A painting by Chinese artist He Kongde was the highlight of Clars Auction Gallery’s May 3 and 4 auction, realizing $98,400. The painting rounded out a strong auction with sales totaling just under $1 million.
The FBI returned stolen pottery, handwoven baskets and other artifacts to an American Indian tribe on June 13, three and a half years after they were stolen from a museum in the Southern California desert.
The chance to claim a piece of Virginia history was irresistible to the Southern collectors and dealers whose soft accents permeated the sale room at Northeast Auctions’ May 17-18 sale of the contents of the James River plantation, Carter’s Grove.
Internationally celebrated as one of the leading sculptors working today, Martin Puryear (b 1941) is known for his painstakingly constructed, wood abstractions of rich, symbolic beauty. Using time-consuming, hand-crafting methods, he frequently blends wire mesh and tar with wood, often evoking associations with animal, vegetable and human forms, as well as such artifacts as nets, tools and vessels. A gifted member of the post-Minimalist generation, his powerful and evocative pieces are notable for their inventive forms, consummate craftsmanship and unusual beauty. The imagination, skill and charm of the oeuvre of this African American sculptor are splendidly showcased in “Martin Puryear,” featuring 46 works, including one monumental piece created especially for the exhibition tour. Already seen at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it is on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., through September 28.
The Annual Darien Historical Society Antiques & Garden Elements Fair set up June 8 at the lovely Tilley Pond in-town park, the first time at this location.
Specialist auctioneer of technical antiques, Auction Team Breker once again achieved outstanding prices for rare collectors items, scientific instruments and museum-quality mechanical musical devices at its May 31 auction.
Dorothy M. Brooks, longtime antiques dealer and co-owner, with her daughter Abigail A. Brooks, of Brooks Antiques in Frenchtown, N.J., died at her farm here on June 22. She was 87 years old. The Metropolitan Museum of Art reported that late at night on June 30 or the early morning of July 1, a Fifteenth Century glazed terracotta relief sculpture of Saint Michael the Archangel by Andrea della Robbia came loose from above a doorway in its European paintings and decorative arts galleries.
In its debut at a new, larger venue, The Antiques in the Valley show stayed true to its roots as a country show, filled with interesting, original finish furniture, lots of redware and stoneware, quilts and coverlets and the general run of smalls.
This summer, visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art will reach into the vest pocket of an Eighteenth Century master furniture craftsman and pull out his secret guide to pricing furniture in colonial America’s wealthiest and most fashionable city.
A strangely contemporary mix of fashion, politics and music, across half a millennium, marked the top results of R&R’s auction, which concluded on May 14.
The 11th annual Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair, commonly known as SOFA, brought record sales and crowds to the Park Avenue Armory for its May 29–June 1 edition.
A diverse array of items shattered their sales estimates at Thomaston Place Auction Galleries’ May 31–June 1 auction due to aggressive bidding from a worldwide audience, with pieces of Russian silver leading the show.
Boscobel House and Gardens' new exhibition gallery on the lower floor of the historic Boscobel House is being inaugurated with “‘The Glorious Scenery Must Ever Excite’: Nineteenth Century American Paintings of the Hudson Highlands,” on view through October 1.
For the 26th consecutive year, the second weekend of June filled the polo grounds of this Hartford suburb with antiques offered by dealers from throughout the Eastern half of the United States.
The Litchfield County Antiques Show, a swank event with a good cross section of antiques, featured 40 dealers in a two-day show in late June.
More than 100 dazzling miniature works of art are featured in “Imperishable Beauty: Art Nouveau Jewelry,” organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where it is on view July 23–November 9.
The second annual June Festival of Antiques brought just under 100 dealers from all over the East Coast to the Gloucester County 4-H Fairgrounds June 14 .
Edward E. Herguth, of Independent Appraisers and Auctioneers, died unexpectedly June 26, at the age of 57. Florence “Florie” Corbin, 91, founder and owner of Three Ravens Antiques and a longtime resident at Huntington Common, died July 7 at her home. An exhibition commemorating the 100th birthday of former New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller (July 8, 1908–January 26, 1979) is on view through October 12 at the Empire State Plaza and New York State Museum.
The bankruptcy sale of property removed from the defunct Salander-O’Reilly Galleries had private collectors, decorators and dealers raising their paddles fast and furiously at Stair Galleries’ sale June 7.
In a reversal of judicial tide eddying around eBay Inc, a federal court here on July 14 ruled that American jeweler Tiffany & Co. cannot hold the online auction platform responsible for policing its trademarks online. One week after the Kentucky Derby, it was the purses at the May 9 and 10 Whitaker-Augusta sale that found themselves in the winner’s circle. Fittingly, they “won the top purse.”
Economic caution in the high-end baseball card and memorabilia market was nowhere in sight at Robert Edwards Auctions’ recent record-setting baseball card and memorabilia auction
The allure and aura of immediacy in Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings will draw viewers to exhibitions of her work and photographs from coast to coast this summer and into next year. It is hard to imagine a more successful undertaking than “Silversmiths to The Nation: Thomas Fletcher and Sidney Gardiner, 1808-1842.” At Winterthur Museum in Delaware through September 21, the exhibition, which opened in New York in late 2007 and will close in Palm Beach, Fla., in January 2009, assembles some of the most spectacular American silver ever made, from monumental presentation urns and vases to gold-hilted swords. The show and its companion catalog create a rich context for these wares through the close study of associated prints, drawings, letters and shop records. Using more than 100 Fletcher & Gardiner creations, organizers tell a compelling story about art, culture, economics and politics in the United States in the first decades of the Nineteenth Century, when war heroes and captains of industry — Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster and De Witt Clinton among them — were lionized by proud citizens of the young republic.
For the second year, Antiques at Castle in the Clouds was a success in bringing more visitors to this landmark home. Produced by Nan Gurley, the show conducted on June 29 had more than 55 exhibitors on the sprawling lawn of the mansion.
It has been a long road for the white bronze angel discovered missing last March from Maplewood Cemetery in Mt Upton that was recently recovered. A William Aiken Walker oil painting of a cotton field and two African Americans with a basket of cotton was the highlight at the Cobbs’ July 5 auction.
Art collectors congregated at Cowan’s Auctions on June 21 for the summer fine and decorative art auction. The event proved successful, with more than 900 total bidders and $826,984 in sales.
Miles down a narrow country road with naught but acres of fields and farms as far as the eye can see, the Fairhaven Antiques Festival comes up all of a sudden. On June 8, Samuel T. Freeman & Co. held its biannual sale of fine and antique jewelry and watches that raised the bar for the department with over $1 million in sales in less than three hours.
The May 26 Memorial Day Antiques Fair at Lasdon Park and Arboretum opened with a long line of eager customers and remained busy until closing time.
Showcasing the work of six young North Carolina studio craft artists, “Possibilities: Rising Stars of Contemporary Craft in North Carolina” illustrates the vitality and diversity present among a new generation of artists, and is on view through November 30 at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design.
The Morse Museum has begun design development on a new wing in which to exhibit most of its holdings of objects and architectural elements from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s Long Island country estate, Laurelton Hall.
The Olympia Fair, a landmark event on the London art and antiques calendar for 35 years, exemplified its ability to change, and — perhaps more importantly, predicting the need for it — ensured its continued success at its recent edition that ran June 5 to 15.
An installation of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ recent acquisition, Jacob Lawrence’s “Hiroshima” series, will be on view in the academy’s Morris Gallery in the historic landmark building August 1–December 28.
Theriault’s May 31 antique doll auction here was titled “A Fine Pretending Tea,” a phrase from a poem about dolls’ tea parties. This auction was no pretender, and offered an abundant selection of fine dolls, evidenced by the soaring prices.
Intrigue, passion and broken promises are excitements not normally associated with the serenity of the Shaker community. All that and more, however, were part and parcel of the formation and preservation of the most significant American Shaker collection and its attendant ethics and scholarship. The exhibit “Gather up the Fragments: The Andrews Shaker Collection,” on view at Hancock Shaker Village, Hancock, Mass., through October 31, defines the Andrews collection. Further, it visits the controversy that ultimately surrounded the gathering of the collection, its dispersal and the collectors themselves. The fragments of that collection have been gathered together in the new exhibit, the most comprehensive gathering of Shaker objects ever assembled. Some 250 pieces of Shaker furniture, printed material, visual art, tools, textiles and small objects collected by Faith and Edward Deming Andrews over 40 years, highlighting specific objects of each type, are on view, many for the first time.
Alderfer Auction rose to new heights at its fine and decorative arts auction June 11–13 with the sale of a 25-by-30-inch Delaware River scene by George Stengel.
For the 16th consecutive Independence Day celebration, Vivien Cord drew more than 3,000 visitors to her sold-out, 120-dealer show, Antiques in a Church Yard on July 4.
Aficionados of art of the American West convened on July 26 for the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction held at the Grand Sierra Resort. About 178 works were auctioned, for a total of just under $37 million, breaking last year’s record of $35 million.
The fireworks were erupting early during the annual Fourth of July Americana auction at Cyr Auction Gallery on July 2 as bidders hotly competed for a select grouping of market-fresh Americana.
One longstanding misperception about The Frick Collection is that works of art cannot be moved around by its present-day staff. The flexibility with which the curators do juxtapose Frick-owned works within the mansion is the cornerstone of its thriving program of acclaimed special exhibitions, large and small.
“It was magical, the weather was perfect, the dealers set up great looking booths with interesting material, Martha Stewart was the perfect honorary chair, and the Botanical Gardens turned out a crowd for a well-attended preview,” Jim Glazer, one of the exhibitors said a few days after the show closed. An exhibition, “Kirchner and the Berlin Street,” will be presented from August 3 to November 10 in the Special Exhibitions Gallery, third floor, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Thomas Eakins’s “The Concert Singer” is on view at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) where it will remain for approximately one year in PAFA’s historic landmark building.
The historic village of Four Corners in Tiverton, R.I., was abuzz with activity on Independence Day morning where 31 dealers set up for Jackie Sideli’s 15th anniversary Tiverton Four Corners Antiques Show.
Sotheby’s June 14 sale of Twentieth Century design brought $7,398,250. The sale was highlighted by a rare “Apple Blossom” table lamp, circa 1905, by Tiffany Studios, which brought $932,500, setting a record for the model at auction.
Want to smile? Want to be amused? Want to be amazed? And do you just want to have a grand time? Enter the world of The Radiator Kid, The Arbus Twins, Big Face, Shelly, The Bug Lady, Spiny Bulbous, Scrapasaurus and Iron Minnie — Queen of the Junkyard, among others, and you have entered the world of Joel Kopp. Tucked away in an enchanted setting in upstate New York, tractor and lawnmower parts, axes, shovels, radiators, steam irons, chains, kettles, rakes and hoes, and just about anything you can name have taken some fanciful shape under Joel’s sharp eye and welding tools. The inspiration that draws these fanciful creatures generally starts with a single object. “I come across something, an old tire iron, a bundle of faucets or a painted shovel, for instance, and I can see it as the beginning of a certain creature. And it grows from there,” he said. |
