The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announces the recent acquisition of Thomas Eakins’ large sporting painting, “Wrestlers,” 1899; it is the gift of Cecile C. Bartman and The Cecile and Fred Bartman Foundation. “Wrestlers” is one of the last major subject paintings that Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) created. Anyone who has not been to Antiques & Fine Art at the Armory — which in 2006 was presented at the Seventh Regiment Armory December 7–11 — owes himself a visit. Freeman’s closed a banner year with sales of silver and decorative arts, Oriental rugs and carpets and Asian arts on December 13–15, with highlights across all disciplines but none that topped the $341,625 paid for a Chelaberd Kazak from the estate of Robert Montgomery Scott. Period lighting enthusiasts and diners out for a steak dinner found plenty of choices not on the menu on October 28 at the historic Willett House restaurant, where the mostly-online auction house LampsandArtGlass.com held its third live sale since its founding in 2004. The Birmingham Museum of Art will open the doors of a newly designed annex to feature the most comprehensive exhibition of works by Alabama’s premier folk artists on January 14.
“One of a Kind: The Studio Craft Movement,” on view through September 3, features approximately 50 works from The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection and includes furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, jewelry and fiber. Status, prosperity and delicious indulgences. That is the top-line social history behind the exhibit of 250 pieces of Maryland silver now on permanent display at the Maryland Historical Society. But the deeper story of the hollowwares produced in Maryland, their evolution and impact on American silver styles across the nation, reflects the true importance of this landmark exhibition. In describing the exhibit, “Served in Style: Silver Collection of the Maryland Historical Society,” Jeannine Disviscour, who created and curates the show, called it “dazzling” — and she was not just mining a cliché. The silver is displayed in a gallery bathed in sunlight. Given the setting, every chased detail, repoussé decoration and decorative banding can be seen, studied and admired.
Status, prosperity and delicious indulgences. That is the top-line social history behind the exhibit of 250 pieces of Maryland silver now on permanent display at the Maryland Historical Society. But the deeper story of the hollowwares produced in Maryland, their evolution and impact on American silver styles across the nation, reflects the true importance of this landmark exhibition. In describing the exhibit, “Served in Style: Silver Collection of the Maryland Historical Society,” Jeannine Disviscour, who created and curates the show, called it “dazzling” — and she was not just mining a cliché. The silver is displayed in a gallery bathed in sunlight. Given the setting, every chased detail, repoussé decoration and decorative banding can be seen, studied and admired.
Two James Edward Buttersworth marine paintings were the top lots at Grogan & Company’s October 15 sale when a 12-by-18-inch portrait of the racing schooner “Atalanta Rounding Buoy 8½” brought $269,500. (AP) — Bernie Webber, an internationally known watercolor painter whose public murals have been a ubiquitous presence throughout Everett for decades, has died of complications from an inoperable brain tumor at age 83. Few better locations for an antiques show exist than the Peabody Essex Museum where imposing figureheads and portraits of Salem sea captains gaze upon the proceedings. Now a decade old, the Boston International Fine Arts Show at the Cyclorama building at the Boston Center of the Arts is brighter and tighter than ever. From the opening of the preview party to the last day, the energy was palpable. The recent evening and day sales of Latin American art at Christie’s offered collectors an array of paintings, sculpture and artifacts spanning the centuries between colonial days and today. A Boston or Salem Federal candlestand with stunning form and ablaze with pinwheel inlay was the choicest of the choice when it recently sold for $166,750 at CRN Auctions. In the shadow of the rugged Mount Sinai in Egypt lies Saint Catherine’s, the world’s oldest continuously operating Christian monastery, established in the Sixth Century. Artistic treasures from this ancient site have traveled to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, for “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons from Sinai,” on view till March 4.
Longtime show manager Bob Armacost is hanging up his hat and has sold his lineup of shows to Bob James, a branding and public relations executive who has about 25 years of experience working with nonprofits, startups, midmarket firms and Fortune 50 companies. Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, the operating company for the restored colonial village in Virginia’s Tidewater region, will open the new Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum on February 3. “Clocks fascinate,” Philip D. Zimmerman writes in Delaware Clocks, his catalog to an exhibition of the same name at the Biggs Museum of American Art through February 25. “It is always nice to play to a full room,” quipped auctioneer Russ Carlsen after the most recent Americana auction conducted at Carlsen Gallery that took place in front of an overflow crowd over the weekend following Thanksgiving. Dave R. Aronson, director of Aronson Antiquairs and chairman of TEFAF Maastricht, died of cancer in Amsterdam on January 5. He was 60. Robert C. Noortman, founder of Noortman Master Paintings in Maastricht, The Netherlands, died of a heart attack at his home in Belgium on Sunday, January 14. He was 60 and had been suffering from cancer, the news agency ANP reported. The Toledo Museum of Art has reinstalled the recently recovered Francisco de Goya y Lucientes painting “Children with a Cart,” 1778, and it is currently on view in Gallery 28A for a limited time. A new exhibition, “Helping Hands: Museum Volunteers Fund Acquisitions,” on view January 20–March 11, at the Brandywine River Museum honors the museum’s volunteers. “A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr,” the first comprehensive exhibition on the important American painter John Brewster Jr (1766–1854), will be on view at the Portland Museum of Art, January 25–March 25. The American Folk Art Museum presents a weeklong series of programs and receptions to coincide with its third annual Outsider Art Fair, which is January 23 through January 28. A sparkling dragonfly pin twinkled from amid a display case while several rows over a grouping of rings invited second glances. Rows of chunky Bakelite bracelets and necklaces arranged by color caught the eye.
December weather with rain and cold had only minor effect on the exhibitors and visitors to dmg world media’s Newark International Antiques and Collectors Fair on December 7–9. Formerly, the Swinderby Airbase was for training the Royal Air Force of England; today it is an exhibition grounds, a place for Arthur Swallow Fairs to have its huge antiques and collectors fairs each year. The art assets of the defunct Haley & Steele gallery came to auction at Kaminski’s recently. Bertoia Auction bidders were giving thanks a week early for the offerings that came up at the firm’s November “Off The Shelves” sale that was stacked with surprise entries and exceeded $2 million in sales. A green painted diminutive comb back Windsor armchair grabbed top honors at Freeman’s recent sale, with Americana presented on the first day and the firm's second annual Pennsylvania sale the second day. The world first came to know John Brewster Jr’s hushed, ethereal painting of Comfort Starr Mygatt and his young daughter, Lucy, when Sotheby’s auctioned the late Eighteenth Century portrait in 1988 for $852,500, then a record for American folk art. No press releases emanated from 1334 York Avenue, nor was there a banner proclaiming it on the firm’s website, but in a January 12 internal memo Sotheby’s notified its staff that, effective immediately, it was raising its buyer’s premium to 20 percent of the hammer price of the first $500,000 and 12 percent of the rest. Opening January 30, the Museo del Prado will present the most important exhibition on Tintoretto (1518–1594, born Jacopo Robusti) since the one held in the Palazzo Pesaro in Venice in 1937. The exhibition will remain on view through May 13.
An upcoming exhibition at The Textile Museum will explore the complex uses and meanings of red in textiles across time and place. “Red” will be on view February 2–July 8.
Miami-Dade Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are jointly investigating a series of thefts committed Friday, January 5, during the Miami National Antiques Show. Cincinnati Art Galleries LLC (CAG) recently held its largest holiday auction ever of American and European art pottery and art glass at its downtown gallery with nearly 1,500 lots offered in two days. Nan Gurley has created a series of new shows at Frank Jones Center this season and on January 7, she conducted the second of three events. The Torrington Historical Society recently acquired two important paintings of former Torrington residents, the Reverend Harvey Loomis and Ann Battell Loomis, that were painted in 1822 by celebrated American artist John Brewster Jr (1766–1854). Given the selection of vintage papier mache German Santas, kruegels, reindeer and sleds, the Katona/Lutz Christmas Antiques Show December 2–3 was verily a “blast from Christmas past.”
A few snowflakes fell on opening night at the Winter Antiques Show on Thursday, January 18; otherwise, a touch of spring was in the air at the 53-year-old-fair, rejuvenated with an updated floor plan and fresh displays by its 75-exhibitor cast. Americana Week in New York City is a time for auction houses and antiques dealers to strut their best stuff, and this year Sotheby’s did some fancy strutting, capping off its sales with a grand total of $29,049,320. One of the most interesting American-based, self-taught artists of the Twentieth Century, Martin Ramirez (1895–1963) created some 300 drawings characterized by aesthetic quality, power and a sense of mystery while confined to a mental institution in California. A gifted draftsman with an eye for spatial manipulation, he employed a variety of images that reflected his exposure to Mexican and US cultures, his restricted environment and his experiences as an impoverished migrant subsisting on the margins of American society. A superstar among outsider artists, Ramirez exemplifies one man’s determination to communicate at all costs and in the face of numerous obstacles. A trio of paintings by the early Nineteenth Century Pennsylvania painter Edward Hicks garnered $10,128,000 at Christie’s, pushing the Rockefeller Center firm’s Americana Week sales total to $23,922,400. Gavels came down fast and furious in many auction halls around the country over the holidays, once again providing both entertainment and investment opportunities as the old year concluded and the new one began. Longtime antiques dealer John Wallace Robinson, 73, of 1501 Hancock Road, died January 27 at his home. He dealt mainly in early country, architectural elements, early hardware and paintings.
New York State Police are investigating the theft of a two-piece, cast iron Victorian birdbath that was reported to have been taken from the lawn of a residence here sometime between December 27 and January 3. A cargo trailer filled with antique furniture and decorative accessories valued at approximately $1 million was stolen from a Hampton Inn parking lot in suburban West Palm Beach on January 23. The Berkshire County unit of the Massachusetts State Police is investigating stolen artwork believed to have been pawned in the Hartford, Conn., area last December. The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM) will present the exhibition: “American Scenes: Leisure and Entertainment” from February 10 through June 3 at the Phoebe and Belmont Towbin Wing. The National Academy Museum will present “High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967–1975,” bringing together more than 40 significant works by 37 artists living and working in New York between 1967 and 1975. Collectors expressed tremendous interest in the December 3 Natural History sale at Bonhams & Butterfields, which brought $1,991,587 for fine fossils, minerals, gold nuggets, lapidary works of art, meteorites, amber, jewelry, gemstones and archeological artifacts. The top selling lot of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings sale on January 25 was a rare, late work by Rembrandt, “Saint James the Greater,” from 1661, which sold for $25.8 million to an anonymous buyer. Setting record prices and capturing a new market in early American furniture, Hudson River School paintings and important Americana, Neal Auction Company’s December 2–3 holiday estates sale was considered a huge success.
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts will open the exhibition “Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920–1950” in the Upper-Level Galleries February 2. Susan and Mark Laracy, well-known collectors of American furniture and folk art, decided one day to sell their home in New Canaan, Conn., and thus began the process of downsizing. Working with Sotheby’s, the one-owner sale was set for Americana Week in New York City, Saturday, January 20. The distinctive smell of tobacco occasionally drifted in through the Mebane Antique Auction hall much like the history of the South still overlays the present day, invisible but still strong.
The opening crowd on Friday, January 12, at the Antiques At the Armory Show was the largest ever with many regulars in attendance as well as a number of first timers. Spring arrived early in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, January 4, ushering in weather in the sixties and a new Congress. But if there was change in the air, it was confined to politics. At the Omni Shoreham Hotel, the Washington Antiques Show was busy upholding a tradition a half-century in the making. The New York Ceramics Fair, the eight-year-old event that annually harnesses the enthusiasms of a small but focused group of connoisseurs, kicked off New York City's Americana Week with the most zealous opening night crowd in town.
Touted as the best gun show in the Atlantic region, the East Coast Fine Arms Show, January 5–7, was once again well received by serious collectors and shooting enthusiasts from throughout the Northeast. As temperatures outside the Civic Center spiked at a balmy 71 degrees, the two-day Papermania Plus antique paper and ephemera show opened January 6, proving things were just as hot indoors as outdoors. |
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