By: Jonathan Lopez On Feb. 6 the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., announced that it had acquired Bagpipe Player in Profile, by the 17th-century Dutch artist Hendrick ter Brugghen. A sophisticated image, it depicts a rustic musician in antique costume, seated, the brawny mass of his exposed right arm offering a poignant contrast to the [...]
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Critic's Notebook: A Painter of Modern Life
May 2009In 1967, at the height of Beatlemania, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bandappeared to wide acclaim. With more than 11 million copies sold in the U.S. alone, it was one of the most successful albums of all time. The cover, designed by the British painter Peter Blake, displayed 70 famous faces, including Edgar Allan Poe, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Carl Jung, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Lenny Bruce, Mae West—and one painter, Richard Lindner.
Continue reading...More Than Murals
May 2009Despite the standard art-history-book summary of Mexican modernism, there actually is much more to this colorful subject than the works, emblematic though they might be, of Los Tres Grandes (The Three Great Ones)—Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco. Their epoch-defining murals painted in the decades following the 1910–20 revolution that ousted the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz gave enduring expression to a proud people’s still-emerging sense of national identity.
Continue reading...Cubist Cottage
May 2009Of all the towns that could have played host to New England’s first modernist building, Lenox, Mass., is among the least likely. When Mrs. Astor’s 400 finished summering at their extravagant, ironically named “cottages” in Newport, R.I., they would shift to Lenox, in the Berkshires, for several more weeks before returning to Manhattan in the fall.
Continue reading...Traveling Collector: Pleasures of Parma
May 2009Parma—the name alone conjures a feast for the senses. Great wheels of pungent Parmigiano Reggiano and haunches of glistening pink prosciutto are universally known by the city’s name. But there’s a lot more to Parma than cheese and ham. Historic art treasures and a lively contemporary scene make this charming small city (population 170,000) in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region a pleasure for the eye and mind as well as the palate.
Continue reading...Books: Photos Trouvés
May 2009There might appear to be a great, even unbridgeable, distance between the perfectly composed, austerely graceful black-and-white photographs of Walker Evans and the colorized postcard views that were printed by the millions and mailed all over America in the early decades of the 20th century. But Evans, who began amassing postcards as a 12-year-old boy and kept at it his whole life, didn’t see it that way.
Continue reading...Film: Pursuit of Happiness
May 2009A New York Times headline dubbed them the “In Couple,” and they are among theGreat Collectors of Our Time, according to the recently published survey of postwar collecting by James Stourton, chairman of Sotheby’s U.K. But Herbert and Dorothy Vogel, who in 1992 became major benefactors of the National Gallery of Art, are neither hotshot jet-setters nor old-money socialites.
Continue reading...Today's Masters: Form and Feeling
May 2009“I did that one in ’28,” says Will Barnet, pointing to a drawing of an elegant young man in a double-breasted suit, one hand draped languidly across his lap. He was a poet named Sully De Vito who lived in Barnet’s hometown of Beverly, Mass. “I don’t know what happened to him,” muses Barnet. Nineteen twenty-eight was a long time ago; few people alive today were doing much of anything then, let alone creating serious artwork.
Continue reading...Exhibitions: Shore Thing
May 2009When upper-class Romans looked to escape the stress of modern life in the first century A.D., they ventured to the shores of the Bay of Naples, in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, where they built elaborate vacation villas filled with Greek antiquities.
Continue reading...In a Nutshell: Sculpted Stones
May 2009Fashionable women from the Renaissance onward were keen on collecting the carved gems known as cameos, which were commonly worn on jewelry as a symbol of elegance and high status. Queen Elizabeth I introduced the concept of using these carved gems—worn on brooches or pendants—as payment for a service or favor. At one time, Catherine the Great of Russia had more than 400 in her personal collection. And Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine, is believed to have broken up some of the family’s jewelry in order to create perfectly coordinated suites.
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