Archive for November 2009
Talking Pictures: The Scholar-Dealer
He is America’s preeminent dealer in Dutch Old Master paintings. But with his soft-spoken manner, gray-flecked beard and disarmingly rumpled suit, Otto Naumann looks more like a college professor than a businessman.
Read MoreEssay: Poetry of the Moment
When Robert Frank’s landmark photography book, The Americans, was first published in the United States in 1959, it was not warmly received, to put it mildly. His photographs—off-kilter, sometimes out of focus or unflattering but always remarkable—were seen by some in that nationalistic, Cold War-era as an all-out condemnation of the country.
Read MoreExhibitions: In the House
During its relatively short life, the Bauhaus school was the site of thousands of conversations and experiments in which artists, designers and architects came together to collectively decide what contemporary art should be.
Read MoreThe Thinker
In September 1931, Alexandre Kojève addressed a letter to his uncle, painter Vasily Kandinsky, one of the pioneers of abstract art, comparing his capacity to continually discover new forms to Picasso’s. “But unlike him, you never allow yourself the role of ham actor,” quipped Kojève, a Russian emigré philosopher living in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne.
Read MoreFrom Russia with Love
The Taos School of painting is known for its part-academic, part-modernistic depictions of a startlingly beautiful landscape and for its celebration of the picturesque qualities of New Mexico’s indigenous people. It often takes the unjaded eye of an outsider to see a place this way, and in fact, none of the Taos painters were actually from Taos (see Art & Antiques, Summer 2009).
Read MoreFrom the Editor: Fifty Years Ago—and Tomorrow
As 2009 comes to a close (and not a moment too soon, for many in the art world), we are being asked, from several quarters, to cast our minds back 50 years to 1959. That’s not for nostalgic reasons, but in order to understand where we are today. According to author Fred Kaplan, 1959 was “the year everything changed.”
Read MoreCollecting: Made in the Shade
Mezzotint allows artists to portray the world in all its many shades of gray. The printmaking technique, invented in 1642, renders the infinite subtleties of the tones that lie between black and white in a manner ideal for reproducing oil paintings. “Most reproductive techniques until then relied on line,” says Sheila O’Connell, assistant keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum. “Mezzotint allows smoother transitions between line and shade.”
Read MoreBooks: Magical Realism
This book is about Giambattista Tiepolo, the superbly energetic Venetian master of frescoed ceilings and inheritor of the mantle of Paolo Veronese. But it’s also about serpents, symbols, sacrifices, Persian magi, Chaldean oracles and ritual magic. None of which should surprise anyone who is familiar with the delightfully subversive scholarship and essayistic verve of Roberto Calasso, the Italian book publisher (his firm, Adelphi Edizioni, is headquartered in Milan) and writer on a wide variety of cultural subjects.
Read MoreCrystal Clear
In 1291, the rulers of Venice ordered all glass foundries to relocate to the little island of Murano, about a mile to the northeast of the main cluster of islands, because of the fire hazard they posed to the city’s wooden buildings. Ever since then, the island’s name has been synonymous with hand-blown, luminously colored, deftly crafted glass.
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