The Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863–1944) belongs to that elite company of artists who, dissatisfied with the limitations of the media available to them, invented their own. Around the turn of the century Prokudin-Gorskii, who had a degree in chemistry, was experimenting with ways to bring color to the monochrome world of photography.
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Essay: Reinhardt’s Heart
December 2009Some four decades after his death at the age of 53, Ad Reinhardt remains an enigmatic figure. His famous “black paintings,” which he produced toward the end of his life, are still some of the most mysterious creations ever made in the long, multifaceted history of modern art. As a teacher, Reinhardt propagated the idea of “art as art.” (“Art is art,” he wrote. “Everything else is everything else.”)
Continue reading...From the Editor: The Search for Authenticity
December 2009Sometimes hindsight isn’t 20–20, but that might not be a bad thing. In this issue, our columnist Jonathan Lopez writes about the academic painter James Tissot (see page 46), who is not much discussed nowadays. No matter. As Lopez shows, some of Tissot’s works, at least, provide an excellent case study of the ways in which, try as we might, we cannot recreate the past.
Continue reading...Books: Winter’s Tales
December 2009Books are among the most inexhaustible of presents; long after the New Year they remain to give pleasure till next December and beyond. That is especially true of art books, and Art & Antiques’ editors have picked some choice volumes to delight and inform the collector and curious reader.
Continue reading...Plugged In
December 2009When Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb in 1879, he had no clue that one day it would become a medium for art. Indeed, he probably couldn’t have conceived of it; when listing 10 ways his new phonograph would improve the world, he ranked “reproduction of music” fourth, behind dictation, audiobooks and teaching elocution.
Continue reading...Lighting Out for the Territory
December 2009If you wander around shops in a city like New York, looking at old maps for their beauty alone in the company of dealers like Harry Newman at The Old Print Shop; or Paul Cohen and Henry Tagliaferro at Arkway; or Graham Arader of Arader Galleries; or Richard Lan, Robert Augustyn and James Roy at Martayan Lan, you could be forgiven for forgetting something important.
Continue reading...In a Nutshell: Box of Brothers
December 2009Toy soldiers have been around for millennia—tiny warrior figurines were found in the tombs of the Pharaohs, and the ancient Greeks and Romans enjoyed them as well—but it was the Britons of the Victorian era who made them a Christmas-morning must for generations of would-be generals. Toy soldiers fired the imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, who romanticized their power to enliven a childhood sick day in his poem The Land of Counterpane, and that of H.G. Wells, who wrote an entire book,Little Wars, on war-gaming with toy soldiers.
Continue reading...Collecting: Neo-Colonialism
December 2009In 1851, feeling very good about itself and its place among the nations, England threw its wealth and commercial muscle behind an idea conceived by Prince Albert, the German-born husband of its beloved Queen Victoria. Under the prince’s leadership, The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations opened on May 1 of that year beneath the vaulting glass and iron of Sir Joseph Paxton’s immense Crystal Palace.
Continue reading...Talking Pictures: Christmas Present and Christmas Past
December 2009By: Jonathan Lopez In the spring of 1894, when James Tissot exhibited 270 paintings from his series The Life of Christ at the Salon de Champ-de-Mars in Paris, one critic declared that the artist could have been “the reporter for an illustrated paper in Rome under Tiberius,” so vivid were these seemingly eyewitness accounts of [...]
Continue reading...Victorian Vanguard
December 2009By: Sallie Brady Not unless you’ve sought them out in Britain’s museums or have been a dinner guest at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s London home are you likely to have been face-to-face with many Pre-Raphaelite pictures. The Victorian school of painting began when the Young British Artists of their day rebelled against the Renaissance methods of [...]
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