moments, as well as the subtleties that characterize that location.

NOT ONLY THE WEST

The nonprofit organization Women Artists of the West will soon mount its 52nd National Exhibition at Cynthia McBride Gallery. The organizers have titled it East Meets West to underscore the extraordinary diversity of talented WAOW members working on both coasts, in between, and even beyond America’s borders. The jury has selected more than 140 two- and three-dimensional pieces in various media and styles, encompassing landscapes, cityscapes, figures, florals, still lifes, and animals.

WAOW and Cynthia McBride will cohost the awards ceremony and reception on November 6, but works can also be pre-purchased during a “sneak peek” reception two days earlier. On November 5, many of the artists will participate in a separate “wet paint” exhibition and sale, too.

WAOW was founded in 1971 in Norco, California, by a small group of women seeking to network as professionals and promote their careers through exhibitions and

advertising. Their first show was held in Palm Springs, and WAOW has subsequently exhibited far beyond California. Today it has approximately 350 members residing in more than 30 states. Particularly central to the organization’s life is mentorship, and indeed

many members share their expertise with each other via activities scheduled throughout the year.

LORI PUTNAM (b. 1962), Tidal , 2022, oil on linen on panel, 36 x 48 in.

JAN DELIPSEY (b. 1953), Sun, Sand & Stone , 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 22 in.

LORI PUTNAM: FAR FROM HOME Customs House Museum Clarksville, Tennessee customshousemuseum.org November

WOMEN ARTISTS OF THE WEST’S 52ND NATIONAL EXHIBITION

Cynthia McBride Gallery Annapolis waow.org and mcbridegallery.com November 6 – January 7

BY LOUISE NICHOLSON

IN LONDON, COURTAULDTHE GLOWS BRIGHTER

“Samuel Courtauld believed that art is for all,” says Professor Deborah Swallow, director of London’s Courtauld Institute of Art since 2004. Over the last 18 years, she has led a £50 million transformation through which the Courtauld has reaffirmed its founder’s mantra and burnished its reputation as one of the world’s top art institutions in all its four components: teaching, research, conservation, and sharing its collection. This is a sea change from the decades following the institute’s opening in 1932, when its focus became narrower and — frankly — its image slightly stuffy and elitist.

So numerous and diverse are the innovative ways of thinking at the Courtauld that, like the Getty or Yale, its range and depth boggle the mind in the best possible way. “Our rubric,” says Swallow, “is opening the whole institute up and making it outward-looking rather than inward.”

So, while retaining its academic rigor, the Courtauld has become a hothouse for dynamic lateral thinking, national and global partnerships, and public accessibility. Its influence has always been considerable. Leading art historians and directors of major museums around the world have long been Courtauld alumni — from London to Madrid, from Washington to San Francisco. Today’s students can reasonably hope to join this elite, which some people call the “Courtauld mafia.”

The scale of the transformation can be better appreciated by considering what the Courtauld was in the 20th century. Its founders were three British collectors who wanted to improve public understanding of the visual arts in their country, a revolutionary idea at a time when the arts were considered a rich man’s dalliance, not a serious discipline. They were the politician-diplomat Viscount Lee of Fareham (he donated

Chequers to serve as the prime minister’s country residence, which it still is); the lawyer Sir Robert Witt, who amassed Old Master drawings and, more importantly, quantities of photographs, prints, and clippings illustrating historical artworks that would become an ideal resource for teaching and research; and the textile industrialist Samuel Courtauld. Samuel Courtauld (1876–1947) used some of his huge fortune to build upon his family’s tradition of arts patronage. He loved pictures, wrote poems about them, and formed his own collection. With the critic Roger Fry’s advice, he bought French impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, including Britain’s most significant group of Cézannes. And he leased the best London building designed by Robert Adam in which to display them — Home House in Portman Square. In 1932, Courtauld gave both the house and the collection to the institute, which remained there for almost 60 years until its lease expired.

So progressive was the idea that art history could be a serious discipline that the first director, William Constable, feared the fledgling

Professor Deborah Swallow, Märit Rausing Director of the Courtauld; photo © Jim Winslet

Samuel Courtauld, July 1936

institution might quickly descend into a finishing school for the wealthy. But the arrival in 1933 of refugees from Hamburg’s Warburg Institute changed everything: they introduced a new kind of art historical scholarship, one of rigorous research rather than the connoisseurship then practiced by most dealers and collectors. One of the first British students to join them was Anthony Blunt. Later, in 1947, by then a mature and influential art historian, he became the Courtauld’s director, a post he held for 27 years. (Concurrently, Blunt was “Surveyor” of the King’s, then the Queen’s, pictures and later of the whole Royal Collection.)

(TOP) PAUL CEZANNE (1839–1906), The Montagne Sainte-Victoire with a Large Pine , c. 1887, oil on canvas, 26 1/4 x 36 1/4 in. The Courtauld seen from the courtyard of Somerset House; photo © Benedict Johnson

Prof. Swallow takes up the story: “This was always an academic institution, but its collection was intended for the public. In the 1950s, however, only the most informed people knew of its existence.” She justifies Blunt’s intensely academic approach and radical adjustment of the Courtauld’s global outlook to a European one as necessary in the context of post-war Britain: “He thought the only way of professionalizing it was to focus on a narrower field, not to be what he saw as ‘scatterlogical.’” Much of the library and some artworks from the collection were transferred to the School of Oriental and African Studies, part of the University of London. Blunt embraced the Warburg’s scholarly worldview, luring academics from across Europe who incorporated into their teaching such disciplines as philosophy, history, literature, and languages.

The next generation would kick off the stream of Courtauld-trained art historians, conservators, and museum directors known as the “Courtauld mafia.” As Swallow says: “The heart and soul of the Courtauld is education, to prepare experts and professionals in art history and scientific conservation.” It was Blunt who transformed it from a fringe endeavor to a center of international renown.1

THE COLLECTION

For decades, students and researchers enjoyed the good fortune of closely studying Samuel Courtauld’s superb pictures, as well as the other

founders’ gifts, on the walls of Home House. Like all honey pots, it began attracting additional donations and bequests; today the institute holds about 530 paintings, some 26,000 drawings and prints, and important decorative artworks.

In 1989 the institute was relocated into part of Somerset House, a massive landmark in The Strand built in the 18th century. The rooms the Courtauld took had been conceived by architect William Chambers as the first home of the Royal Academy of Arts (now on Piccadilly), which held its summer exhibitions here from 1780 until 1837. Swallow traces the germ of the Courtauld’s transformation to this uprooting move. “The idea was to make the collection much more available, to publicize it, to integrate the teaching, research, conservation, and works of art. When I came in 2004, it had already begun to globalize. I’ve pushed that on.”

Two-thirds of the whole project to renovate and repurpose the Courtauld’s home are now complete. Its success is credited to Prof. Swallow and her team’s close collaboration with architects Witherford Watson Mann, gallery designers Nissen Richards Studio, a squad of lighting experts, and — absolutely vital — the gallery’s own curators led by Dr. Ernst Vegelin. This required a total closure for three years. At the reopening in November 2021, every space and every artwork felt refreshed, enhanced, exciting.

“It’s a rare opportunity to refurbish and transform a whole museum, not just one space,” says Barnaby Wright, deputy head of the Courtauld Gallery and its curator of 20th-century art. “We had the chance to rethink all aspects of the display in order to reach a wider audience. We could re-imagine rooms that were no longer fit for purpose and make them sparkle.” He underscores the role of the new lighting, which “illuminates the pictures and also shows the glory of the rooms.”

As an example, he cites the new Medieval & Early Renaissance gallery. This is the first room a visitor encounters after climbing one of London’s most elegant staircases from the now spacious and welcoming lobby. Today a small, once-forgotten service room displays a group of perfectly lit goldground paintings, creating a contemplative and intimate space of the kind these pictures were designed for. As one enters the room, the calm subject of Bernardo Daddi’s golden triptych The Virgin and Child Enthroned with

Visitors marvel at the Courtauld’s renowned spiral staircase, though an elevator is available, too; photo © Jim Winslet

In the display case at center is FRANCESCO DI STEFANO PESELLINO (c. 1422–1457), The Annunciation (diptych), c. 1450–55, tempera on panel, 8 x 5 1/2 in. (each panel); photo © David Levene

Saints, displayed straight ahead, sets the tone; step forward and you are surrounded by shimmering images that inspire reflection.

Dr. Wright has also played some tricks to slow visitors down, to help them look more deeply and find — he hopes — greater fulfilment. Pesellino’s particularly fine little diptych of the Annunciation is placed in a display case in the middle of a big gallery, or a single work is hung alone on a wall to encourage a close one-on-one encounter, no distractions. Wright adds, “We’ve rewritten all the labels, too, often throwing the viewer back to scrutinize a picture more carefully. Our temporary exhibitions are deliberately small, 18–20 pieces, with sharp focus, to show you can get a lot out of viewing a few pictures.”

One of the most exciting groups for Wright and his team to re-display was the Courtauld’s magnificent collection of Peter Paul Rubens’s paintings and preparatory works for paintings and tapestries. “It is now front and center,” says Wright. “We’re very pleased. His Landscape by Moonlight is seen at its best. Rubens is not fashionable today, so we are showing him as full of life and energy.” Next to this scene, Rubens’s portrait of the family of Jan Brueghel the Elder, his close friend and collaborator, has an intimate tenderness; beyond it hangs his fascinating copy of Raphael’s portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, both an homage and a competitive exercise. It would be easy to spend an hour or two in this one gallery.

CONSERVATION AND EXHIBITIONS

The Courtauld’s three-year closure offered rare opportunities for some major conservation treatments. Austin Nevin, head of the department of

conservation and someone who has worked on difficult projects around the world, is clear about what he and his colleagues do for the collection, and globally. Their in-progress work at Nagaur in India is a notable example: “We are a beacon for conservation especially with regard to methodology and approach, rather than craftsmanship. New techniques are introduced all the time, and we have to find the most sustainable solutions for climate change.” This might entail more rainfall or, as the U.K. experienced this summer, a drought with damagingly low humidity. “People often think conservation is fancy makeup paint,” Nevin continues. “In fact it’s a balance of ethical arguments and practicality: should you see the repairs, what materials should you use, how should you address losses and cracks, and other questions.”

The room devoted to Peter Paul Rubens; photo © David Levene A Conservation of Easel Paintings student in the studio

During the closure, the conservation department gained bespoke renovated spaces and new analytical equipment. “X-ray fluorescent scanning lets us see unprecedented details,” Nevin explains. “We could study Rubens’s underdrawing, which helped us identify workshop practice and the different hands working on a painting.”

Their star piece of conservation work was Botticelli’s huge and heavy The Trinity with Saints, his most important painting in the U.K. Three years of treatment have given it a new support structure and a cleaned-up surface that reveals what Dr. Nevin calls “its aesthetic visibility, its texture.” He says, “You can see its history now, even feel its story.” And a new frame, inspired by the remarkable discovery of designs on the back, evokes its original late 15th-century Florentine church context. As Wright says, “It stops you in your tracks.”

As most of the collection’s big-ticket items are on show, the staff will now undertake selective rotations rather than total re-hangs. There are two exceptions. The new modern gallery will have an annual re-hang, and the drawings gallery will get three or four each year — perhaps looking at one aspect of the collection, or relating to a temporary show elsewhere in the building. This winter, Helen Saunders: Modernist Rebel (on view until January 29) comprises 18 drawings and watercolors by this forgotten vorticist. They were given to the Courtauld in 2016 by the artist’s relative Brigid Peppin, and they complement a show upstairs in the Project Space.

Up there, two Courtauld students — one pursuing an M.A. in the history of art and the other a four-year conservation course — are exhibiting the results of their joint investigation into a painting by the vorticist Wyndham Lewis called Praxitella (owned by the Leeds Art Gallery in West Yorkshire). Underneath it they discovered a major lost painting by Helen Saunders. Key to this find were, firstly, the newly renovated conservation department’s cutting-edge equipment, which enabled them to accurately measure chemicals in the pigments and, secondly, the innovative annual “painting pair” program specifically designed to promote such collaboration between art history and conservation students.

All of this — the newly spacious arrival lobby, the medieval goldground paintings, the rotating drawings selections, the baroque Rubenses, and much more — lead to the collection’s climax, the renowned French impressionist and post-impressionist paintings. Displayed in splendor in the Great Room where the Royal Academy held its exhibitions for 57 years, here are Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. “With new high-quality lighting mixed with natural light from above, they look better than ever before,” Wright declares. “To see a Monet landscape and notice through the ceiling window a cloud passing, to feel the natural light washing around the gallery, becomes part of the experience.”

As if to make visitors think more about the story of this extraordinary room and the other galleries, the Courtauld has a temporary show this winter of 50 private drawings, most depicting women and loaned from collections worldwide. They are all by Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), the maverick Swiss artist who settled in London and for 21 years served as professor of painting and keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, living and working in these magnificent rooms.

EDOUARD MANET (1832–1883), A Bar at the Folies-Bergère , 1882, oil on canvas, 37 3/4 x 51 1/4 in.

MAKING CONNECTIONS

This porousness between departments enriches any visit to the Courtauld — whether in person or virtually. When you are in the galleries, you can also use the audio guide funded by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. If you’re not in London (yet), no matter: you can enjoy a full tour of the main galleries on the Courtauld website. The hope is that each temporary show will have its own tour online within a few days of opening. A new collection database is about to go online, making it easier to search for items you want to research — and possibly go see. It will be easy to make an appointment; there’s no need to be an academic, as at some other institutions. This September the Courtauld joined Google Arts & Culture by sharing over 300 artworks and 13 In Detail exhibits, focused explorations of a single work such as Renoir’s La Loge, which ends with a seven-minute talk by Dr. Wright.

It’s all about reviving Samuel Courtauld’s founding mission, art for all. And taking that mandate further, the Courtauld is going out and about, lending works from its collection to museums and galleries up and down

Britain where Courtauld had his textile factories — Braintree, Hull, Preston, Coventry, Belfast, and more. Each show is bespoke and collaborative.

“We’ve learned new ways of selecting exhibitions,” says Wright. “The value of engaging with audiences directly.” Coventry wanted drawings, and Belfast wanted works to complement its Modigliani masterpiece. The people of Hull wanted pictures about the aims of their community. “They chose Monet’s painting of Antibes, a wonderful seascape,” Wright notes, “because it relates to their ideas of self-reflection and mindfulness.”

Closer to home, the Courtauld is maintaining its academic rigor while pushing into new territories. About 540 undergraduates, plus research students, enjoy a far broader faculty at their campus in Vernon Square near King’s Cross station. (In due course, they will also have renovated space at Somerset House.)

Professor Alixe Bovey, the Courtauld’s dean, deputy director, and head of research, leads a crucial part of the institute’s expanding vision. She oversees the Research Forum, which develops new ways to support research and share it with a wider public. “Art history is an international enterprise,” she explains. “We remain committed to fields in which we excel — Europe and the European diaspora — but we now have a global interconnectedness which our students need.” Newer faculty members specialize in Buddhist art, China, South Asia, Iran, and the Americas.

Students starting their B.A. degree this autumn have the same small classes and close-up encounters with art that their predecessors did, but they also have more modules to broaden the degree’s scope, such as museology, heritage, and conservation. Their first year will include arts of Byzantium and the Buddhist world, as well as the traditional Courtauld strength, the Italian Renaissance.

As for pure conservation training, there are two new M.A. degrees in easel painting and wall-painting. “In the past,” says Dr. Nevin, “conservation used to be an outlier. Now it’s central.” He is also looking at ways of offering courses to outsiders during the 30 weeks each year his new studios are not used for teaching.

Perhaps the most exciting and ambitious new partnership is with the Courtauld’s next-door neighbor, King’s College, a founding unit of the University of London. “King’s is an ideal partner,” says Prof. Bovey. “They have no art department, but all of their departments are interested in the visual arts to promote students’ well-being. We are interested in their chemistry and dentistry departments (in relation to conservation) and their modern languages. We are moving toward co-producing a joint liberal arts degree soon.”

“Today’s students have a very different view of the world,” says Deborah Swallow. “They are totally international in outlook but have historic rigor. They are eager to understand the wider world.” It’s a fair bet that some of these students will carry the “Courtauld mafia” torch into the future.

Information: courtauld.ac.uk; artsandculture.google.com/partner/the-courtauld All photos © The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

LOUISE NICHOLSON is an art historian, lecturer, and writer who lived in New York City and explored the U.S. for 19 years. Now based in England, she frequently visits the U.S. and India.

Endnote

1 This is the same Anthony Blunt (1907–1983) whose earlier espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union was revealed publicly in 1979. Already retired from the Courtauld, he was stripped of his knighthood immediately.

VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853–1890), Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, oil on canvas, 23 3/5 x 19 1/4 cm

Professor Sussan Babaie teaching an M.A. seminar in the history of art

BY PETER TRIPPI

DISCOVERING DUTCH OLD MASTERS IN THE HAGUE

Amsterdam may be the metropolis most people associate with the Netherlands, yet the country’s most elegant city is located 40 miles to the south. The Hague (Den Haag in Dutch) is where the Royal Family reside and where international embassies are located; it is also home to an array of top-notch museums and galleries presenting art from many eras.

Particularly strong are several venues in The Hague’s charming historic center devoted to Dutch art of the 17th century. This period is usually called the Golden Age to convey the impressive productivity and staggering wealth that followed the Dutch provinces’ violent breakaway from Spanish imperial rule. Since 2020, attention has rightly shifted to the fact that much of this prosperity was built on the backs of people in Africa, the Americas, and Asia, where Dutch traders and slavers flourished. Now well underway, the often painful acknowledging of this tragic reality should not diminish our admiration for the superb quality attained by the artists of “Holland” (our modern-day shorthand for what was then the United Provinces of the Netherlands).

This season The Hague is concluding the bicentenary celebration of its best-known museum — the Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery (pronounced “MOW-ritz-house”). Opened to the public in 1822, it is one of the four finest collections of Dutch Golden Age paintings anywhere, ranked right alongside Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, London’s National Gallery, and Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. Today its 17th-century masterworks look better than ever inside its handsome

17th-century mansion. The Mauritshuis owns more than 800 artworks, yet its permanent display contains only 260 of them (mostly paintings, with some sculpture and furniture), thus allowing each piece the space it needs to “breathe” and be properly admired in a grand yet intimate environment. The displays are complemented by a program of

The Mauritshuis’s 1644 mansion (left) stands beside the turreted building (right) where Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte works. Photo: Ivo Hoekstra

temporary exhibitions mounted in a stately Art Deco building across the street, the two structures being connected by a sky-lit subterranean foyer.

Once inside the mansion, most visitors make a beeline for “the Mona Lisa of Holland,” Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. It may seem like the portrait of a specific person, but is actually a tronie, an idealized type pursued by various Dutch artists. Vermeer is also represented by his View of Delft, beloved for its silvery tones and hypnotic stillness. Hanging nearby is one of the few documented works by Carel Fabritius, the tiny Goldfinch, and of course major works by Rembrandt van Rijn, including early and late self-portraits and the grisly Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

Among the Mauritshuis’s other star holdings from the Golden Age are Paulus Potter’s life-size portrait of an idealized bull; Jan Steen’s bawdy party scene As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young; Frans Hals’s Laughing Boy; Hendrick Avercamp’s crowded Ice Scene; and Ambrosius Bosschaert’s detailed Vase with Flowers. The museum’s earlier Netherlandish paintings were created by such talents as Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Quentin Massys, while Germany is represented by Lucas Cranach and Hans Holbein, and Flanders by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

The Mauritshuis is located in the heart of The Hague’s government district, near the Dutch Parliament and literally next door to the prime minister’s office. Entering the museum through massive wrought iron gates, visitors learn that its classical brick mansion was finished in 1644 by the architect Jacob van Campen as a house for Johan Maurits (1604–1679), a nobleman who was actually living abroad (governing Holland’s Brazilian colony) during its construction. Given its prime location, it makes sense that the house later became a lodge for distinguished visitors, then a military school, and even the national library.

Though Maurits owned some art, the core of the museum’s collection was amassed quite separately — by the Orange stadtholders of Holland, especially Willem IV (1711–1751) and Willem V (1748–1806). Beginning in 1774, the latter welcomed the public to an art-filled room

located nearby, a space that the Mauritshuis has reopened as the Prince Willem V Gallery. Here hang approximately 150 of the museum’s lesser (though still impressive) paintings, and visitors may also be tempted to visit the city’s former jail next door. Napoleon’s occupation of the Netherlands marked a turbulent historical chapter, and when it finally ended in 1815, the new king, Willem I, gave his family’s art collection to the nation. It needed to be displayed somewhere, so in 1820 the government bought the old Mauritshuis and opened it as the Royal Picture Gallery two years later. In 1995, this national museum was privatized and transferred to a foundation — an unusual gambit that has worked well thanks to astute management and a circle of generous admirers worldwide, including the American Friends of the Mauritshuis.

JOHANNES VERMEER (1632–1675), Girl with a Pearl Earring , c. 1665, oil on canvas, 17 1/2 x 15 in., Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery (BELOW LEFT) Interior of the Prince Willem V Gallery, photo: Kees Hageman (BELOW RIGHT) Above: Lonnkerstraat as it looked before the Mauritshuis Murals team arrived. Below: after street artists Super A and Collin van der Sluijs departed.

Proud as it is to welcome visitors, the Mauritshuis has been marking its bicentenary offsite as well. Recently five street artists were commissioned to create murals around The Hague, particularly in neighborhoods lacking public art. Illustrated here, for example, is a massive project by the team of Super A and Collin van der Sluijs, who were inspired by paintings of birds in the museum’s collection. And available to anyone — whether they have visited The Hague or not — is the new book Pen Meets Paint, in which 200 Dutch and international authors have each written just 200 words about a single artwork in the Mauritshuis collection.

Rembrandt created more than 40 self-portraits, and on view now at the Mauritshuis (November 1–30) is one with an unusual backstory, The Standard Bearer of 1636. Having long been abroad (most recently in the Rothschild family’s collection), it was purchased this January for

$198 million — including $170 million from the Dutch government. Understandably, the Dutch public wanted to see what they paid for, so The Standard Bearer began a national tour this May, visiting each of the country’s 12 provinces. Next May it will finally settle down — for good — at the Rijksmuseum, whose director, Taco Dibbits, believes this painting represents the moment “when Rembrandt became Rembrandt.”

This season the Mauritshuis bicentenary celebration is officially concluding with Manhattan Masters, an exhibition featuring 10 Dutch

(CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT) A room in the Museum Bredius; hanging at far right is Tobias and the Angel, an oil on canvas by Matthias Stom, 1630/32, 43 3/4 x 49 1/4 in. REMBRANDT VAN RIJN (1606–1669), The Standard Bearer, 1636, oil on canvas, 46 3/4 x 38 1/8 in., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder’s 18th-century townhouse facing the Mauritshuis and Parliament JOHANNES ANTONIUS VAN WELIE (1866–1956), Portrait of Dr. Abraham Bredius, 1918, oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 27 1/2 in., Museum Bredius

paintings loaned by New York City’s Frick Collection, the equally exquisite “jewel box” of a museum founded by Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) and now closed for a complete renovation. In 2013, when the Mauritshuis shut down for a renovation, it loaned top pieces to the Frick, including Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Goldfinch — a milestone moment that drew 235,000 visitors to the Manhattan venue. Then, in 2015, 36 Frick works came to the Mauritshuis, but all had been acquired after Frick’s death.

Now, on view through January 15, are 10 works that Frick purchased for himself; Mauritshuis curators were allowed to select the ones they wanted, and nine have never been in Europe since they were shipped to America more than a century ago. Among them are Vermeer’s The Soldier and Smiling Girl and Hals’s Portrait of a Man, but the largest is Rembrandt’s self-portrait of 1658. In 1913, the Rembrandt scholar Abraham Bredius visited New York and wrote, “The crowning glory of all that we saw was The Frick Collection. What a joy it was to see again Lord Ilchester’s Rembrandt … that almost more-than-life-sized portrait of the painter, seated, his right hand resting on a stick, regarding us with an expression denoting a truly deserved sense of self-worth, such as to make one fall silent; “every inch a king”, I once wrote of it.”

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

Dr. Abraham Bredius (1855–1946) is an important figure in Dutch cultural history, and you need walk only a block north to learn more about him at the Museum Bredius. Born to a wealthy Amsterdam family, he was one of the first people to study Dutch Golden Age paintings seriously. In the late 19th century, every country was trying to establish what made its own culture unique, and naturally Holland decided to highlight its 17th-century heyday. In art circles, Bredius led the way by studying archives, publishing articles, and preparing the catalogue raisonées for both Rembrandt and Steen. Building a foundation of knowledge that is still used by scholars today, he highlighted major painters and rescued minor ones from obscurity.

Bredius served as director of the Mauritshuis from 1889 to 1909, and he also bought art for himself on a grand scale. He contributed funds to

acquire Rembrandts for the museum and ensured that it acquired both The Goldfinch and Girl with a Pearl Earring. His own Vermeer, Allegory of Religion, which he discovered, is now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. When Bredius relocated from The Hague to Monaco in 1924, he turned his large 17th-century house into a museum; upon his death in 1946, he bequeathed more than 200 paintings, drawings, and pieces of furniture, silver, crystal, and porcelain to the municipality of The Hague. That collection remained on view in the house until 1985, when the city closed it. Fortunately, in 1990 a group of private donors made it possible for the museum to reopen in an 18th-century mansion overlooking the Mauritshuis, which Bredius had led so capably. Now, in this grand yet domestic environment, visitors can enjoy the artworks he lived with, including three great Steens.

Located next door is another unique place to see the Dutch Old Masters, the distinguished commercial gallery Hoogsteder & Hoogsteder, a family firm now directed by Willem Jan Hoogsteder, who also serves as vice chair and curator of the Museum Bredius. Though it resembles a private mansion, the gallery is open to the public and often mounts temporary exhibitions developed with other organizations or charities. And don’t leave this neighborhood without walking back toward the Mauritshuis to explore the Haags Historisch Museum; though it concentrates on the city’s past, it uses many artworks to help tell that story in visual terms.

Finally, true devotees of Golden Age art should take an easy 10minute walk into what is now The Hague’s Chinatown neighborhood to visit the Buitenmuseum. In Dutch this word means “Outdoor Museum,” which is somewhat misleading because it is essentially a row of three handsome historic houses overlooking a canal. (There are gardens behind each house, though they are not particularly memorable.)

What makes them worth a visit is the fact that, at different times, these houses contained the studios of the great painters Jan van Goyen, his son-in-law Jan Steen, and also Paulus Potter, not to mention the leading architect Claes Dircx van Balckeneynde. Their original decors and furnishings are long gone, but the museum has done a fine job evoking how they might have looked, and it is particularly interesting to inspect art supplies similar to those once used here.

Located within less than a square mile, all of these venues underscore how ideal The Hague is for discovering and enjoying Holland’s Golden Age art.

Information: mauritshuis.nl, afmauritshuis.org, museumbredius.nl, hoogsteder. com, buitenmuseum.com, thehague.com. To schedule a guided walking tour of The Hague’s historic center, contact Mr. Remco Dörr (r.dorr@thehague.com).

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

(ABOVE) An architect’s rendering of the three historic houses that comprise the Buitenmuseum (LEFT) A room in the Buitenmuseum overlooking the canal

BY MICHAEL J. PEARCE

FLORENCE WHERE PAST, PRESENT & FUTURE CONVERGE

The Florence Academy of Art was established in 1991 by the American-born artist Daniel Graves (b. 1949) in the limonaia (lemon conservatory) of the noble Corsini family. From the very start, it was a bootstraps opportunity intended to reshape the future of art instruction; the young academy buzzed with the excitement of knowledge being transmit-

ted, and the air was full of paint’s heady perfume. Graves felt he had a responsibility to pass along the flaming torch of the atelier to the next generation. He recalls:

We were exchanging information that we learned and gleaned and read about. Technical stuff from frame gilders and from Zecchi’s [the historic

BEHIND THE SCENES

Tom Richards in his studio

Florentine art supplies store]; all these local people who had so much knowledge. It was phasing out, and we caught it right at the end. There was the studio of Signorina [Nerina] Simi, whose father, Filadelfo, had studied under [the French academician Jean-Léon] Gérôme. There were all these connections back to that tradition. It was so rich and alive. We were in awe of everything, trying to absorb as much as we could, and we realized that there were many others who wanted to do the same thing.

Under Graves’s careful cultivation, the lemon-house was outgrown, ultimately superseded by high-ceilinged studios in a sprawling, refurbished warehouse complex just outside Florence’s historic center. Where today nude models pose for young painters and sculptors, once Italian customs officials supervised storerooms full of seized goods. Later these buildings became a restoration workshop, where pieces of furniture waterlogged during Florence’s catastrophic flood of 1966 were repaired, sanded, and oiled. Graves and his administrative wizard of a colleague, Susan Tintori, supervised the transformation of these warehouses into a modern atelier with skylights and airy spaces. They sought a place where,

in Graves’s words, “everyone feels equal, where there is no special group — an inclusive and safe environment. You have to teach people, but you also must create an environment in which students feel free to learn.”

Graves is quick to praise Tintori, who in the early days was responsible for finding students to fill the studios, and has been his partner in making the academy a popular institution ever since. Today it attracts students from around the world, lured to Florence by the irresistible magnetic pull of artistic tradition and methods gleaned through centuries of practice. The academy now offers a three-year certificate in Italy; runs a second campus in Mölndal, Sweden; and offers a NASAD-accredited M.A. in Studio Art program in partnership with St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Breathing the linseed air of the busy Florentine studios is a sensual reminder of the tradition, and the atmosphere buzzes with the energy of purpose and ambition. Students come to learn the techniques of the Old Masters, keenly aware of their role in the transmission of knowledge from master to student and beyond.

At Florence, students are immersed in practices derived from 19thcentury Paris’s Ecole des Beaux-Arts: they work from models, learning the importance of measure and value, of observation and patience. In London in the 1980s, Graves rediscovered a portfolio of academic drawings printed in Paris by the now-forgotten artist Charles Bargue as a course in drawing for Gérôme’s students and admirers. Graves realized that this was a trove

Four of Tom Richards’s Venetian paintings

of forgotten knowledge, and so arranged to have photographs made and brought them back to Florence, where he revived the practice of teaching from them. News spread, and the Bargue drawings are now a fundamental of contemporary atelier training worldwide. (See the June 2021 issue of Fine Art Connoisseur for an article on Graves’s re-publication of Bargue’s sheets at their original scale.)

A CHAPTER BEGINS

At the end of 2022, Graves will retire from the academy’s directorship in order to head its etching program, and he could not be happier about the recent appointment of his successor, Tom Richards (b. 1982). Graves says Richards is “one of the most delightful people, knowledgeable, talented. I literally cannot say enough good things about this man. He’s the ideal person to take over. I’m so fortunate! The students love him, the teachers love him.” The academy is in good hands, and there will be no sense of disruption in the months ahead. (Graves will play an active role in the M.A. curriculum, and both he and Tintori will remain on the academy’s board.)

Lineages matter in the world of ateliers, and Richards shares a pedigree comparable to that of Graves, whose pedagogical inheritance descends from Gérôme to Filadelfo and Nerina Simi. Richards studied painting under both Graves and the American-born, Florence-based painter Charles H. Cecil, who trained with a pupil of the Boston School master William McGregor Paxton. Paxton was in turn a student of Gérôme, who learned from Paul Delaroche, painter of the still popular Execution of Lady Jane Grey (National Gallery, London).

This transmission of knowledge across generations lends a depth to the academy; its instructors offer what is virtually a priestly laying-on-of-hands as they initiate students into a lineage connecting them back to the Old Masters. Going forward, then, the students’ work becomes not only a pleasure but also a responsibility. This reminds us that society is a contract between generations — between the dead, the living, and our descendants.

This summer, I met Tom Richards in the academy’s lively cafe, across a courtyard from its spacious gallery. He sat at a scrubbed refectory table and reached for a frothy cappuccino — a tall Englishman dressed in a gray linen shirt and chinos, with lively eyes and a sprawl of dark hair. Behind him, the staff were busy preparing tasty treats and wiping steam off the shiny espresso machine. “They keep the students happy,” Richards confides, “because everyone here needs caffeine.”

Richards grew up in a London home adorned with oil paintings; living with art was normal, and expected. His mother took him to the capital’s great galleries — he especially remembers seeing masterpieces by Caravaggio and Monet — and those visits created a solid foundation of familiarity with art. Richards attended Eton College, the elite boarding school for boys with a long tradition of producing prime ministers and CEOs. There his teacher, John Booth, took groups of students and guest painters on summer trips to Florence to paint outdoors in the streets and the Tuscan countryside. Richards says, “In the evenings, you’d put the work up and have a glass of wine and the artists would talk about it. I thought, ‘This is amazing, I want to do this forever.’ When I was 15, I realized I wanted to be a painter and live in Florence.”

Upon graduation, Richards spent a year in Florence studying under Cecil, then enrolled in the art history program at

TOM RICHARDS ( b. 1982), CdM, Sprezzatura , 2015, oil on canvas, 88 x 40 in., available through the artist

Scotland’s University of St. Andrews. In 1999 he visited three important painting exhibitions in London — Rembrandt, Van Dyck, and Sargent — a powerful experience that steered him toward a career in portraiture. Richards recalls studying the Rembrandt portrait from London’s Kenwood House and thinking that the person in it was more interesting than any of the real people in the room. He was fascinated. He observes, “Paint became someone. Paint became flesh — it was a transubstantiation. This was actually a person.”

Yet Florence had captured his soul, and Richards returned to Italy immediately after graduating from St. Andrews; he was offered a job teaching at Cecil’s studio/atelier. There he met Richard Serrin, Daniel Graves’s first teacher in Florence. Serrin hammered home the idea that figurative paintings must be more than faithful renderings of what we see — they must also trigger some reaction in the viewer’s heart or mind. “He really encouraged me,” Richards says. “I want to honor him.”

Richards cites an anecdote about the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson, who was notoriously blind to the pleasures of art, but once wrote warmly to his painter friend Joshua Reynolds that the beautiful thing about a portrait is that it creates friendship in the present tense, sustains the bond when two friends are apart, and reminds us of friends after they have died. Richards feels “that idea of the three tenses, and that idea of a really meaningful relationship built up over time, is such a precious thing.”

Perhaps it is because Richards pays such close attention to that mysterious friendship that passes between a painting and its

TOM RICHARDS ( b. 1982), Old Fort, Lamu , 2022, oil on canvas, 20 x 34 in., available through LE Bennett

TOM RICHARDS ( b. 1982) , Italian Girl , 2020, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in., available through the artist

viewer that he is so in demand as a portraitist. He has had some remarkable clients, including a Hong Kong multimillionaire who commissioned an entire series of portraits. The trustees of Oxford’s Balliol College asked him to paint Donald Harris, the law professor remembered for championing the idea that the law has moral and ethical implications beyond its theoretical foundations.

SOURCES & ASPIRATIONS

The Florence Academy of Art is a few short miles from the golden heart of the Renaissance, where Botticelli painted Primavera, Michelangelo sculpted David, and Leonardo began his wrecked Battle of Anghiari Its neighbors include the glorious galleries and frescos of the Uffizi and

Palazzo Vecchio, among the world’s greatest art collections. Why, then, does the academy focus on techniques promoted by the leading art school in 19th-century Paris? Richards replies:

There isn’t that much really solid written evidence of a comprehensive program before the very end of the 18th century. You have fragments of things, but there isn’t the idea of a training manual. But the painters that most of us are interested in worked in the 17th century and earlier, so we use the 19th century as a prism to get back, to find connections to the art we really love. The 19th century is a guide, and the earlier art is an inspiration.

Having said that, the academy isn’t stuck in the reactionary mud of a Luddite past. Lest we imagine that formal imitation is the only goal, Richards is clear that students are instead devoted to emulation — learning from the Old Masters while improving upon their excellence, carrying the tradition forward into the future. He explains:

Tradition by itself is one of the worst reasons to do anything; otherwise you’d risk blindly carrying on with apartheid or something ghastly like that. Tradition has to be useful, to have a function … Nostalgia can be a great excuse for not doing anything or perpetuating evil. I don’t think the past is a mythically better place. I love the paintings of the 17th century, but I wouldn’t want to live then.

The academy’s three-year certificate course provides excellent skill-based training, from which students emerge with technical proficiency but without having yet had time to concentrate on independent work. “It’s like having great handwriting, but not writing a book,” Richards notes. He expects that the M.F.A. program he hopes to inaugurate next year will fill that gap, giving students time and space to develop their vision as individual artists, guided by the faculty and by authorities outside the academy.

A group of smiling students rattles across the sunny courtyard into the cafe, talking of paint and pigments, gesso and glue. The espresso machine fills the air with a whoosh and the scent of fresh coffee, and Richards smiles: “You walk into the courtyard in the evening and there are a hundred people from 35 countries all doing their best. To see this global interest, this youth, this enthusiasm — it’s such an important thing. It’s pretty hard to be pessimistic.”

Information: florenceacademyofart.com

MICHAEL J. PEARCE is a writer, curator, and critic who champions skill-based art that emerges from popular culture and shapes the spirit of the age. He has published dozens of articles, authored Art in the Age of Emergence, and is professor of art at California Lutheran University.

TOM RICHARDS ( b. 1982), Study for Abstract Painter Meets Raphael Drawings , 2019, oil on canvas, 35 x 28 in., private collection

Based in Urbana, Illinois, the artist Adrian Gottlieb (b. 1975) has been highly regarded in the world of contemporary realism for almost two decades. He is best known for his figurative pieces and portraiture, both official and personal, and is also admired for an uncanny ability to integrate radiant figures into realistic landscapes. (Two new examples of this expertise are illustrated on page 106.)

Gottlieb often works directly from the live model, as well as from images taken during photoshoots he directs. What comes off his easel are people who are luminous — many seem to glow from within — and replete with both purpose and poise. Gottlieb likes to quote the story of Rembrandt’s student asking how the master knew when a painting was complete. He was told to recall the vision he had when he began the piece. When that vision was fulfilled, the painting was finished. Seeking to create what he calls a “total experience,” Gottlieb’s portraits are notably insightful, bringing us closer to the sitter through a heightened awareness of that person’s humanity.

ADRIAN GOTTLIEB INSPIRATION & HARD WORK

BEHIND THE SCENES

Duality, 2022, oil on linen, 43 x 72 in., T.H. Brennen Fine Art (Scottsdale)

Born and raised in Vermont, Gottlieb loved oil painting and realism from early on, but found that the basic skills he wanted to learn were not being taught at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he had enrolled as an undergraduate. Soon he transferred to the B.F.A. program in illustration at New York’s Rochester Institute of Technology, where his drawing skills improved quickly. In addition to independent study in anatomical drawing, Gottlieb spent three consecutive summers in Florence learning Old Master painting techniques with Charles H. Cecil and Nicholas Beer. After this he pursued three years of graduate study at the Florence Academy of Art.

Gottlieb then moved to California to teach at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, after which he instructed workshop groups in his own studio for 15 years. Now he lives in Urbana, working with models, executing portrait commissions, and teaching workshops.

STEP BY STEP

Like many artists, Gottlieb carefully documents each stage of his process. Fresh off his easel is the superb two-figure painting Duality, and now he has kindly shared a sequence of 10 photographs with Fine Art Connoisseur so that we can better appreciate how he developed it. The commentaries here are in Gottlieb’s own words, and they underscore how purposeful an artist must be as he or she moves through the working process.

Next time you encounter a painting as well made as Adrian Gottlieb’s Duality, pause to consider how much thought and effort went into bringing it to completion.

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

This is stretched linen triple-primed with lead white oil primer. I have used a color mixed with Oleogel, alizarin crimson, and olive green to lay in the basic drawing and massing.  I’ve left the canvas fairly bright, as this allows the painting to stay light enough as it ages.

As I mass the painting in, I will rub in a thin coat of Oleogel with a little alizarin and olive green as I go. This gives a midtone harmony easier to work into and allows the painting to cover the canvas more quickly and easily. The Oleogel is ideal since it’s more “giving” than a dry canvas alone, while still containing enough “tooth” to prevent the surface from becoming too slippery or greasy.

I am not getting too hung up on good painting at this stage, preferring to just mass things in since, even with a color study guiding me, areas will change as their relationships to others become clearer. I also lay in the shadows first to establish the anchor my lights hold onto.

Having roughly massed in the figures, I move on to the background.  It’s best not to hold off too long on this since the figures will depend on their environment to read correctly. People will disagree as to whether it’s better to lay in the foreground or the background first, but so long as you don’t put one too far ahead of the other, it will really just come down to personal preference.

With the canvas entirely massed in, I am now in a much better position to change the tonal relationships of certain areas to work better. This might include harmonizing the background immediately around the figures with the rest of the background, or making the shadows of the legs at right harmonize with the bright sunset better, and also to model the forms.

Reflections , 2022, oil on panel, 24 x 36 in., T.H. Brennen Fine Art (Scottsdale)

Mesquite Sunse t, 2022, oil on panel, 28 x 40 in., T.H. Brennen Fine Art (Scottsdale)

Enigma, 2022, oil on panel, 24 x 20 in., T.H. Brennen Fine Art (Scottsdale)

ARTISTS & GALLERIES

of children’s books, he spent more than four decades in New York’s Hudson Valley. Much of his fine art reflects a deep love of that region’s unique light and palette.

New Orleans

thedegasgallery.com

November 5–December 1

Marcia Holmes will open her sixth solo exhibition at Degas Gallery, titled My Floral Muse. On view will be oils and pastels that explore the vibrancy of flowers and foliage from various perspectives. The gallery is named in honor of Edgar Degas, who created important art in 1872–73 while visiting relatives in New Orleans.

Madison, Connecticut susanpowellfineart.com

through November 26

Vincent Giarrano: City Life Paintings is the 13th solo show this gifted painter has mounted at Susan Powell Fine Art. On view are more than 30 recent paintings, many highlighting women going about their daily lives — at work, dressing for an evening out, or enjoying drinks. New York City features prominently, with its sharp shadows, graffiti, and cast iron architecture.

New York City salmagundi.org

November 20–December 10

The 20th century witnessed the rise of individualism as artists’ defining characteristic — no longer part of a movement, but unique individuals with a singular vision. This worldview was not previously the norm and is being revisited today. An exhibition of paintings, drawings, and sculpture at the Salmagundi Club, Lineage: Generations of Realism, visualizes how pre-modernist generations grew through networks and interactions between master and student. Among the talents represented are William Merritt Chase, N.C. Wyeth, Nelson Shanks, Martha Mayer Erlebacher, Richard Schmid, Max Ginsburg, Juliette Aristides, Dan Thompson, and John Varriano.

Online only

nwws.org

through January 6

The Northwest Watercolor Society (NWWS) has launched its online-only 82nd International Open Exhibition. Juror Andy Evansen selected 75 paintings from 664 submitted from 16 countries and 39 states; he has also awarded more than $11,000 in cash and merchandise prizes. Among the water media represented are watercolor, acrylic, gouache, casein, and egg tempera.

St. Simons Island, Georgia

andersonfineartgallery.com

November 4–December 4

Kinderhook, New York gallerynortheastllc.com

November 3–December 11

Gallery Northeast is presenting impressionistic landscape paintings by the talented artist Howard Knotts (1922–2004). Best known as an illustrator and author

Vincent Giarrano (b. 1960), Cindy Hulej in Her Studio, 2022, oil on panel, 12 x 9 in.

Howard Knotts (1922–2004), Autumn House, 1975, oil on canvas, 19 x 23 in.

Norman Rockwell (1894–1978), One of Uncle Sam’s Assets [Cover of Literary Digest, 22 October 1921 issue], oil on canvas, 18 x 16 3/8 in., courtesy of American Illustrators Gallery, New York City

Marcia Holmes (b. 1954), Belles of Valencia, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 x 40 in.

Lorraine Watry (b. 1964), Coral Chorus Line, 2021, watercolor on paper, 26 1/2 x 19 1/2 in.

Roger Dale Brown (b. 1963), Be Still, 2022, oil on linen, 40 x 30 in.

Anderson Fine Art Gallery is presenting Lingering Light, a show of recent paintings by the Tennessee-based master Roger Dale Brown. Brown explains, “My whole purpose for painting is to let the viewer feel and see what I did at a moment in time. I want them to feel God’s presence, serenity, and comfort through my art. If I can accomplish that, then I have succeeded as an artist.”

240-page volume, Watwood shows readers how to learn skills in realistic drawing and develop confidence in their own voices.  She shares her process for building a personal sourcebook and using collage, vision boards, and notan thumbnails, illustrating images by 56 contemporary and historic masters (including herself) to demonstrate how drawing becomes a vehicle for exploring ideas and developing complex works.

In celebration, the Salmagundi Club of New York is presenting an exhibition of Watwood’s drawings (December 11–23). She will speak there about the book (and sign copies of it) on December 14, the day it is published.

KANŌ TSUNENOBU (Japanese, 1636–1713), Page from Studies of Ancient Masters (Gakko-jō), c. 1695, ink and color on silk and paper, 11 1/4 x 9 7/8 in., Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, anonymous gift, 1975.11.40

Art’s exhibition Earthly Exemplars: The Art of Buddhist Disciples and Teachers in Asia highlights images that facilitated this faith’s transmission from one teacher to the next. The works on view were made in Tibet, China, and Japan and are drawn primarily from the Fralin’s permanent collection.

New York City

sugarlift.com

through January 7

Sugarlift is hosting its second show devoted to the Colorado-based painter Zoey Frank, who melds realism and abstraction, shifting deftly from banalities (such as the radiator illustrated here) to ambitiously diffracted scenes of multiple figures engaged in activities that are by turns obvious or enigmatic.

Monacelli Studio Press & Salmagundi

Club of New York

monacellipress.com, salmagundi.org , patriciawatwood.com

December

Based in Brooklyn, Patricia Watwood is well known for her realist drawings, oil paintings, and portraits.

On December 14, Monacelli Studio Press will publish her first book, The Path of Drawing: Lessons for Everyday Creativity and Mindfulness. In this richly illustrated,

Westfield, New York

katherinegalbraithfineart.com

November 11–12

Located in western New York State, Chautauqua County is, according to artist Katherine Galbraith, “rural, somewhat economically depressed, but utterly charming and surviving.” She has created more than 30 portraits of her fellow county residents, all to appear this month at the historic Westfield Train Station in the exhibition Painting the Faces of Chautauqua

Represented in these 14-by-11-inch panels is a cross section of Galbraith’s neighbors, from large landowners and vintners to nurses and firefighters. The portraits will be hung in a grid pattern opposite a wall of her landscape paintings. (The latter are for sale, but the portraits will remain hers as she seeks to exhibit them at a museum.) During the reception on November 11, some sitters will speak about their portraits, and Galbraith will give a public talk the next day.

MUSEUMS

Charlottesville, Virginia

uvafralinartmuseum.virginia.edu

through March 19

As different traditions of Buddhism spread across Asia between the 17th and 19th centuries, art of Buddhist luminaries played a pivotal role. The Fralin Museum of

James Jacques Joseph Tissot (1836–1901), God Appears to Noah, c. 1896–1902, gouache on board, 9 x 4 3/8 in., Jewish Museum, New York City; gift of the heirs of Jacob Schiff

Provo, Utah

moa.byu.edu

through December 31

After the worldwide success of his illustrated publication The Life of Christ, the French artist James Tissot returned to the Holy Land in 1896 to begin a series of more than 370 illustrations, painted in watercolor and gouache, depicting stories from the Old Testament. Utilizing religious and scholarly sources, his own travel experiences, and his unconventional imagination, Tissot decided to illustrate every episode. After his unexpected death in 1902, the images left unfinished were completed by artists he trusted.

These remarkable works have long been at New York City’s Jewish Museum, and now the Brigham Young University Museum of Art has borrowed 129 of them to conserve and display for the first time in four decades. Also included in BYU’s exhibition (titled Prophets, Priests, and Queens: James Tissot’s Men and Women of the Old Testament) are several previously unlocated oil paintings related to the Old Testament.

Zoey Frank (b. 1987), Radiator #2, 2021, oil on linen on panel, 48 x 36 in.

Katherine Galbraith (b. 1948), Kate, 2022, oil on wood panel, 14 x 11 in.

the Uffizi. It features more than 45 paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, decorative artworks, and even ancient Roman marbles that rarely leave Florence’s famous museum, let alone Italy. The stars are a dozen works by Sandro Botticelli, making this the largest show on him ever mounted in the U.S. His genius is contextualized through masterworks by such peers as Fra Filippo Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, and Signorelli. All are presented alongside pieces from Mia’s own collection.

Sully, the Peale family, Cole, Kensett, Durand, Richards, Robinson, Hassam, Metcalf, Chase, Cassatt, Sargent, and Tarbell. Included are still lifes by Roesen, Harnett, Porter, Peto, and Bailey; sculptures by Powers, Manship, and Saint-Gaudens; and modern works by Hartley, Marin, Cadmus, Nevelson, and Rockman.

American Made is accompanied by a 400-page catalogue published in association with D. Giles Limited (London); its principal author is Elizabeth B. Heuer (University of North Florida). After Memphis, the show will move to the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens (Jacksonville), San Antonio Museum of Art, and Alabama’s Huntsville Museum of Art.

OUT & ABOUT

Miami

frost.fiu.edu

through January 15

Surely there is no better setting than Florida International University’s Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum for In the Mind’s Eye: Landscapes of Cuba, an exhibition that shows how this famous island has been imagined by American and Cuban artists. Well into the 20th century, U.S. artists such as Winslow Homer, William Glackens, and Childe Hassam projected an Edenic image of escapism, overlooking Cuba’s harsh realities of servitude, racial strife, and environmental degradation. Since 1959, Cuban artists like Juan Carlos Alom and Juana Valdés have presented a different story.

The project is accompanied by a handsome 136page publication produced by D Giles Limited (London). It features essays in English and Spanish by editor Amy Galpin and contributing scholars Jorge Duany and Katherine Manthorne.

Minneapolis

artsmia.org

through January 8

On view at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is the exhibition Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from

Altoona, Pennsylvania sama-art.org

through December 4

On view at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art are 30 luminous, often poetic landscapes by the Philadelphiabased painter Elizabeth Wilson. She has titled her exhibition Spirit of Place because it traces her life over the past two decades through travel, via both direct experience and memory. Significant during the pandemic lockdown were her cherished recollections of Long Island’s North Fork and the Roman Campagna.

Charlotte mintmuseum.org

through December 24

In Cody, Wyoming, this September, record results lit up the 41st annual Buffalo Bill Art Show & Sale (BBAS), a weekend of activities centered on a live auction and outdoor quick draw event. Produced by the Cody Country Chamber of Commerce to benefit the Chamber, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, and various arts organizations, BBAS offers contemporary artworks highlighting the land, people, and wildlife of the West. Embrace, an equine oil painted by Wyoming’s own Mark McKenna, won the People’s Choice Award and sparked a bidding war; ultimately it sold for $24,000 over its retail value. Seen here carrying it are Howard Thompson (left) and Gina Luttenegger.

On view at the Mint Museum Uptown is the first showing of a touring exhibition, American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection. Organized by the Mint and Memphis’s Dixon Gallery and Gardens (where it will appear January 29–April 16), the works come from the Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen Ph.D. Foundation, an outstanding private collection of American art.

The project surveys two centuries of paintings and sculpture, encompassing such bold-faced names as West,

In September, Plein Air Painters of the Southeast partnered with Leiper’s Creek Gallery (Franklin, Tennessee) to revive an annual tradition interrupted by the pandemic. PAPSE members again spent several days painting the picturesque buildings, streets, and pas-

tures of the historic village of Leiper’s Fork, then displaying their creations on the gallery’s expansive porch. Sales were strong, and Fine Art Connoisseur editor-in-chief Peter Trippi (seen here at right with gallery principal Lisa Fox) gave a talk highlighting how these gifted landscapists sustain the legacy of their forerunners, and also what collectors should watch for today.

Willard L. Metcalf (1858–1925), Havana Harbor, 1902, oil on canvas, 18 5/16 x 26 1/8 in., Terra Foundation for American Art, 1992.49

Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), Madonna and Child in Glory with Angels, c. 1467–69, tempera on panel, 47 1/4 x 25 1/4 in., Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence

Elizabeth Wilson (b. 1959), Above 67 Steps II, Greenport, 2013, watercolor on paper, 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in., collection of the artist

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau (1837–1922), La Captive, c. 1883, oil on canvas, 68 x 47 in.

Yorkshire Coast oil on linen panel

NANETTE FLUHR

AWA

Featured in six-city national museum tour of China

Recipient of AWA’s Distinguished Achievement Award

Winner of Manhattan Arts International HerStory 2022 Custom

Signature Member: American Watercolor Society (Dolphin Fellow), Transparent Watercolor Society of America, Watercolor USA Honor Society, New England Watercolor Society

“Shadia” Oil on Linen, 16” x 12”

Paula B.

Women Artists of the West

52nd National Exhibition

“East Meets West”

McBride Gallery, Annapolis, MD

November 6 - January 7, 2023

ANDERSON

CHERYL NEWBY GALLERY Pawleys Island, SC

HIGHLANDS ART GALLERY Lambertville, NJ

HUGHES GALLERY Boca Grande, FL

MARY WILLIAMS FINE ARTS Boulder, CO

PROVIDENCE GALLERY Charlotte, NC

www.paulabholtzclawfineart.com

FINE ART GALLERY

St. Simons, GA

The power of the heartfelt poetry of the Neo-Renaissance painter resonates in every brushstroke.

Nik Anikis, the Neo-Renaissance Painter from Slovenia.

Love of Craft and Nature

45 x 35 cm 17.7 x 13,78 in, oil on canvas, 2022, Sevnica

Learn the secrets of this masterpiece here: www.anikis.com/loveofcraft

Debbie Korbel

is an artist whose creativity has been applied to various media including sculpture as well as writing television comedy scripts, and song lyrics. Her work has been featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, appeared on many TV shows, been exhibited in multiple museums across the country, including a public art display in Times Square, NYC. She is thrilled to include Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith, as one of her collectors.

“They are dream-like yet real, mysterious yet comprehensible. Her work feels inhabited- they have gravitas, wit and soul.” - Genie Davis, Diversions LA

www.DebbieKorbel.com

Instagram @debbiekorbel

Facebook @debbiekorbelart

(818) 383-8905

The Kiss 37” h x 13” w x 13” d, Bronze

YOU COLLECT ART. Now you can become an artist.

NICHOLAS COLEMAN: Storypainting: Creating Emotion with Your Brush™ Stories Make the Painting S

torypainting… a word that describes the mission of nearly all painters — to create artwork that is breathtaking in appearance and will also lead viewers through the story you’re telling.

Nicholas sets out to tell and show you how he includes an underlying story in each of his paintings. Believing there is no substitute for your own experiences, you’ll see how this talented artist develops his storyline and then tells the story through his exquisite artwork.

MARK SHASHA: Painting the Golden Hour™ Painting Gold

Mark is passionate about capturing the mood of the Golden Hour — that special time each day when the sun begins to set and the natural light is truly golden.

In his full demonstration painting, Mark will reveal what has taken him years to master — his specific techniques, including a unique application process, that results in a scene that is awash with sunshine.

Stream to your computer, phone, tablet, or TV, or watch on DVD.

JILL STEFANI WAGNER: Pastel Painting from Photos

A 5-Step Process

J ill shares the five-step process she uses to extract every possible benefit and detail from the photos she takes. Then she captures only the most interesting elements from those photos to include in her award-winning pastel paintings.

Paint along from photo to finish as Jill captures a beautiful sunset over a calm, peaceful lake. Stream to your computer, phone, tablet, or TV, or watch on DVD.

BRAUER: Abstract Figure Painting™

LON

L on leads you through a start-to-finish painting demonstration where you’ll discover the abstract within a photo reference and see the structure by using shape, value, and color.

Lon has developed his own techniques such as laying out a specific palette for figures, color mixing, brushwork, and movement. He’ll even show you how he uses alternative tools to add interest to his paintings.