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Record-Breaker: The Vivid Pink
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley It’s known as The Vivid Pink, but this five-carat pink diamond, which was unearthed as a 10-carat rough stone in a South African mine in 2006 and was cut by the London jewelry firm Graff, is formally known as a Fancy Vivid Pink potentially flawless diamond. That’s jeweler-speak for “My, oh…
Books: My Type
Atypographical design is the ultimate “art that conceals itself.” That means you’re not supposed to notice the font you’re reading, or rather, that you’re supposed to appreciate it only subliminally, without being distracted from the substance of the text. Unless, of course, you’re a typography geek. In that case, you definitely notice.
Symphonies of Color
Seminal advances in abstract art aren’t usually thought of as coming from Americans, especially in the early modernist period, when the avant-garde of Europe was busy revolutionizing the visual vocabulary that had held sway for hundreds of years. Nonetheless, in 1913 Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, two young American expatriates in Paris, created a technique and style they called Synchromism, which represents a major step in the direction of nonobjective painting.
Monuments to the Obscure
One might imagine that at this late date there are no more discoveries to be made in the art world, or at least no discoveries outside the realm of what the trade likes to call “emerging artists.” And yet some more or less forgotten artists continue to emerge from the obscurity into which they have been cast by prejudice or by happenstance. In this issue, we consider a few of these.
Talking Pictures: A Life in Letters
Vincent van Gogh’s letters have offered the general public an intimate view of the artist’s life and psyche since at least 1893, when the French painter Émile Bernard published a selection of items that he had received from Van Gogh in the Mercure de France. This was just three years after the troubled Dutchman’s death by suicide at the age of 37, during a period when the name Van Gogh was little known beyond a small community of avant-garde artists.
Collecting: And Still They Rise
African-American art has come a long way since 1876. In that year, at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, artist Edward Mitchell Bannister won the bronze medal, the top prize for painting, but was denied the chance to attend the award ceremony when officials realized he wasn’t white. Exactly 100 years later,Two Centuries of Black American Art, a groundbreaking show that appeared at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Museum of Fine Arts, Dallas, and the Brooklyn Museum, raised public awareness and was followed by scores of others that examined art made by African-Americans.
Gold Standard
Gold is a seemingly magical substance. Virtually impervious to corrosion, this most malleable of metals can be made to flow, to fold, to be pounded into sheets as thin as foil. It can be shaped and pierced, made solid or hollow, cast to replicate any form the goldsmith desires. Perhaps the most magical technique of all is granulation—affixing patterns of tiny gold balls onto a gold surface.
Essay: Cut and Paste
It would be hard to argue against the Internet being the fastest-spreading technological revolution of all time, but the rise of photography in the 19th century was surprisingly swift. Within two decades of its invention in 1839, it had deeply penetrated the middle classes of Europe and the United States.
In Perspective
UPCOMING AUCTIONS Zero Hour: Almost 50 works from the Sammlung Lenz Schönberg Collection of ‘Zero-Art’ will be offered in Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in London on Feb. 10. Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Victor Vasarely are among the artists who will be represented in the sale, which is expected to garner more than…
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