Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i Art & Antiques

BONHAMS OPENS the month of June with a sale of Modern Decorative Art & Design on the 7th in New York. Among the highlights will be a 1987 work by François-Xavier Lalanne. Tortue Topiaire is a sculpture of a tortoise in black patinated copper, more than four feet long, with its shell covered in topiary. Stamped “FXL” and “Lalanne,” number 2 of 8, and with a certificate of authenticity from Claude Lalanne, it is estimated at $80,000–120,000. On June 17, the action moves to the West Coast, where Bonhams Los Angeles holds a sale of Native American art. The auction includes nearly 100 examples of Pueblo pottery from the col lect ion of Bertram J. Malenka and his wife, Ruth, lifelong collectors in the field who were profiled in Traditional…

IN PHOTOGRAPHER Nick Brandt’s recent series “Inherit the Dust,” which will be on view beginning later this month at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art in Sonoma, Calif., endangered animals haunt polluted manmade landscapes like phantoms. Brandt, who, in previous bodies of work chronicled the debilitating impact of man on the animals of East Africa, here superimposes the life-sized panels of his animal portraits onto images of factories, landfills, and crumbling wastelands of urbanization. Through this juxtaposition of imagery, acute issues such as pollution and global warming feel increasingly immediate, and the sense that the animal kingdom is shrinking—both in population and habitat—is eerily apparent. In Wasteland with Elephant (2015, archival pigment print) an elephant is transposed onto a landfill teeming with garbage and plastic. A signature image of the…

DUSTI BONGÉ, a Biloxi, Miss.-born actress turned artist, is credited with bringing Modernist painting to the Magnolia State. After starting her career with Cubist-influenced figurative depictions of her home in the 1930s, Bongé, like so many mid-century artists, moved through a Surrealist period and landed on an Abstract-Expressionist style that defined her mature work. A fixture in the New Orleans art scene, Bongé also showed her work at the Contemporary Arts Gallery in New York in 1939, before joining Betty Parsons’ stable in the mid-1940s. “Piercing the Inner Wall: The Art of Dusti Bongé,” a sweeping look at the artist’s career, runs at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans through September 8. Works like Shrimp Boats at the Dock, Biloxi, MS (circa 1940, oil on canvas), showcase…

VIOLA FREY, sculptor, painter, and long-time arts educator, was one of the most important figures in northern California’s ceramics movement of the late 1960s through ’80s, yet it’s been nearly 40 years since the region saw a comprehensive exhibition of her work. That’s changing this year with “Viola Frey: Center Stage,” a comprehensive survey of the artist’s work at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, Calif. Spanning the years 1963 to 2002, the exhibition consists of not only the monumental ceramic sculptures for which Frey is best known but also many early and less-known paintings, functional ceramics, and drawings. Frey began her career as an artist training as a painter, learning from teachers who included the influential artists Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn. She studied painting as…

Stepping into a Judy Pfaff installation can be an overwhelming experience. A forest of imagery both abstract and figurative, natural and artificial, seeming to swirl and press against the walls and ceiling, surrounds the viewer, transforming him or her into a participant. The diverse shapes and textures of Pfaff’s compositional elements, the mixture of 2-D and 3-D elements, and the riots of color make her installations into essays in sensory overload, a quality that could be chaotic were it not for the artist’s attention to form and structure. This carefulness lurks below the surface—in a manner of speaking, because there is no one surface to these works—but it is there, making Pfaff’s architecturally-scaled installations essays in controlled chaos, or perhaps uninhibited order. Not all of Pfaff’s art is installation-based; she…

PAINTER FRANK Bowling was thought of, by some, as an artist of the Caribbean diaspora because of his Guyanese heritage and subsequent immigration to Britain. His friend and Royal College of Art classmate, the painter David Hockney, because of his whiteness is thought of as an artist who likes to paint pictures of his pool. Bowling lamented the pigeonholing he and his paintings have experienced in a 2012 interview with Courtney J. Martin for Frieze. About these early experiences, Bowling says, “I was not allowed to explore the paint possibilities. Every time I did a group of pictures, it had to be nailed down within this black dilemma or Caribbean dilemma. It could not be taken as art qua art; it had to be socio-political or socio-anthropological. All of those…

ONE OF THE most expansive exhibitions of the Art Deco movement in recent history, “Deco: Luxury to Mass Movement,” is to be found at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University in Miami Beach, Fla. It’s an appropriate site, considering that Miami Beach is known for its significant collection of Deco-inspired historic architecture. In fact, Deco is such an important element of the city’s style and history that many exhibition visitors don’t realize that the style was not born in Florida, says exhibition co-curator Shoshana Resnikoff: “When we talk to locals about Deco, they assume it’s local—that it came from Miami Beach.” The reality, of course, is that the Art Deco movement originated in France in the early 1920s. From there, it spread across Europe and later landed in the U.S., where it…

WHEN EMPEROR Akihito abdicated the throne of Japan in favor of his son Naruhito on April 30, the world’s attention was drawn, at least briefly, to the importance of Shinto in the collective psyche of Japan. Shinto, which means “the way of the gods,” is the ancient Japanese religion that venerates kami, the deities, spirits, or energies behind the multitudinous phenomena of the world. Kami are believed to pervade the Japanese landscape and to mingle freely among humans, as well. They are considered to be virtually omnipresent and are traditionally numbered at eight million—a purely symbolic figure. Shinto is not an organized religion but a diverse set of beliefs and rituals that is attested in writings dating back to the 7th century A.D. but is probably much older. It was…

IN THE LATE 1960s, the Australian government uprooted several indigenous communities—namely the Pintupi, Luritja, Warlpiri, Anmatyerre, and Arrernte peoples—from the Western Desert region, forcing them to relocate to the Papunya settlement, some 150 miles south of Alice Springs in the Northern Territory. From this displacement, however, came a flowering of artistic output, as members of these itinerant communities strove to express and preserve their ancestral stories and customs, first in murals and then on canvas. In 1972, a group of Aboriginal Australian men formed the Papunya Tula, an arts cooperative. However, the Aboriginal community criticized the group’s work for revealing their sacred heritage. In response to this criticism, the unique style of dotting and over-dotting canvases, a means of obfuscating sacred symbolism, was born. The result is a unique and…

“MESSAGE FROM Another Space,” an exhibition devoted to the work of Masumi Sakagami, runs at Walter Wickiser Gallery in New York through June 18. In her work, Sakagami, who studied traditional freehand Japanese ink, or sumi, painting in Nara, melds contemporary abstraction with classical calligraphy. The result is a style that is grounded in the legacy of Japanese mark-making and bursting with expressive energy. In Wisteria (organic pigments, sumi ink on canvas), a highlight of the show, coils of black ink seem to spring off the canvas. As its title suggests, the interconnected abstract spheres grow down into the composition like a wild vine. In Sunsun 0423 BLUE (organic pigments on paper), Sakagami utilizes the same coil painted in layers of various thicknesses. The thin, watery coils serve as a…

IN 1967, PATSY Nasher, the doyenne of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, surprised her husband, Raymond, with Torso with Buds, a 1967 bronze by Jean (Hans) Arp. The sculpture was the first major modern sculpture to enter the Nashers’ collection, which would grow to include works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Henry Moore and would expand well beyond sculptural works by the mid-20th-century masters. Several decades earlier, a work by Arp stoked the flames of another celebrated collection when Peggy Guggenheim acquired Head and Shell, a 1933 bronze. In her autobiography, Out of This Century, the collector and dealer chronicled the portentous purchase: “The first thing I bought for my collection was an Arp bronze. [Arp] took me to the foundry where it had been cast and I…

Arshile Gorky was born Vostanik Manoug Adoian in 1904 or thereabouts (the exact year is uncertain) in the village of Khorgom near Lake Van in Armenia on the eastern border of the Ottoman Empire. His childhood coincided with the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of the Armenian people by Turkish troops. In 1915, Gorky’s family was driven from Lake Van and in 1919 his mother died of starvation. The following year, Vostanik, a teenager, a refugee, and soon to be an artist by another name, fled to New England. “When Gorky arrived in America his family felt he should be put to work in a factory—that was considered presumably manly work,” says Saskia Spender, president of the Arshile Gorky Foundation and granddaughter of the artist. “His milieu…