Innholdsfortegnelse for September-October 2025/No. 83 i American Fine Art Magazine

Early California art On view through October 11 at American Legacy Fine Arts, Scenic Route: A Half-Century of California Discovery, 1900-1950 takes viewers on a visual voyage through the Golden State as seen through the eyes of early California artists who traversed the state capturing its diverse terrain. From sun-washed deserts, sparkling coastlines and forests, to rolling valleys, inland waterways and landmarks likeYosemite, Mount Shasta, Palm Springs, and the Sierra Nevada, these works document a California both timeless and rapidly changing. The show features nearly 30 rare paintings by artists like Thomas Hill, Charles Frederick Krantz, Conrad Buff, Paul Grimm, James Arthur Merriam, AlbertThomas DeRome, Geoffrey Holt and more. Addison Rowe Gallery show During NYC’s Independent 20th Century art fair, New Mexico-based Addison Rowe Gallery will be presenting a solo exhibition…

Henriette Wyeth (1907-1997) House at San Patricio Widely considered one of the most significant female American painters of the 20th century, Henriette Wyeth was the eldest daughter of N.C. Wyeth and sister of Andrew Wyeth, with whom she painted at their home and studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In the mid-1930s, after marrying artist Peter Hurd, who had come to study under N.C. and Andrew, the couple moved to San Patricio, New Mexico, where they lived on a ranch and raised their three children. Although it was a difficult transition at first for Henriette, she eventually embraced the New Mexico culture and climate, and it began to influence her work. Known predominantly for her portraits—most notably the officialWhite House portrait of First Lady, Pat Nixon—and still lifes, she also painted…

By national treasures, I am not only referring to the countless masterworks in our country’s holdings, but the institutions that house, preserve and protect them and, in doing so, our cultural heritage. Museums are the bridge—and the gatekeepers—between the most significant works of art and the public. Fortunately for us, their mission is to make their collections accessible to as many people as possible. And they are anything but passive in their efforts. Curators are conceptualizing exhibits designed to engage people of all ages and backgrounds, creatively weaving the past into the present to underscore its continued relevance and foster mind-opening conversations. They are borrowing works from personal collections to enhance touring exhibitions. They are loaning important pieces from their own permanent collections to regional museums across the nation. And,…

Earlier this year, the National Gallery of Art launched Across the Nation, a lending program that sent key American and European artworks in its permanent collection to 10 regional museums around the country. The works are on view now at all participating museums and will remain so through early 2027, as part of the National Gallery’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States. Participating institutions were intentionally chosen to reach as many geographic regions of the United States as possible to make the nation’s art collection accessible to the greatest number of Americans. They include Anchorage Museum in Alaska, Boise Art Museum in Idaho, Denver Art Museum, Iowa’s Figge Art Museum, Flint Institute of Arts in Michigan, Mint Museum in North Carolina, Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of Art,…

From the 17th through the early 19th centuries, watercolors were largely used by artists and explorers for the practical purposes of mapping and documenting the American landscape. Eventually, artists began employing watercolors to create larger, more “finished” pieces that were soon regarded as works of art in their own right. Through a collection of 30 watercolors, a new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art explores how a diverse group of artists depicted the landscape across two centuries. “Printmakers and explorers found watercolors to be an inexpensive and portable material apt for mapping and documenting what they saw on the spot,” explains Amy Johnston, National Gallery of Art associate curator of collections, department of old master drawings. “Artists such as Seth Eastman and William Russell Birch were able to quickly…

On view at Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA) through mid-November, is an exhibition that explores painter Henry Strater’s love of coastal Maine from his first exposure to the state in 1919, through the following 60 years. Strater (1896-1987) first visited Ogunquit when it was already a summer haven for artists drawn to its dramatic coastline and unique qualities of light. Soon after enrolling in Hamilton Easter Field’s School of Painting and Sculpture, Strater became a key figure in the local arts community. “Strater was a networker,” says David Zimmerman, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “He made friends with and brought together significant artists and writers of the period together. From his relationship with Earnest Hemingway—a fishing trip the two men took inspired Hemingway’s Old Man and…

HILLSBOROUGH, NC LELAND LITTLE AUCTIONS SEPTEMBER 10 Fine Art Auction Leland Little’s upcoming Fine Art Auction will feature a wide selection of works by important American artists from the 19th and 20th centuries, including portraiture, landscapes and modern works that reflect the depth and range of the nation’s art history. Among the highlights is a mid-19th-century portrait of George Washington, after Charles Willson Peale’s original life painting in 1795. The work comes with notable provenance, having passed down through two longstanding Main Line families in Philadelphia. The piece is expected to fetch between $3,000 and $6,000. Also included in the September sale is a large scale landscape painting by William Louis Sonntag, Sr., a prominent figure associated with the Hudson River School. Dating to the 1860s, Passing Storm, Adirondacks is a…

AMERICAN FOLK ART MUSEUM The American Folk Art Museum announces the gift of five incredible Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946) paintings stemming from the estate of Maria and Conrad Janis, son of legendary art dealer and gallerist Sidney Janis. The museum notes that this is one of the most significant groups of Hirshfield paintings donated to an institution in recent years. The collection comes after the museum hosted the landmark exhibition Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered, that ran from September 2022 through January 2023, and the partnering symposium Unexpected Partners: Self-Taught Artists and Modernism in Interwar America. The five pieces join the four the museum also owns, making the museum the world’s largest institutional repository of the artist’s work. Of this collection, we find the spectacular piece Zebra Family, 1942, illustrating the artists unique…

The late pulp illustrator Mort Künstler, who started painting for gritty men’s adventure magazines in the 1950s, created thousands of pieces of art for publications such as Argosy, True and Male. Decades later, he questioned where they all went. “I just think of all those images for all those years. I got a lot of them back, but so many others ended up in closets, or stuffed under a desk somewhere. I’m certain some got tossed on the heap,” he says. “A lot of art by a lot of great artists probably ended up in a bonfire.” For Künstler and countless other illustrators from throughout the 20th century, the final product was not the painting. The final product was a book or a magazine, or even a cereal box or…

Manhattan-based Hawthorne Fine Art is holding a new online exhibition centered on late 19th - and early 20th-century works by women tonalists. The exhibition will feature nearly a dozen paintings by historic women artists who were influenced by the French Barbizon school and its American exponents likeWilliam Morris Hunt. “In the post-Civil War years, many American artists captivated by the French Barbizon school began to turn away from the grand and highly detailed vistas of the Hudson River School toward a more subdued, quiet, and personal expression of the landscape,” says Megan Bongiovanni, senior researcher at Hawthorne Fine Art. “This is evident in the expressive brushstrokes of Maria a’Becket, the atmospheric effects of Charlotte Buell Coman, and the mood and tonality in the work of Mary Loring Warner. These works…

Freeman’s | Hindman held the late spring edition of its American Art & Pennsylvania Impressionism sale on June 8, amassing a total of $3.5 million. The sale offered a wide range of works by leading artists in the Pennsylvania Impressionist school, including Daniel Garber and EdwardWillis Redfield. However, the top lot in the sale went to Canadian impressionist Clarence Alphonse Gagnon (1881-1942) for his oil on canvas, Sunday Morning, Québec, from around 1921. The snowy townscape sold for a remarkable $457,700—nearly ten times its high estimate of $50,000. This is the second highest auction price ever for the artist, and the highest ever in the United States. High-performing lots from the realm of Pennsylvania Impressionism include a masterful autumn oil painting by Garber titled In a Wood, which broke past…

There were several major stars in Heritage Auctions’ May 16 American art sale: Ernie Barnes was one, and so was Golden Age Illustration, specifically works by Norman Rockwell and J.C. Leyendecker. Altogether, the 49-lot sale realized more than $5.1 million. Immediately following the American sale, Heritage held a second auction, Property from the BSA Settlement Trust, which generated more than $7 million in sales. “The energy was undeniable from the moment the first lot opened,” says Aviva Lehmann, Heritage’s senior vice president of American art. “What we saw on Friday was genuine enthusiasm from bidders who were deeply engaged, well-informed and ready to compete. The strong results across both auctions reflect not just the strength of this category for Heritage but also a real passion for the stories these works…

For nearly 30 years, Initiatives in Art and Culture (IAC) has curated an immersive fall conference dedicated to the Arts and Crafts movement in America. For the 27th annual event, IAC is venturing to Syracuse in Central New York, an area that, according to IAC president and founder Lisa Koenigsberg, has been relatively underexplored in terms of its significance in the arts and crafts movement. “Ceramics, stained glass, book arts and, of course, furniture flourished here,” says Koenigsberg. “In this conference, we’ll explore touchstones of the movement, as it’s helpful to understand its evolution and its expressions sequentially, thus the circa 1900 emphasis.” Two of the central figures of the movement who will receive significant attention are furniture designer and entrepreneur Gustav Stickley who published the seminally important The Craftsman…

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why? As a native NewYorker, I still feel like I can just go around the corner to see exhibitions at any one of my favorite NewYork City museums. However, life and present geography (i.e., now living in Charleston) sometimes get in the way of that…One recent case is Sargent and Paris, a Met exhibition featuring the work of John Singer Sargent. While I would have loved to have seen the show in Manhattan, that it continues in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay under a slightly different title, Sargent. The Parisian Years (1874-1884), through January 2026, gives me incentive for a trip across the Atlantic. What are you reading? I am digging back…

In 1910, the American artist Susan Watkins returned triumphant from more than a decade in Paris. During her time abroad, she had won an honorable mention and a third-class gold medal at the Paris Salon, plus a silver medal at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis. Her teacher William Merritt Chase considered her “the best woman painter living,” according to a letter from Chase’s wife. If Watkins had lived longer, she would likely have achieved greater prominence. But three years after her return from Paris, she was dead, apparently from cancer. She was just 38 years old. Memory ofWatkins’s work quickly faded, as tastes in the art world turned toward the avant garde. But now an exhibition organized by the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, is…

The American Scene was a realist art movement born out of a response to the Great Depression and the shock waves it sent throughout the nation, upsetting rural and urban lives alike, and evoking trepidation about geopolitical issues at home and abroad. Encompassing regionalism and social realism, American scene paintings rejected abstraction, but not necessarily modernism, in favor of depictions of everyday life and the landscape with an emphasis on narrative and national identity. Through October 15, CW American Modernism will present The American Scene: Visions of a Nation, a selection of 30 paintings from the 1930s and ‘40s that provide a visual window into this tumultuous time in our country’s history. Regionalism, which tends to be more nostalgic and concerned with rural America than social realism, is represented by…

Renny Reynolds, landscape architect, founder of the elite floral and event company Renny & Reed in NewYork City and author of The Art of the Party, is one of the most renowned entertaining, gardening and lifestyle experts in the country. In the Studio 54 days, Reynolds was the most sought-after designer for the party decade’s most lavish events, with a client list that included celebrities and socialites such as Giorgio Armani, Yves St. Laurent, Bianca Jagger, Diana Ross and Mrs. Vincent Astor. On September 21, the public will get a glimpse into the aesthetic sensibilities of the tastemaker in Garden Party: The Collection of Renny Reynolds presented by Freeman’s | Hindman. The thoughtfully curated sale will feature more than 100 lots, including 30-plus paintings by artists associated with the Pennsylvania…

On September 13, Jackson Hole Art Auction will kick off its 19th annual fall sale with a huge lineup of artwork, with many of the lots coming from three stunning single owner collections. The auction house is also marking a new era after it was purchased in May by a new ownership group that includes Fighting Bear Antiques owner Terry Winchell, investor and art collector Keith Ohnmeis, and investor and business executive Phil Harrington. Working closely with the new owners is Denver-based art advisor Kate Hlavin, who also serves as curator of the Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale in Denver. Kevin Doyle, managing director of the auction house, says the sale has a massive selection of material available to bidders—around 430 lots, which is nearly 100 more lots than…

On July 26, the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction celebrated a 10-year high with sales totaling $22.1 million with a 97 percent sell-through rate across 354 lots. Auction partners were ecstatic. “The secret was great paintings with reasonable estimates—those are the big things, for sure—but also our clientele. Our buyers are always so great, and they love Western art,” says auction partner Mike Overby. “You can see how great they are in the strength of their bidding. They’re the best of the best.” The two lots that helped send the July sale into the stratosphere were paintings by Charles M. Russell and Maynard Dixon. The Russell came up first: Roping a Wolf, a 1918 watercolor and gouache estimated at $500,000 to $750,000. In short order, bidding quickly jumped to $1.3 million, easily…