Dr Henry David Ginsburg, an expert on Thai painting and manuscripts, died in New York City on March 29. He was 66. Cecily Colburn, chairman of the Ellis Antiques Show, has announced that Chris Jussel will serve as the manager for the 48th annual Ellis Antiques Show, set for November 2–4 at the Castle at the Park Plaza Hotel and Towers.
The first exhibition in England to focus on the complex relationship between Russian and Italian Futurism is at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art through Sunday, June 10.
The exhibition, “Honoring a Tradition, Honoring a Teacher: A Tribute to James Cahill,” is on view through May 27 at the The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and featuring a selection of work from BAM/PFA’s collection of Chinese paintings.
“The only thing that I can promise you is that you will never be bored,” Christie’s consultant Ralph Carpenter told Dean Failey over lunch one day in 1979 at an exclusive Newport, R.I., club. The 32-year-old Winterthur-educated curator had recently taken a job with Christie's, but feared commercial experience would jeopardize his standing in the museum field. Twenty-eight years later, Failey is still at Christie’s and, as Carpenter predicted, life has been anything but dull. A published scholar with a deep affinity for objects, as well as for those who care for them, Failey is a natural choice for the 2007 Award of Merit, to be presented by the Antiques Dealers Association of America (ADA) at a dinner in his honor at the Philadelphia Antiques Show on April 14.
The National Heritage Museum will open “Sowing the Seeds of Liberty: Lexington and the American Revolution,” its new cornerstone exhibition, on the state’s Patriots’ Day holiday, Monday, April 16.
John Keith Russell, president of the Antiques Dealers’ Association of America (ADA) has announced that Lincoln R. Sander, a resident of the Sandy Hook section of Newtown, will replace Satenig St.Marie as executive director of the ADA. St.Marie will retire at the end of this month, after serving more than 20 years as ADA’s first executive director.
At the end of the day it was the sweet sounds of a “Black Beauty,” a 1957 Gibson Les Paul custom left-handed guitar, that crowned Eldred’s thousand-plus-lot sale March 30-31 when it sold for $247,000. The guitar, of which 283 were produced, was one of a few made for lefties.
A small but select grouping of flasks, figural bottles, fruit jars and other glasswares were sold during an absentee auction conducted by Norman C. Heckler and Company on March 14.
“You broke it, you bought it.” That shopworn phrase got turned around when the hammer fell and shattered a record at the Rago Arts and Auction Center Saturday, March 10. A rare vase by Frederick H. Rhead, the English “father of Fiesta ware,” sold for $516,000.
As we toured the spacious aisles of the Connecticut Spring Antiques Show prior to the show opening to the public on Saturday morning, there was an obvious sense of heightened anticipation among the exhibitors. Dealer after dealer proclaimed it the “best looking Hartford Show I can remember.” And they were correct. Between March 15 and April 14, Historic Charleston Foundation hosts dozens of special events to help pay for the city’s ongoing restoration.The belle of the ball is the Charleston International Antiques Show, which ran March 15-18.
Heart of Country Antiques Show returned to Nashville’s Opryland USA for the 26th year March 1–3. With 125 dealers, according to Susan Kramer Hunkins, daughter of the founders, Richard and Elizabeth Kramer, “the show had strong sales of Americana, its particular specialty.”
More than 150 antiques dealers gathered at the Radisson Hotel for Music Valley Antiques Market March 1–3, offering a mixture of early American antiques, Americana and folk art.
More than 170 exhibiting dealers were greeted by the largest audience in the last five years at the most recent Tailgate Antiques Show at Fiddler’s Inn from February 28–March 3.
London antiquary Alistair Sampson sold his first creamware collection at Christie’s in 1967 on the eve of his marriage because he wanted his new wife to, as he put it, “move her bits and bobs into the cupboard, which had previously been home to 80 teapots.” Creamware nevertheless remained one of his great loves. As a collector, Sampson was interested in illustrating the stylistic evolution and great formal diversity of the earthenware first produced in Staffordshire, England, in the 1740s using calcined flint clay and a lead glaze that, when fired, turned a transparent creamy-white. Sampson died on January 13, 2006, age 76. Historic Deerfield recently acquired Sampson’s personal creamware collection, consisting of 162 figures, vases, urns, tureens, sauce boats, mugs, teapots, food molds, shaving bowls, candlesticks, spittoons, pierced dessert wares, baskets and other forms. The majority of the collection will be on view in the Flynt Center of Early New England Life.
Christie’s has abruptly cancelled its upcoming auction of American Indian Art, originally scheduled for May 24, and closing the department for an indefinite period of time. On April 21, The Muscarelle Museum of Art at The College of William & Mary will be the first museum venue on the national tour to showcase works from the renowned artists in the Wyeth family together in one exhibition.
On April 28, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the New World, with “Rule Britannia!,” a major exhibition of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century paintings whose core will be unprecedented loans from the collection of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.
Written and printed ephemera, by its very nature, is designed to be transitory, but the crowds gathered at the Stamford Marriott March 10–11 for the Ephemera 27 fair prove that this collecting niche has lasting appeal.
Home to the single largest collection of Asher B. Durand works, the New-York Historical Society will present more than 70 paintings, drawings, sculptures, daguerreotypes, and historical artifacts as part of its exhibition, “The World of Asher B. Durand: The Artist in the Antebellum New York” opening April 13 and running through September 30.
The International Asian Art Fair, the flagship for Asia Week in New York, returned to the Seventh Regiment Armory March 23–28.
Arts of Pacific Asia returned to the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue and 26th Street, March 22–25. The oldest, largest and biggest of New York’s Asian fairs, the Caskey-Lees event has been a stable performer for the Topanga, Calif., promoters since it debuted in 1995.
Despite an early morning coating of icy slush and snow and midtown parade gridlock, the Stella Show Mgmt Co.’s popular Spring Pier Show March 17–18 was not to be thwarted. Stella Management and its army of dealers were busy throwing design into the mix and those who made their way to the show were amply rewarded.
For some time Beverly, Mass., auctioneer Frank Kaminski has been testing the antique waters in the San Diego area, and the success of his February 17 and 18 inaugural West Coast auction has established the firm as a bicoastal entity.
The spring 2007 edition of Asia Week at Christie’s New York realized just under $40 million, the second highest total for Asia Week at Christie’s New York. The strong results in the Asian field followed record-breaking sales in London and Dubai earlier this year.
On March 20 at Sotheby’s, there was applause after an extended bidding battle when an important and rare archaic bronze wine vessel and cover (fangjia), late Shang dynasty, Thirteenth–Eleventh Century BC, from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., attained $8,104,000.
Swann Galleries’ 12th annual auction of printed and manuscript African Americana on February 27 featured material related to slavery and abolition, the modern Civil Rights movement and the varied contributions to literature, theater, film, music, art and sports by African Americans.
A break-in at a summer residence here sometime between February 28 and March 29 and reported by the caretaker on March 30 is being investigated by the Wolfeboro Police Department. Stolen was a three-quarter-length folk art portrait of a woman in a gold frame measuring approximately 3 feet by 3 feet and valued at $6,000. Up to $1,000 is being offered by the owners for information resulting in the arrest and conviction of individuals involved in the break-in of a residence here and the recovery of the substantial number of family antiques removed from the premises. Alexander H. Biggar, founder of Biggar Antiques, died on March 29 at the age of 84. He had been in the antiques business for more than 50 years. Show manager Eric Bradley acknowledged that the Atlantique City Antiques and Collectibles Show on March 24–25 was smaller than a few years ago but said dealers were selling well with the big crowds.
Ivey-Selkirk Auctioneers celebrated March 31–April 2 with a $3.1 million sale featuring American and Irish paintings, jewelry and a pair of Eighteenth Century English console tables at its spring gallery auction.
He holds New Hampshire Auctioneer’s License #1 and has been hailed as the greatest showman to ever wield a gavel, but Richard W. Withington Sr is not resting on his laurels. He celebrated his 89th birthday on March 31 by making more plans. Last week, on April 12-13, Withington Auction, Inc., began its 48th season of specialty doll auctions and has six more cataloged dolls sales this year. Dick Withington is “merely mellow for the antiques dodge, a country dance in which the old outfoot the young, because they have had time to learn a trade whose secret is endless learning,” Time Magazine wrote about the auctioneer in 1986. It is still so. Twenty-one years later, Dick Withington is as busy as ever and full of plans for the future. . More than 50 dealers displayed a wide variety of merchandise at the Greenwich Spring Antiques Show and Sale over the weekend of March 24 and 25, much to the delight of local collectors and enthusiasts who traveled from near and far to attend. The 22nd annual Bedford Spring Antiques Show was conducted at the Rippowam Cisqua School on March 31 and April 1.
On March 31, the H.H. Ellis Technical High School hosted an antiques show for 52 dealers specializing in early American and country style furniture and household accessories. Items from several estates provided a varied assortment of offerings at Nadeau’s Spring Estates Sale on March 23–24. The 650-plus-lot sale grossed an impressive $1.5 million.
On March 31, Harlowe-Powell Auction Gallery conducted a multiple estate auction sale, and the featured piece was an early Nineteenth Century Virginia two-drawer chest.
“Le Corbusier: Art and Architecture — A Life of Creativity,” opening on May 26 at the Mori Art Museum, examines Le Corbusier the man, providing an all-encompassing overview of his achievements.
The Jewish Museum will present “The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend,” the first major American survey of her work since 1980, from May 5 through September 16.
The exhibition, “Firm Favorites,” will be on view April 24–September 1. Works by Scotland’s most renowned artists will be on display.
Best known in the antiques world as a collector of most anything, the former star of both stage and screen died on April 7 at the age of 86 while traveling in Bucks County, Penn. New Hampshire lost another “old-time” antiques dealer recently as Mabel Joslin (doing business as M.J.’s Antiques) died on April 1 at the age of 97. Richard Dubrow, a dealer who pioneered in Nineteenth Century American furniture, died April 10, after a long illness. Richard Kemble, 74, a partner in Forager House Collection, died at his winter home in Key West, Fla., April 21 after a long series of illnesses. In the 1930s and 1940s, Frank Lloyd Wright designed 47 homes in a 100-acre community called Usonia in Pleasantville, N.Y. Featuring four to six of those homes, the Neuberger Museum of Art will present an unusual architectural house tour titled “Usonia” on Monday, June 4.
Christie’s has arranged the private sale of Thomas Eakins’ “Portrait of Professor Benjamin H. Rand,” 1874, from Thomas Jefferson University to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., for an undisclosed amount.
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) recently announced an unprecedented series of gifts — the largest in the museum’s history — from prominent museum patrons and collectors. The gifts, which commemorate the museum’s 75th anniversary in 2008 and represent art from across time and cultures, will include nearly 1,000 works from more than 40 collections.
Pook & Pook set a new house record on April 20–21 when it auctioned the collection of Dr and Mrs Donald A. Shelley for $9,765,454, including premium. The total is more than double Pook’s previous single-owner sale tally, achieved in June 1999 when it auctioned the estate of William Koch for $4.3 million. When 10-year-old Terrance A. Walker bought his first antique more than three decades ago, a piece of Flow Blue pottery for $20, he set in motion a prolific career as a picker of Canadian Maritime country antiques and folk art. When he decided to sell his personal collection, his longtime mentor and auctioneer Chris Huntington came out of retirement for the pair of sales.
Altermann Galleries’ March 3 auction and set price sale realized $1,008,160. The top lot was a 22-by-30-inch oil by Olaf Wieghorst, “American Nomads,” that brought $66,000.
Christie’s second international modern and contemporary art auction recently conducted in Dubai exceeded its presale expectations, totaling $9,417,560.
Promoter Marvin Getman took a risk when he decided to produce a 240-dealer show on a late March weekend. His efforts paid off when The Boston Antiques Weekend proved to be a robust “three-fer”: a tripartite event that comprised the Boston Antiquarian Book and Ephemera Fair, the Boston Antiques Show and the Boston Antique Textile and Vintage Fashion Show.
Flamingo Promotions produced two shows in one at St Paul’s March 31–April 1. The Long Island Book and Ephemera Fair and the Garden City Antiques Show shared space, attracting a larger audience, promoters said.
One of Maine’s most popular and prolific Nineteenth Century artists, Portland native Harrison Bird Brown is best known for his cityscapes and seascapes, which he depicted with notable precision and vigor. By the time he left Portland in the early 1890s, Brown was the best known native Maine painter of his time. His work has faded somewhat from public appreciation in recent decades. “Vividly True to Nature: Harrison Bird Brown, 1831-1915,” on view at the Portland Museum of Art through September 9, will go a long way toward restoring the painter’s high standing. Comprising some 40 oil paintings, plus works on paper and memorabilia of Brown’s life and featured views of Portland and the Maine coast, as well as scenes in the White Mountains, the Canadian Maritimes and Europe, the comprehen-sive display helps explain the resurgence of interest in his work. |
