Archive for March 2009
Pictures at an Exhibition
By: James Panero As the March 15 opening approaches for his exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the curator Frederick Ilchman moves from conservation to design to exhibition space with an amiable twitter. Dressed in a natty three-piece suit, he looks as if he just stepped off a…
Read MoreSacred Spaces
In two widely separated spots on the globe—Central America and Southeast Asia—two ancient civilizations created vast temple complexes that express a strikingly similar sense of man’s place in the universe.
Read MoreIn a Nutshell: Familiar Spirits
The bobcat knows secrets. The crow is the keeper of sacred law. The frog brings rain. The Zuni knew these things and made carvings, called fetishes, to help them access this other world. (The word “fetish” comes from the Portuguese feitiço, meaning “made by art.”) For collectors, Zuni fetishes are beautiful, highly sought after and small—most fit easily in the palm of the hand.
Read MoreTreasure Hunt
The European Fine Art Fair, held every March in Maastricht, is justly famous for its selection of Old Masters. It’s easy to spend days lingering in that realm alone, but that would risk missing the fair’s other delights. TEFAF is uniquely able to attract a staggeringly large selection of rare treasures of all styles, shapes and varieties from across the millennia and the world.
Read MoreCritic's Notebook: Lives and Works
One day Leonardo Da Vinci acquired a peculiar lizard, for which he made a pair of wings by flaying several similar creatures. He filled the wings with quicksilver, causing them to quiver whenever the lizard walked and, having tamed it, proceeded to terrify everyone he met.
Read MoreBooks: We'll Always Have Paris
One might think that Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (formerly known in English as Remembrance of Things Past) has by now been analyzed from every possible angle—psychoanalysis, homosexuality, fashion, French cuisine. The essayist Alain de Botton has even written a tongue-in-cheek self-help book calledHow Proust Can Change Your Life.
Read MoreMetal Works
When race car driver Hervé Poulain asked his friend Alexander Calder to embellish the exterior of his 480hp BMW 3.0CSL for the 1975 Le Mans, Poulain’s car became Calder’s ultimate kinetic sculpture. The resulting colorful expression also launched BMW’s Art Car series, which has grown during the past three decades to comprise 16 cars by artists from several continents, including the most recent from Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who encased a hydrogen-powered H2R in reflective ice and called it Your Mobile Expectations.
Read MoreCollecting: Training Wheels
When Donald Kaufman was a boy in Massachusetts in the 1930s, he wished for a pedal car but never got one. As an adult, though, he fulfilled his childhood desire more than 200 times over, by amassing one of the greatest collections of pre-World War II toys, including 200-odd pedal cars, over almost six decades. This month, Kaufman, a 78-year-old retired toy company executive, is selling it all through Bertoia Auctions of Vineland, N.J., a specialist in pre-World War II toys that will disperse the hoard (which exceeds 10,000 objects) in at least five sales, the first of which will be held March 19–21.
Read MoreDesign: Living Color
When Raoul Dufy’s intricately carved woodcuts first debuted in 1911, as illustrations for Guillaume Apollinaire’s book of poems Le Bestiaire ou cortège d’Orphée, the quality and importance of the French artist’s technique went relatively unnoticed by his contemporaries. Yet one man, the couturier Paul Poiret, recognized Dufy’s gift for innovation and would later offer him an opportunity to expand his talents through textile design—where Dufy would make a vibrant impact on the world of fashion.
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