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Making It New
by Sarah E. Fensom Two of the Met’s period rooms get a contemporary reimagining. Katrin Sigurdardottir, an artist born in Iceland in 1967, stands in one of her two installations in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, aptly titled Boiserie, meaning “decorative paneling.” What seems like a Japanese-style screen stolen from the set of an Alice…
Fowl Most Fair
Bird decoys are America’s only completely original form of folk art, and they are avidly hunted by collectors across the country. By Sarah E. Fensom One night in the 1950s, Adele Earnest, Americana dealer, founding trustee of the American Folk Art Museum and author of the 1965 book The Art of the Decoy: American Bird…
A Passionate Patron
Not too long ago, a slogan for Jamaica’s tourism industry advised, “It’s not just a beach. It’s a country.” Apparently, some visitors needed to be reminded that the sun-drenched island was, in fact, an independent state with a complex society and a vibrant culture. That very goal was given a big boost in 1974 by the opening of the National Gallery of Jamaica, a government-funded repository of the country’s visual-arts patrimony.
Silver, Unstandard
At Christie’s sale of Important Silver on October 19, the top lot was not a table service or a tea set but a pack of cards. The cards are exquisitely fashioned, thin enough to stack and play with, if not exactly to shuffle. Estimated at $150,000–200,000, they shot up to $554,500, selling to an English dealer who was bidding on behalf of a private collector who specializes in Renaissance art.
Talking Pictures: Grace and Beauty
Architectural historian Judith Dupré is the author of Skyscrapers (1996), Bridges (1997) and the New York Times bestseller Churches (2001). Her latest book, Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Life & Art (Random House, $40), represents a new departure in her work. Divided into 59 brief chapters, each representing a bead of the traditional Marian rosary, this amply illustrated volume explores the Virgin Mary’s place in the Bible, in history, in theology and in the wider culture. Speaking with Art & Antiques, Dupré discusses her multifaceted approach to this pivotal Christian figure.
Escape to Freedom
When Beatrice Mandelman and her husband, fellow painter Louis Ribak, left New York for New Mexico in 1944, she knew she was leaving behind one of the world’s most dynamic hubs of cultural and intellectual activity—and the possibility of making a lasting mark there. Mandelman could not have predicted that World War II would end the following year, but she certainly knew that New York had become modern art’s axis mundi by the time she decided to move away.
Istanbul Goes International
As Turkish contemporary art takes its place on the worldwide stage, the market for it is getting so hot that collectors in Turkey are being priced out. By Abigail R. Esman Situated at the meeting point between Europe and Asia, the city of Istanbul has long been seen as a bridge between East and West….
The Sacred and the Sensual
Few Old Masters are as popular as the Early Netherlandish painters. Visit any major European or American art museum, and the corridors and rooms featuring the gentle works of Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling and Gerard David are filled with hushed, reverent admirers, faces as close to the protective glass as the guards will allow, drawn into a placid, cozy late-Gothic world. But moving along to the early 16th century, the paintings of Jan Gossart tend to give fans of the Flemings something of a jolt.
The Fanciful Forties
L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, a short opera by Maurice Ravel with a libretto by Colette, which premiered in Monaco in March of 1925, is about a naughty little boy who comes to regret his bad behavior. This coming to life was more than just a fiction; it was prophetic, because at that time furniture was about to acquire an extraordinary vitality in French society.
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