Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Asian Art
Collecting: Drawn to it
Hand-drawn pictures and plans of a suburban Prairie Style residence by Frank Lloyd Wright. An extremely rare sketch of signature Louis Sullivan foliage. A portfolio of a turn-of-the-20th-century modern house by Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
Books: Dear Diary
An elaborately staged re-creation of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, with a little sexual mischief added. A lovely female centaur listening contemplatively as an equally lovely woman (the same woman?) plays the piano. A bare-breasted, though otherwise fully clad woman holding a palette and painting an Old Master-style portrait.
Design: Labor of Love
Intrigued by the idea of transforming inexpensive materials into original and highly decorative artworks, the Swiss Art Deco artist Jean Dunand mastered the painstakingly meticulous technique of dinanderie. This method of hammering forms out of a sheet of metal such as brass or copper, which was then laid over a shaped mold, became the foundation for Dunand’s early creations.
Market: Fair Minded
By: Sallie Brady With the cancellations of the 12-year-old International Asian Art Fair, which was once was the centerpiece of New York’s March Asia Week, and the 5-year-old Moscow World Fine Art Fair, which was rescheduled for September from May, collectors are wondering which fair will go next. Factor in the closing of three of…
Market: Fully Booked
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley One of the joys of attending a fair is encountering treasures you’ve never seen before, or items that reach the market only once in a lifetime. The 49th annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, which takes place April 2–5 at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan and features 205 exhibitors, should…
Market: Wright Angle
By: Christy Grosz With an angular roof that pitches dramatically toward the blue sky above it, Frank Lloyd Wright Jr.’s 1965 Bowler residence in Palos Verdes, Calif., represents the distinctive style the architect carefully developed outside his father’s shadow. Taking père’s penchant for angles and use of inexpensive materials like concrete and corrugated fiberglass, Wright,…
Market: Unsentimental Education
By: James Panero The students of Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., have been enrolled in a crash course in museum ethics and the realities of the art market. On Jan. 26 the trustees voted unanimously to sell the permanent collection of the school’s 48-year-old Rose Art Museum, which houses one of the finest collections of…
Market: Winter Thaw
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Some see the glass as half empty; others see it as half full. The sales of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art that Sotheby’s and Christie’s held in London in February contained fodder for the arguments of both camps. The half-empty crowd can cite the collective total for the four evening sales…
Pictures at an Exhibition
By: James Panero As the March 15 opening approaches for his exhibition Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the curator Frederick Ilchman moves from conservation to design to exhibition space with an amiable twitter. Dressed in a natty three-piece suit, he looks as if he just stepped off a…
Subscribe to Art & Antiques for your Digital or Print copy
