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Impressionism
Market: Autumn’s Appetites
By: Jenna Curry Despite a tough economic year for the art world, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have high hopes for their New York Impressionist, modern and contemporary evening sales this month. Christie’s kicks off the season on Nov. 3 with its Impressionist and modern sale, featuring Pablo Picasso’s 1943 oil-on-canvas Tête de femme (est. $7–10 million),…
Market: House Party
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley The second annual American Art Fair will take place at the National Academy & School of Fine Arts in New York on Nov. 30–Dec. 3. All but one of the 11 exhibitors from the inaugural fair will return to the second-floor galleries of the mansion-turned-museum. Each dealer may choose to mark…
Market: Doubly Modern
By: John Dorfman This month, for the first time, Modernism (in its 24th edition) will be merged with Art 20 (in its eighth edition) into one event, to be held at New York’s Park Avenue Armory on Nov. 13–16. According to fair producer Sanford Smith, the decision was made in response to current market conditions….
Market: Eyes on the Past
By: Jenna Curry Art objects and ethnographic artifacts from across the globe—from Africa to Southeast Asia to the Americas—will be brought together for the 19th annual Los Angeles Asian and Tribal Art Show, running Nov. 14–15 at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. About 60 international dealers will offer bronzes, ceramics, textiles, wood sculptures and other…
Talking Pictures: Maid in Manhattan
By: Jonathan Lopez As a salute to New York on the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage to America—a Dutch-financed venture that aimed to find the Northwest Passage to the Orient but instead found the waters around Manhattan island—the Rijksmuseum has placed Johannes Vermeer’s famed Milkmaid on temporary loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting…
Books: A Kleptocrat’s Collection
The great complexities of provenance research are little known to those outside the profession. Claimants of looted art, lawyers, judges and most journalists, unaware of the difficulties, often think that the exact history of a work of art is easily found. In her extraordinary book on the paintings collection of Hermann Goering, Nancy H. Yeide, chief of provenance research at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., makes clear that that is not the case.
The Visionary
In 1930, at the age of 37, Charles Burchfield was given a one-man exhibition by the Museum of Modern Art. While by no means indifferent to the honor and in no way dissatisfied with the way his work was presented, the artist didn’t trouble himself to make the trip from his home in Buffalo, N.Y., to attend his own show. To MoMA director Alfred H. Barr Jr., he wrote, somewhat sheepishly, “I wish I had been able to come to the exhibit, but found it was impossible just now.”
Outside In
Russel Wright’s longtime home and studio, Dragon Rock, was built along a rocky slope overlooking the Hudson River about an hour north of Manhattan. The designer envisioned Dragon Rock as a modern country retreat that melds unnoticed into 75 acres of oaks, ferns, white pines, wildflowers, streams, moss, meadows and Chevy-size boulders. “His key philosophy in developing and creating Manitoga (meaning, ‘place of the great spirit’) was to live in harmony with nature, and he achieved this by blending the indoors with the outdoors,” says Lori Moss, assistant director of the Russel Wright Design Center
Collecting: Take Me Away
Toward the end of the 1920s real estate entrepreneur Carl Fisher attempted to repeat the huge success of his Miami Beach residential development, promoting what he called the “Miami Beach of the North” on New York’s Long Island. To promote the 10,000-acre luxury resort, Fisher commissioned a poster that featured star athletes of the time posing in the foreground of his grandiose 200-room Montauk Manor.
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