Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i Art & Antiques

Between World War I and II, Charleston, South Carolina, experienced a cultural boom where artists, writers, architects and more came together to improve and represent the city. It became known as the Charleston Renaissance and was related to the larger Southern Renaissance movement. Visual arts were at the forefront with Alfred Heber Hutty being among the four most recognized artists of the period. Hutty was born in Grand Haven, Michigan, but at the age of 15 received a scholarship to the then-new Kansas City School of Fine Arts. He became a glazier and later studied stained-glass, which eventually led him to New York City where he was employed by Tiffany Studios. Hutty studied at the Art Students League and eventually settled in Woodstock, New York, and is often credited with…

ON JUNE 11, Leland Little Auctions will host its Signature Summer Auction featuring fine art, antique furniture and jewelry. Bidding will take place live on the company website, by phone or through absentee bids online prior to the sale. Anyone registered for the sale can also bid in person at the new Leland Little gallery that opened this past spring. The new facility, which includes a gallery, exhibition space and administrative offices, connects with the existing structure and provides 41,000 square feet of auction engine. Company president Leland Little says, “This gallery was designed to provide a space for the collecting community—to gather, to learn, to connect and to grow in their field of interest, as well as to provide an opportunity to buy and sell in a professional,…

IN THE PAINTINGS of Andrea Marie Breiling, there are no areas that are not in headlong, ecstatic motion, particularly those from the past two years. Dizzying swirls of blurred diaphanous color—so many uploaded onto characteristically large surfaces that appear larger yet once she’s taken charge of them—rock a world conceived in and for the present, seeming in constant atomization and reconstitution, as if optically looped. The rhythms of the kaleidoscopic streams of color suggest those of music, and, if not too fanciful, a series of sounds might be heard by viewers susceptible to the synesthetic. Flagging the connection to music are the titles of the works which Breiling has borrowed from songs—for instance, Eyes To The Wind, I Wanna Surround You Like A Fire, Lucy In The Sky, A Prayer,…

AFTER THE TUMULT of the past few years, perhaps we want to look at something beautiful and meditate on how it came to be. Perhaps “Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity”, the new exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, a glamorous, careful show—jeweled slippers on ice—is just what the doctor ordered. The value of escape is not to be taken lightly. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers elegantly distracted the world from the Depression in the 1930s. The Eastern world as a fantasy, projected onto cultures, has the same fascination as the play of light on the facets of diamonds. And that may be how we are meant to take in “Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity”—like Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—drawn to beauty and…

CURRENTLY ON view through June 28 at the Speed Art Museum is the first survey of quilt-based works by American interdisciplinary artist Sanford Biggers. The exhibition, titled “Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch”, features 33 pieces from his ongoing Codex series that were inspired partly by the creative legacies of African American quilters. Each piece dates from 2012 to 2020 and are complemented by two video works from 2000 and 2014. In linguistics, code-switching is when a speaker alternates between two or more languages or dialects when in conversation. “Codeswitch” is aptly titled because Biggers is speaking multiple languages in his artwork. The works in the show are mixed-media paintings and sculptures on or made from antique American quilts. Biggers, who was born in 1970 and now resides in New York City, considers…

In 2022 the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, recognized Ashley Bryan as its Maine in America Award honoree. Bryan was born in Harlem in 1923 and raised in the Bronx. His first visit to Maine was in 1946 to attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and later that summer visited Mt. Desert and Cranberry Islands. Captivated by the communal life on the islands, Little Cranberry became his longtime summer home before settling there permanently after retiring from Dartmouth College in 1988. Bryan is known widely in children’s literature as the author and illustrator of more than 50 books. Particularly he brings the oral tradition of African folk tales and African American spirituals to new audiences. Along with his writing and illustration, Bryan is a painter, printmaker,…

“PHILIP GUSTON NOW”, a retrospective on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, could be seen as the reverse. Guston hasn’t left the party; he was disinvited. The traveling exhibition has officially opened after a nearly two-year postponement. The organizing institutions—the Boston MFA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., London’s Tate Modern and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas—put a hold on the June 2020 opening date at the National Gallery of Art in response to events surrounding the death of George Floyd. “We are postponing the exhibition,” the organizers stated last fall, “until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston’s work can be more clearly interpreted.” This announcement…

At the “Dawn of a New Age: Early 20th-Century American Modernism” opened May 7 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This illuminating show of modernist American works created between 1900 and 1930, often looks fresh to our eyes in 2022, much in the way we find ourselves captivated and appreciative of 1960s and ’70s conceptualism. The Whitney has just chosen the right moment to pull these many selections out of storage and gather them together with newly acquired works of the period, many by lesser-known modernists. The show, on view through January 1, 2023, enables us not only to see these images but also to contextualize them in unexpected ways. In this light-filled Renzo Piano–designed contemporary-modernist structure, we can view the Hudson River to the west giving substance to…

SAN FRANCISCO gallery owner Charles Campbell has a legacy that began with his love of jazz and life in the city’s North Beach. It was during the 1950s and ’60s when the vibrant bohemian art and culture was bustling. During his career he represented major Bay Area contemporary artists for more than 60 years. Through August 18, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art will present Dancing with Charlie: Bay Area Art from the Campbell Collection featuring works from his grouping of works. “Campbell was wellknown for his eye for enduring talent and commitment to living artists, some of whom he helped push to the forefront of Bay Area art in the period after World War II,” says Susan M. Anderson, guest curator for the exhibition. “A study of the Campbell Collection’s…

IF RAPHAEL ISN’T the first artist to achieve the kind of mythical, romantic status we have since reserved for meteors like Mozart, Van Gogh and Jim Morrison, he is almost certainly the artist whose hagiography has enjoyed the longest shelf life. “The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Raphael”, now on view at the National Gallery, London, offers an in-depth examination, not only of the artist’s life, career—and brand—but of his long afterlife and extraordinary impact on European and American art. In a wonderful catalogue essay, “The Death and Life of Raphael”, Mathias Wivel homes in on the artist’s passing, after a 10-day fever. It is suggested that his illness may have been the result of a combination of overwork and overplay, and that the artist’s appetite for life, matched only by his…

The artistic riches of the Persian Empire, which dominated western Asia for over a thousand years, form the subject of the exhibition “Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World” that just opened at the Getty Villa Museum in Malibu. It is the second in a series of exhibitions focusing on the different cultures of the classical world. If one had to sum up the qualities of ancient Persia in a single word, surely that word would be “splendor,” as is apparent from many of the masterworks on display. Perhaps the major theme of Persian art is the unquestionable authority and divine power of the king—exemplified for example in a polychrome panel that once adorned the Palace of Darius I at Susa, showing two sphinxes with bearded human heads standing beneath…

For over a century, Winslow Homer has been canonized as one of the great American painters, if not the single greatest among them. His brooding Turner-esque seascapes, his seemingly playful images of beachside promenades, his grassy landscapes and hunting scenes have cornered a specific and enduring visual lexicon of the American nineteenth century. Yet, a key element of Homer’s work has often been sidelined in art historical narratives: Winslow Homer was an artist of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, the aftermath of what was arguably the nation’s first total war, and the resulting struggle to live amidst a fundamentally altered landscape. Even the most joyful of Homer’s images feel sobering—because they are imbued with life’s daily struggles, and, just as often, the much larger, existential questions about destiny, mortality,…