Fine Art Connoisseur November/December 2024

Digital photography has changed our world, and especially how we look at images. Because I went digital very early, I now have terabytes of data on multiple hard drives. They contain what must be millions of photos that will never be discovered in a shoebox by my descendants as they sift through my belongings. Soon enough those hard drives will become unreadable, and most of my photos will never even have been printed. Those images that did get printed will surely fade away, since most home printers do not use archival-quality inks. Though my shelves are lined with photo albums from my youth, I have not assembled a single album since I went digital. Perhaps, then, our children's children's children will never actually know what we looked like. In contrast,…

The United States is fortunate to have a lively museum scene, with hundreds of thousands of artworks on public view at their home institutions and thousands more in circulation through traveling exhibitions. Even so, vast holdings of American art remain tucked away in museum vaults, inaccessible to art lovers due to financial and logistical constraints. That's a regrettable situation now being addressed in earnest. Earlier this year, Art Bridges launched its Partner Loan Network, fostering long-term collection-sharing partnerships among museums of all sizes nationwide. This initiative existed in another form for the past seven years, but now its scope has broadened. “By providing a platform for museums to share their collections, the Partner Loan Network offsets limitations to collection-sharing by providing logistical and strategic support to get artworks out of…

Stay abreast of up and coming as well as established American realist artists in person or online through regular exhibits: • The Grand National Exhibition at the Salmagundi Club of New York is AAPL's flagship juried xhibition showcasing America's top realist fine a tists. October 28-November 15, 2024 • Realism on the Hudson, A Small Works Show at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY gathers together premier AAPL artists and collectors from all over the country to showcase exceptional talent across various media. March 1-April 13, 2025 • Our Affordable Works Online Show is always a hit with entry-level as well as seasoned collectors. aaplinc.org/artwork-store/affordable Check out all our upcoming shows Everyone at Fine Art Connoisseur salutes the talented members of the American Artists Professional League (AAPL) on their…

Although the editorial team at Fine Art Connoisseur loves all kinds of art — fro landscape to still life, from the ld Masters to the still-wet — we hold a special place in our hearts for figu ative works and portraiture. People are at the center of what we do, and so images in which artists depict other people — be they models, strangers, or commissioning clients — carry a special fascination. Capturing a face or human body is incredibly challenging. We all have them, so we can see immediately when something is “not right” in a painting or sculpture. We may not be able to articulate what's wrong, but we sure do spot it. This makes figu ative and portrait artists all the more extraordinary in my estimation; even…

Poets are good at imagining. The prolific American poet and poetry editor Daniel Halpern noticed the details in Watteau's drawing of a nude woman asleep in her bed, but he keeps imagining who it was she might have spent the night with. In 1982 he even published a poem entitled Nude about this work, which resides in storage at the Louvre. But of all the earthy details that Watteau rendered here and that Halpern took note of in his verse — the tangled wet mass of hair, the limp wrist encircled by a bracelet, rumpled blankets gathered about her — what is not shown is what especially compels Halpern. “What's most important to me in the drawing is to imagine what had taken place, and who isn't there next to…

JENNIFER CRONIN (b. 1986) makes meticulously rendered images that explore the mystery and complexity of everyday life, skewing toward magic realism and often evoking emotions that range from enchantment to melancholy. She was born and raised in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago, the metropolis where she lives today. “I have always been struck by the visual world,” Cronin explains. “I remember my older brother drawing a slice of pie and thinking it was almost magical the way he used the pencil to shade the texture of the fruit filling. In school I was quiet, but I could communicate and be seen through my art, which was a great motivation to continue learning and growing.” Cronin headed to the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, where she earned a B.F.A. in painting…