Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i Art & Antiques

WHEN WILLIAM N. Banks, Jr., a collector, historian, preservationist, playwright, and Southern gentleman, passed away last November at 95, he left Bankshaven behind. The estate, located in Newnan, Ga., about an hour’s drive south of Atlanta, boasts extensive grounds and a circa-1828 Federal-style house that Banks famously preserved. Inside the stately home, a renowned collection of Federal and Classical American furniture and 19th-century American painting conjured the illusion of a time long past. On September 12, Brunk Auctions will hold a single-owner sale of Banks’ collection. Featuring the contents of Bankshaven, the more than 300-lot sale will be held virtually and at the auction house’s facilities in Asheville, N.C. The sale’s lots speak to Banks’ ardent love of history and passion for collecting. Citing the collector’s “sophisticated eye,” Andrew Brunk,…

WHILE MANY Western modern artists have been strongly influenced by the art of East Asia, few if any have had as close a connection as did Sam Francis. The American Abstract Expressionist painter lived and worked in Japan for extended periods of time, collaborated with Japanese artists, was collected by Japanese collectors, and seriously studied Japanese language and culture. He was profoundly inf luenced by his decades-long encounter with Japan—not on a superficial level but in an organic and creative way that makes it impossible to understand Francis’ oeuvre without reference to Japanese art, both traditional and contemporary. A new book by the American critic and curator Richard Speer, The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan (Scheidegger & Spiess, distributed by the University of Chicago Press) explores this history…

IN THE ART of Jackie Saccoccio, it’s as if the souls of the Baroque and Mannerism were reincarnated in an Abstract Expressionist body. The visual complexity and explosive paint handling of her oils on canvas, coupled with their size—larger than human scale, up to 11 by 8 feet—have an impact akin to that of an extravagant 17th-century building. In her Portraits series she pays homage to 16th- and 17th-century monumental portraits by artists such as Bernini and Velázquez, by depicting not actual persons but the impressions left in the artist’s mind by the original works. Saccoccio’s engagement with these things began with a junior-year trip to Italy when she was a student at RISD in the early ’80s. A Providence, R.I., native, she started studying architecture at the school before…

PHOTOGRAPHY IS the perfect medium for Surrealism. With its unblinking impartiality, the glass eye of the camera creates absurd juxtapositions that challenge logic and the narrative impulse. Photography is uncanny; as soon as the shutter closes, a moment is pulled from the space-time continuum and frozen forever, taking on a weird life of its own. The very act of creating an after-image of reality on film is surreal. And being not only instantaneous but mechanical, photography is ideally suited to the Surrealist practice of automatism, making art without thinking, letting the medium do the work while the unconscious mind comes into its own. So it’s surprising that photography is far from the first thing one thinks of when Surrealism is mentioned. This is partly due to the misperception—for which generations…

THE INAUGURAL Hamptons Virtual Art Fair (HVAF) will open—online—on September 2 and run through Labor Day weekend. Produced by Show Hamptons, HVAF will take the place of a physical art fair, bringing postwar and contemporary works from 60 top international dealers together in 70 virtual booths. IN Accessible on a range of compatible devices, the innova tive show will be open 24 hours a day, with VR technology digitally simulating an art fair environment. An around-the-clock live chat feature will allow collectors and browsers the ability to connect with art experts, and buyers will be able to purchase works directly from the fair’s 3-D simulation. Atlanta dealer September Gray Gallery will feature a highlight of the fair—paintings by Richard Mayhew, the winner of HVAF’s Artist of the Year award. The…

IT WAS 100 years ago that women won the right to vote in the United States, and this fall the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, N.Y., is commemorating the ratification of the 19th Amendment with “Celebrating Suffrage: Women Artists From the Collection” (through January 3, 2021). The exhibition, which spans 200 years, explores art as a way for women to challenge laws and beliefs and bring about social change. In the the 19th century, making art in and of itself was a way to challenge the established order, given that women were excluded from the official art world and often worked in media such as quilting or watercolor that were considered minor. Among the works on view are a pitcher decorated by Amelia Brown Sprague for Rookwood Pottery; By the…

IN 1885, AS Claude Monet’s dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, prepared for an exhibition of the Impressionist’s work in New York, Monet fretted about his paintings being sent to “the land of the Yankees” and told Durand-Ruel that he hoped that at least some could be kept in Paris, “the only place where there is still a little taste.” In that latter comment he was wrong. There was at least one other place—or within the next few years there would be—where there was not only taste but specifically a taste for Monet, and that was Chicago. The meat-packing “City of Broad Shoulders” might not seem like the likeliest candidate for appreciation of avant-garde French art, but during the 1890s, some very wealthy and influential Chicago businessmen and their wives became avid collectors…

ALONG WITH Zao Wou-Ki and Wu Guanzhong, Chu Teh-Chun is one of the “three musketeers” of 20th-century Chinese art. After World War II, all three went to study in Paris, where they were inspired to meld European modernism with Chinese aesthetics and techniques. Chu and Zao spent the rest of their lives in France, while Wu returned in 1950 to China, where he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution of the late ’60s. All three artists lived into their 90s. Born in 1920 in Anhui Province, Chu studied at the School of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where his teacher was Lin Fengmian, an influential advocate of a synthesis between Eastern and Western art. In 1937, the Sino-Japanese War made it necessary for Chu to transfer to the University Nanking, where…

THE FOURTEENTH Annual Jackson Hole Art Auction is slated for September 19. The sale, which is presented by Trailside Galleries and the Gerald Peters Gallery, will be held virtually and live-streamed from the Center for the Arts in downtown Jackson Hole, Wyo. This year’s auction will feature some 250 lots of important Western, wildlife, sporting, figurative, and landscape art by renowned past masters and contemporary artists. The sale is led by Thomas Moran’s Cascade Falls, Yosemite, a 1905 oil on canvas that epitomizes the balance between serenity and might in the Western landscape. The painting is part of a series of works inspired by a trip Moran took with his daughter to the Yosemite Valley in the summer of 1904. There, traversing the valley on horseback, the artist sketched views…

JERALD MELBERG Gallery of Charlotte, N.C., opens “Kim Keever: Underwater Canvas” on September 26. The exhibition, which will be on view through November 7, features an important selection of recent abstractions by the celebrated New York-based artist. Though actually photographs, Keever’s works make bold, dazzling use of paint. The artist, who was trained as an engineer, strategically disperses pigments into a 200-gallon aquatic tank. He then photographs the fluid dances that occur among the floating colors, later cropping the images to achieve his desired compositions. In the resultant images, paint can seem as languid as silk or as volatile as billowing smoke; color pools in bold clots or disperses into thin, nearly imperceptible wisps. Among the highlights of “Underwater Canvas” is ABSTRACT 48661 (2019, C-print), an organic burst of khaki…

THE GOLDEN Age of Magic, in which elaborate stage illusions and over-the-top personae came into their own, lasted from around 1880 to 1930. Coincidentally—or not—this was also the golden age of the poster, a gaudy, larger-than-life art form perfectly suited to the glorification of grand illusionists such as Harry Houdini, Harry Kellar, Howard Thurston, and Harry Blackstone Sr., whose performances astonished audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Currently, through November 8, more than 55 rare magic posters from that era are on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, Canada, in an exhibition titled “Illusions: The Art of Magic,” along with photographs, documents, ephemera, and archival films showing the actual illusions as they were performed on stage. The posters on view are all from the Allan…

“My painting is not art of rebellion but one of discovery and sharing. I have found satisfaction in the spontaneous, often compulsive, act of drawing and painting.” This personal statement by Leonard Edmondson manages, with extreme concision, to encapsulate the main themes and traits of a life spent making and teaching art. Edmondson (1916–2002), who spent his career in and around Los Angeles, was equally adept at painting and printmaking, in both of which he pursued a style of abstraction that was rooted in Cubism and Surrealism. He never became an Abstract Expressionist, remaining loyal to his own vision. That, combined with a reluctance to self-promote, contributed to a certain lack of recognition in the art market, although he won many prizes and had many works enter prominent museum collections.…

GLOBAL CONSIDERATIONS today have a scale to them that makes other eras seem bashful. Climate change, global pandemic, artificial general intelligence, ecological collapse, biotechnology risk, overpopulation, molecular nanotechnology, and the decolonization of Earth and multiplanetary colonization hint at the range of opportunities and challenges. It’s a good time for futurists. Jonathon Keats’ large-scale thought experiments about our collective society and its future have at last found their era. As a conceptual artist and self-described experimental philosopher, Keats examinations of deep time, Wall Street, religion, identity and immortality are ripe. It was two decades ago that Keats sat in a chair in a San Francisco gallery and sold his thoughts to patrons. The price: one’s annual income divided by minutes. The Oakland Tribune branded him “too weird for Berkeley” in 2002…