Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2019 i Art & Antiques

IN THIS ISSUE, we have career surveys of two 20th-century American abstract artists who are much less well known than they deserve to be, in our view. Arthur Osver (1912–2006) started out painting figuratively, concentrating on the industrial landscape, and then moved into gestural abstraction (see page 64). Edna Andrade (1917–2008) was a hard-edged abstractionist much of whose work could be considered under the heading of Op Art (see page 72). Besides being almost exact contemporaries, both made worthy and original contributions to their fields, had long and productive careers, and were influential as teachers. So why are they under the radar? Geography has a good deal to do with it. Both artists were based outside the main centers of American contemporary art, New York and Los Angeles. Osver moved…

THE PALM BEACH Jewelry, Art & Antique Show will be held from February 13–19 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, coinciding with President’s Day weekend. The show, which is celebrating its 16th edition, features more than 170 international exhibitors and boasts over a billion dollars’ worth of fine art, antique furniture, jewelry, photography, rare books and sculptures. This year’s edition will also feature “Contemporary Focus,” a special section for exhibitors dealing in modern and contemporary art. London gallery Gladwell & Patterson will feature L’Allée des Peupliers, a 1905 oil on canvas by French Post-Impressionist painter Gustave Louiseau. The bright and airy painting features a sunlit grove of trees. Meanwhile, Steidel Fine Art of Wimberley, Texas, will be showing work by Deborah Falls, including Poppies with Pod (2018). Falls paints…

EVER SINCE its invention in the 1880s, Coca-Cola has had power over the imagination. Today, it is considered the world’s third-most valuable brand, after Apple and Google. On February 11, Michaan’s Auctions of Alameda, Calif., will be offering, for the first time at auction, a major single-owner collection of Coca-Cola memorabilia and ephemera that was put together over a 60-year period. One of the most interesting parts of the collection is a selection of Coca-Cola branded trays from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, highlighted by an 1897 serving tray, one of the first to be produced by the Atlanta-based company. Estimated at $60,000–80,000, it depicts a genteel Victorian lady sipping the coveted beverage, framed by the words “refreshing” and “delicious.”…

ALFRED FLECHTHEIM, a German art dealer, collector and publisher, opened his first gallery in Düsseldorf in 1913. The son of a wealthy Jewish merchant, Flechtheim had been around the art world since 1900 or so and had amassed a collection of paintings by the likes of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Wassily Kandinsky. He eventually opened galleries in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Vienna. Flechtheim acquired Joseph de Montesquiou-Fezensac, seen here, a masterpiece of Oskar Kokoschka’s early portraiture, around 1927. Alexander Vömel, an art dealer and member of the SA or Brown Shirts, “aryanized” Galerie Flechtheim in the early 1930s and sold the painting to the National Museum of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 1934. It was later transferred to the Moderna Museet. It stayed in that collection…

THE ART DEALERS Association of America (ADAA), a national nonprofit membership organization of art dealers, will open The Art Show this year with a Gala Preview on Wednesday, February 27. The fair, which brings together the ADAA’s rich network of prestigious dealers, will run February 28–March 3 and, as it has for the last 30-some years, will benefit Henry Street Settlement. This year’s edition will feature several first-time exhibitors, such as Luxembourg & Dayan and Venus Over Manhattan. One first-timer, Kayne Griffin Corcoran of Los Angeles, will be showing work by Brooklyn-born, Italy-based sculptor Beverly Pepper, including Untitled #3. The 1962 cut-out brass piece is reminiscent of Pepper’s celebrated monumental sculptures, which manipulate industrial materials, but on a smaller scale. Jessica Silverman Gallery, another new exhibitor, will be showing Dome…

CHARLES BURCHFIELD grew up in Salem, Ohio. He lived primarily in the same house there until he moved to Buffalo, N.Y., in 1921, when he was nearly 30. The house and its environs played a critical role in the artist’s work, often serving as subject matter for his abstracted landscapes, a unique style he developed in the 1910s and returned to later in his career after a prolonged dalliance with Regionalism. “Charles Burchfield: The Ohio Landscapes, 1915–1920” runs at the Cleveland Museum of Art through May 5. It features some 30 drawings and traces the artist’s early life in Salem, his time at the Cleveland School (now Institute) of Art and his self-described “golden year” of 1917, when he painted more landscapes than ever before. Watercolors such as the jubilant…

PRESIDENTS’ DAY weekend is the busiest time of the year in the Coachella Valley, and Art Palm Springs, a fair devoted to modern and contemporary art, attracts some 15,000 art enthusiasts. Palm Springs, long a destination for the Hollywood and business elite, has also become a cultural oasis in the desert, with over 20 galleries and a major institution, the Palm Springs Art Museum. Produced by Atlanta-based Urban Expositions—the company that organizes SOFA Chicago, Art Aspen, and the Houston Art Fair—Art Palm Springs takes place from February 15–18, with an opening night on Valentine’s Day. Some 80 dealers from the U.S., Europe, Asia, and South America will be in attendance. Among the offerings at Art Palm Springs: Uncanny, surreal works by Dain Yoon, including Drawer, apparently a rendering of the…

The 52nd California International Antiquarian Book Fair will be held at the Oakland Marriott City Center on February 8–10. The fair, which is sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, features thousands of rare books and manuscripts from nearly 200 booksellers from some 20 countries around the world. This year’s edition will feature a special exhibition organized by the Book Club of California, with one section on the group’s most coveted treasure and one on California women printers and book artists. Highlighted are Jane Grabhorn’s test prints for the illustrations in Grabhorn Press’ edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Another special section will feature the collection of Joel Harris, a local member of the International Wizard of Oz Club. The exhibition will showcase first-edition…

When Alfred Gilbert’s Eros topped the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus in London in 1893, reviews were mixed. The winged statue was cutting-edge—the first to be cast in aluminum and a shining example of the New Sculpture movement—but it was also naked. Thus, while the Magazine of Art praised it for signaling a break from the “dull ugliness” of London’s street sculpture, Victorian protestors lambasted it. The public artwork, which is now one of London’s most iconic landmarks (it even serves as the mascot for the Evening Standard, one of the city’s tabloids), memorializes Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury and a beloved Victorian philanthropist. Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm was initially offered the commission, but he nominated his former pupil, Gilbert, in his stead, with the warning that…

THE NAPLES Art, Antique & Jewelry Show, produced by the Palm Beach Show group, returns for its 8th annual edition from February 22–26 at the Naples Exhibition Center. An acclaimed roster of international dealers will bring to the Gulf Coast city thousands of years worth of fine art, antique and estate jewelry, furniture, porcelain, silver, glass, textiles, sculpture, and Asian antiquities. Contemporary art will also be in the mix. There will be an opening night preview party, by invitation only, on the 22nd. Among the exhibitors is Rehs Galleries of New York, which will have diverse paintings on offer. Andrea Landini’s The Toast is a classic example of the 19th-century Italian artist’s lightly humorous scenes of the domestic life and luxuries of the red-clad cardinals of the Catholic Church. Alongside…

THE CELEBRATED California painter Ed Moses, who passed away in January 2018, spent more than six decades exploring abstraction. A staple in the L.A. art scene since his first show at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1958, Moses painted daily in his Venice studio right up until the end of his life. “Through the Looking Glass,” a new exhibit ion at Santa Monica’s William Turner Gallery, explores the work produced by Moses in his last five years. The show, which runs through March 30, takes its name from Lewis Carroll, as well as from a sentiment of Moses’ own—that art can be a portal to the unknown. The late works on view are also, in many ways, a portal to the totality of his career, with stylistic approaches from earlier…

SINCE 1983, the Southeastern Wildlife Exposition (SEWE) has made Charleston, S.C., a key destination for collectors of nature-themed art. From February 15–17, the event’s 37th annual edition will take place at multiple venues in historic downtown Charleston, featuring not only artworks for sale but conservation education opportunities and sporting demonstrations. SEWE 2019 kicks off with an opening night party at the Gibbes Museum, which will be mounting an exhibition of sporting and landscape paintings by Ogden M. Pleissner, one of the great masters of wildlife art. SEWE’s 2019 Featured Artist will be Lou Pasqua, from Etna, Pa. His Little Havoc, which depicts a Boykin Spaniel flushing a covey of quail, has been selected as the Featured Painting of the event. This year’s guest artists will be Walter Matia and Sandy…

HARVARD UNIVERSITY’S relationship to the Bauhaus can be traced back to three grad students. This triumvirate—Lincoln Kirstein, Edward Warburg, and John Walker—started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in 1929 and showed forward-thinking work by artists such as Buckminster Fuller. In 1930, the group put together an exhibition of contemporary German art, and later that year, a show of the Bauhaus—the first exhibition in the United States of work from the revolutionary German art school. “It wasn’t huge, but the group got loans from important galleries in New York, and Lincoln Kirstein wrote a small catalogue for it,” says Laura Muir, the research curator for academic and public programs at the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibition traveled to New York and Chicago and caught the attention of Charles Kuhn, the…

IN BERNARD MALAMUD’S 1969 comic novel, Pictures of Fidelman, Bronx-born painter and aspiring writer Arthur Fidelman travels to Italy to continue researching his life’s work—a fresh critical perspective on Giotto—and reinvigorate his painting practice. From the moment he arrives he is beset by a series of particularly Italian calamities including con games and desperate romantic entanglements. Along the way, his manuscript is stolen, his painting gains new life, and he questions just about every long-held belief regarding decency and sanity that a person possibly could. Fidelman’s agony makes for great comedy, but there is something achingly true about his radical shift in perspective. In a far less salacious manner, the modern American painter Arthur Osver (1912–2006) underwent a similar fate. In 1952 Osver, whose paintings consisted mainly of moody industrial…

In 1911, Pierre Bonnard bought a flashy car. The French painter was entering his mid-40s, and he had experienced nearly 15 years of success in the art world. In the previous year alone he had shown in several cities throughout Europe, completed four panels for pianist and woman-about-town Misia Sert, and started a triptych for Russian collector Ivan Morosov. The Renault 11 CV, which Bonnard had painted pale yellow, was an uncharacteristically ostentatious purchase for the notoriously shy artist but, it could be argued, a well-earned one. So was the small home in Normandy he purchased—“Ma Roulotte” as he called it—which was in Vernonnet, close to Vernon and Claude Monet’s house in Giverny, which he frequently visited. But there’s a stereotype about men who buy flashy cars in their mid-40s…