A Salute to The Magazine Antiques at 100

@laurelrdantiquesandmodern @lindleymartens

A Salute to The Magazine Antiques at 100—

An esteemed arts publication reaches the century mark!

The Magazine Antiques first issue in 1922. The Magazine Antiques was founded in 1922—well before the New Yorker, Time magazine, Newsweek, and many other eminent publications ever landed in readers’ hands. Now one hundred years old, Antiques has outlasted such legendary magazines as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, The American Mercury, Life, Look, and Scribner’s. Both in print and online, Antiques remains a keystone of the trade and a beloved source of information and enjoyment for collectors and art lovers everywhere.

Throughout its century-long history, Antiques has sought to be a trusted and authoritative resource for museum curators and other scholars of the fine and decorative arts. Over the decades, the magazine has been a platform for new discoveries and fresh research and, on the odd occasion, an arena for lively academic debate. Today, many scholars keep the entire back catalogue of Antiques on hand for reference—as do a surprising number of casual readers. Beyond helping to build and nurture the art and antiques trade, Antiques has been instrumental in fostering a broader interest in historical art and design. The magazine and the antiques market have grown up side by side, and continue to thrive in harmony.

Advertisements that have appeared in the magazine are themselves valuable documents, and have been used by scholars, gallerists, and dealers alike to trace the pedigree and provenance of innumerable paintings, pieces of furniture, silver services, ceramic wares, and more. For many dealers, a first-time advertisement in Antiques is about pride as much as sales— a mark that they are ready to take their place in the upper echelon of the trade.

A Salute to The Magazine Antiques

The following commentaries from curators, scholars, professionals in the art and antiques trade, and casual readers testify to the goodwill and esteem that Antiques has achieved throughout its century-long existence.

MARCH/APRIL 2019

Antiques is full of surprises, happily. It is probably the last of the general arts magazines, and still thoughtful, imaginative, well-informed, and gutsy in its own way. Editor Gregory Cerio and Antiques bravely offer us quirky, off-the-beaten-track, personal approaches to the arts and life, and to things of high quality everywhere. As a longtime reader and admirer, I salute them on this grand occasion! There may not be a single issue of The Magazine Antiques that I have not read, enjoyed, and learned from over the last fifty years—half of the magazine’s existence. A visually stunning magazine, Antiques has long been recognized as the gold standard of popular scholarly publications for its concise, accurate, stimulating, and evocative presentation of content. Many books have come and gone from my library over the years, yet copies of Antiques have remained on my shelves for decades, simply because they are too valuable to discard.

The dozen or so articles that I have written for the magazine have covered a wide range of topics, from Queen Victoria’s collection of hair jewelry to the trade medals given by explorers to indigenous peoples around the world. I have discussed historical figures from different eras, from George Washington to Beatrix Potter, and described collection- filled institutions, from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia to the Explorers Club in New York. I have written about decorative arts and fine arts and several subjects that fall somewhere in between. I can think of no other magazine that would have encouraged such an eclectic assemblage of topics—or given them such a spectacular showcase.

The editorial guidance, thoughtfully and sensitively provided by Wendell Garrett, Alfred Mayor, Allison Eckardt Ledes, Eleanor Gustafson, Gregory Cerio, and their colleagues over the years, has greatly improved everything I have ever submitted.

I congratulate The Magazine Antiques on its hundredth birthday and wish it all the best as it embarks on a second century of engaging, instructive, and insightful scholarship.

Robert McCracken Peck, senior fellow and curator, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Drexel University

Joan K. Davidson, philanthropist, Furthermore and the JM Kaplan Fund

MAY 1981

FOUR DOLLARS

Since my childhood, The Magazine Antiques has been an influential and indispensable part of my life. As a boy, I would run to our mailbox in heart-pounding anticipation for the arrival of the latest issue. As a reader, I felt welcomed by a familiar sequence of ads for Israel Sack, David Stockwell, The Old Print Shop, and John Walton at the front, with John Bell of Aberdeen, Herbert Schiffer, and Shreve, Crump & Low anchoring the back. I joyfully dove into its pages, absorbing a galaxy of illustrations throughout and fascinating articles.

One of the most treasured and well-utilized sources in our reference library is a bound complete run of Antiques. After my mother, Marjorie H. (Peggy) Schorsch, transitioned from a private collector to a dealer in 1975, her first advertisement appeared in the December 1976 issue. Over the past 45 years, our ads have featured pieces that reflect both our particular viewpoint as well as trends in collecting. I achieved a professional milestone in 1990 when Antiques’s editor Allison Eckardt Ledes afforded me the honor of writing the first of a series of articles published by the magazine.

Throughout its one hundred years, The Magazine Antiques has championed scholarship, promoted the American market for art and antiques, and served as a documented timeline of the field’s maturation.

David Schorsch, principal, David A. Schorsch and Eileen M. Smiles American Antiques

Here’s to a century’s worth of The Magazine Antiques! I grew up with copies of the magazine strewn around the house, each with important articles and eye-catching advertisements that provoked ‘if only” thoughts. Antiques has taken on many roles in my family over the years, including assisting in my dad’s recovery. He was hospitalized in 1934 after getting into a bad automobile accident while searching for a Christmas tree. One day, someone brought him a copy of Antiques to pass the time. Although he was about 150 issues behind, he soon caught up and continued to read new issues until the age of ninety-five! Thanks for that.

Philip Zea, past president and CEO, Historic Deerfield

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A Salute to The Magazine Antiques

I imagine I was one of few college seniors in the spring of 1982 who, in addition to graduation, eagerly anticipated the arrival of the April issue of The Magazine Antiques.

I discovered the magazine the previous summer while interning at the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine. There, I shadowed Martha Gandy (M’Lou) Fales as she researched the nineteenthcentury portraitist, still-life painter, and Kennebunkport native Hannah Brown Skeele. A regular contributor to Antiques, M’Lou received her master’s degree in Early American Culture from the Winterthur Program in 1954 (not only was she part of Winterthur’s first class of fellows, but also met her future husband, Dean Fales, a fellow scholar of American fine and decorative arts, through the program). By the end of the summer, M’Lou had identified a core group of thirty to forty paintings by Skeele and assembled a chronology of the artist’s career.

M’Lou’s resulting article in Antiques remains, to my knowledge, the only substantial piece of writing on Skeele. As an artist relatively well known in her lifetime, Skeele’s meticulous depictions of people and objects —such as an Italian Greyhound in one notable painting from the Brick Store Museum’s collection—were so accomplished that they invited comparison with the work of members of the Peale family. Recently, I returned to the article after coming across one of Skeele’s paintings listed for sale by a private gallery. When I told gallery about this important source of information, they passed it along to the purchaser, a major museum. Even though the gallery had not discovered article in its own research, others have. Shana Klein, an assistant professor at Kent State University, enlisted M’Lou’s research in an article recently published in the online journal of American art, Panorama. Klein cites M’Lou’s article in Antiques as her main source for Skeele’s biography as she analyzes still-life painting in relation to American imperialism—an argument that would have been completely foreign in 1982.

I suspect that Skeele is one of many women artists, queer artists, artists of color, or artists working outside of metropolitan areas who have been documented most extensively—or even exclusively—in The Magazine Antiques. The magazine’s archive therefore takes on even greater significance as scholars expand upon the canon of artists they write and teach about, and as the works of artists marginalized during their lifetimes become increasingly popular among collectors. Antiques remains, as far as I am concerned, a unique venue for the publication of original and substantial research on artists, works of art and architecture, and locales that otherwise might remain obscure. I hope that new generations of college students will discover in the archive of deeply-researched and carefully-edited articles from The Magazine Antiques a trove of cultural objects which they will think about in ways we can scarcely imagine.

Kevin D. Murphy, professor of art and architectural history, Vanderbilt University

A Salute to The Magazine Antiques

I was not raised with antiques—or even magazines about antiques. My Depression- era parents had an aversion to anything that smacked of the secondhand, and they threw away whatever possessions grew old or tarnished in favor of something shiny and new. I think they were puzzled by their thrift-shopping, vintage-clothes-wearing, Victoriana-collecting, art-loving daughter who was always on the lookout for a career that would match her proclivities. That career started to take shape when I enrolled in the American Folk Art Studies graduate program at New York University. Conceived by Robert Bishop, then director of the American Folk Art Museum, this small yet rather brave program quickly introduced me to the Museum’s library.

Years-worth of issues of The Magazine Antiques occupied quite a length of shelf space in a quiet corner of the library that I claimed as my own.

Antiques was born in the flush of the colonial revival. In the magazine’s earliest incarnation, its pages revealed a reverence for china, silver, ancestor portraits, and Pilgrim and brown furniture—an unfamiliar world in which my Lower East Side soul was not the least comfortable. However, Antiques granted me entrée into that world where I could read, dream, and learn in private. As a graduate student, my papers centered on topics and artists that I would pursue throughout my career (and eventually write about in the magazine). One of my first papers considered the Boston fishing lady needleworks, which prompted my first research foray into Antiques—to encounter the marvelous articles by Nancy Graves Cabot. I was hooked. Thereafter, I spent hours and hours leafing through the pages of issues that marched through time. I have always returned to Antiques as my first port of call for any research project. As I became more familiar with the Museum’s collection, I fell under the thrall of the “Phrenological Head” attributed to Asa Ames (1827–1851). The sculpted bust was first exhibited at the Newark Museum in 1931, a point in time when modernism met folk art met the colonial revival, but, of course, the one and only article published on the artist to date appeared in The Magazine Antiques in 1982.

As time goes on, topics covered by the magazine have cast a wider net while always remaining relevant, scholarly, and inviting so that even the most uninitiated become enmeshed in its sheer beauty and ideas. The Magazine Antiques is now itself an antique, and its tenor has necessarily changed and grown as it responds to new leadership, times, and interests. What has never changed, though, is the intellectual delight in art, objects, and their histories—the passion in knowledge for its own sake, and the pure joy in sharing it with others.

Stacy C. Hollander, former director of curatorial affairs, chief curator, and director of exhibitions, American Folk Art Museum

A Salute to The Magazine Antiques

The Magazine Antiques has been a central part of my life since my early teen years. Since then, I have worn various successive hats as a student, museum curator, dealer, and collector as I eagerly await the arrival of each issue.

Cumulatively, the amount of information contained in nearly 100 years of publication is overwhelming. There is almost no subject of research in the field of American art that would not benefit from reviewing the scholarship published in Antiques. As an author, I have always been pleased with the excellent editing and artistic presentation of the various articles I have submitted. Good health and long life to a great American institution!

Stuart P. Feld, principal, Hirschl & Adler Galleries

Antiques is a resource for everybody; a stimulating and inviting venerable publishing presence with a terrific range of articles and features in every issue by those who know and who also know how to write.

As a curator who labors in the vineyard of American painting and has had the privilege of writing several articles, Antiques has also kept me abreast of everything else: sculpture, the decorative arts, architecture, textiles, prints, jewelry, and so on.

Importantly, Antiques pays close attention to private collectors and the practices of collecting, in addition to the collections they assemble and their modes of display. Between the front and back covers of each issue is a robust survey of the current marketplace; much of it ‘American’ but hardly all. This is an education (and a visual delight) in and of itself. The sheer breadth of the magazine’s range of inquiry over the past century has been extraordinary; exploring “up and down” the hierarchies of connoisseurship and scholarship from indigenous, folk, and artisanal to popular culture; from high art to material culture and artifacts as well as a geographic range that can reach well beyond continental borders. In the expanding global community of today, such ambition suggests that Antiques is well-positioned for its second century.

Linda S. Ferber, vice president and museum director emerita of The New-York Historical Society and curator emerita of The Brooklyn Museum

A Salute to The Magazine Antiques

Since its first issue was published in January 1922, Antiques has remained a key source of information about early Americana, broadly conceived. Moreover, as was noted in a printing trade journal in 1922, Antiques not only published good content, but did so elegantly: “typographically the magazine is a gem.”

Appropriately published initially in Boston, the magazine flourished under the leadership of distinguished editors and staff, beginning with Homer Eaton Keyes, and including Alice Winchester and the inestimable Wendell D. Garrett. For more than a thousand issues, Antiques has consistently brought new research and fresh topics to the attention of its readers. It has fostered healthy scholarly debate, as with the legendary battle between Fiske Kimball and Mabel Munson Swan over the attribution of Samuel McIntire furniture in the 1930s, and has helped expand the temporal and spatial boundaries of the antiques world writ large. Even the magazine’s many advertisements have become a valuable archive over time, helping to chart the unceasing flow of objects through the marketplace. With its rich blend of well-edited, authoritative texts accompanied by colorful images, Antiques has been a fixture for a century, evolving with the field and helping to shape the trajectory of its evolution, as it no doubt will in the challenging years and decades ahead.

Gerald W.R. Ward, curator emeritus, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Like many of us, I have a near-complete run of Antiques in my home library. My set came to me from a collector in Connecticut, and every time I leaf through an old issue, I think of her. I also dwell on the names of all those who contributed articles or placed ads, feeling a sense of kinship that transcends time. We antiques scholars, antiquers, and antiquarians thank you for a century of community and wish you a century more.

John Stuart Gordon, curator, Yale University Art Gallery

When we first started our business 36 years ago, we quickly realized that knowledge would be a key ingredient to our success. Early on, we purchased a whole run of The Magazine Antiques, starting with the first issue of January 1922. Throughout the years, the magazine’s articles, pictures, and advertisements have produced exemplary scholarship and documented the tastes of the times. We always look forward to each issue.

Mark McHugh and Spencer Gordon, principals, Spencer Marks, Ltd.

The Magazine Antiques was the first magazine to which I ever had a subscription. No Seventeen for me. When Charles Montgomery left his position as director of Winterthur to teach at Yale, I took the opportunity to enroll in one of his courses, known among students as “pots and pans.” The class seemed like an excellent opportunity to learn more about historic houses, which had interested me since the age of nine when I visited Portsmouth and Exeter, New Hampshire, and Concord, Massachusetts.

Montgomery eventually became my thesis advisor and mentor. Our class studied and rearranged the great furniture at Yale according to the different periods we had learned, and were given a private tour of Winterthur.

My parents evidently understood that antiques had become my passion after I bought an eighteenth-century Windsor chair with the cash my grandfather gifted me for my birthday. My Christmas present from them was not a usual nineteen-year-old’s gift but it was perfect—my first issue of a subscription to Antiques. Every month I would rush to open the latest issue and usually read most of it in one sitting. My subscription to Antiques coincided with my own early research, several more courses with Montgomery and others, and my introduction into the museum world.

I have kept every issue of Antiques and frequently go back to find articles, often looking for one thing and ending up reading the articles on either side—like going into the stacks of a library. I am glad I still have them. I hope full digitization will allow everyone to share in the century-long history of Antiques (before and after my subscription began). Nevertheless, I still enjoy the feeling of seeing my first issues, with their elegant photos and research that led to further discoveries in later issues, and the romance of the lives of collectors featured in the “Living with Antiques” series.

Congratulations to The Magazine Antiques on its first one hundred years, and best wishes for inspiring and captivating more generations in the next hundred.

Sarah D. Coffin, former head of the Product Design and Decorative Arts department, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

The Magazine Antiques has long remained a principal resource for me in keeping keeping me apprised of select new exhibitions and scholarly endeavors in the field of decorative arts. Just as our fascination with and study of multi-faceted histories is richly reflected in various functional and artistic objects that are part of our lives, each issue of Antiques continues to open eyes and minds to new work, new discoveries, and new ways of thinking about our shared past and present.

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022

Celebrating 100 Year

1922–2022

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