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Impressionism
Market: A Sculptor's Selection
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley It’s a good time to be a collector of tribal art. Just six months after major pieces from the late Frieda and Milton Rosenthal’s collection fetched $10.8 million at Sotheby’s New York, the auction house is preparing for another promising sale drawn from the holdings of the Renee and Chaim Gross…
Market: Art at the Mart
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley and John Dorfman Chicago celebrates bigness, and its famous Merchandise Mart is a massive structure, but Art Chicago, which will be held there May 1–4, is going to be smaller this year. The fair was huge in 2008, with 181 participants; in fact, some of the galleries thought it was too…
Market: Midwinter Nights' Dream
By: Sallie Brady It was the sale of the young century, and a powerful reminder that there is still a great deal of ready money in the international art and antiques market. When the final hammer fell on lot number 733, well after 11 p.m. on Feb. 25 in Paris’ Grand Palais, the collection of…
Exhibitions: Going for Baroque
By: Jenna Curry One evening in 1655, the powerful Barberini family of Rome presented an elaborate theatrical performance for an audience of 3,000. The show concluded with a parade of actors fighting in a mock battle against a fiery dragon. Such ornate productions were not created merely for entertainment purposes; they were also a means to…
Essay: Tales of the City
By: Lance Esplund Dutch weather, much like that of Seattle, is temperamental: A storm is always coming, going or both. And because Holland’s sky—blue, gray, golden, mauve—is so fluid and sweeping, as well as seemingly pressed down to the ground, its architecture and inhabitants appear smaller and more incidental than they actually are. It is not…
Sketches of the Past
Born in Jamaica in 1794 into a well-to-do Sephardic-Jewish merchant family, Belisario spent part of his life in England and died in London in 1849. His major work is Sketches of Character, In Illustration of the Habits, Occupation and Costume of the Negro Population, in the Island of Jamaica, a series of lithographs of Jamaican slaves dressed up for a popular music-and-dance celebration, which the artist, who was based in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, issued to subscribers in 1837 and 1838.
Passionate Journey
Serendipity is the word that comes to mind when I think of my pattern of collecting. I grew up in Indiana, in an environment that wasn’t particularly artistic, and I spent my first decade after college playing the double bass. It wasn’t until I studied arts policy in London in the late 1980s that I became aware of the art-collecting world, and only after working at Bonhams for a few years did I begin to occasionally acquire a painting, sculpture or tribal piece.
In a Nutshell: Worth Their Weight
It was with good reason that the Portuguese, who in 1471 began trading with the Akan-speaking people of West Africa, gave the name “the Gold Coast” to the region today known as Ghana. Gold was both the spiritual and material foundation of the region, where vast quantities of the precious metals were mined from the rich forest soil between the Volta and Ankobra rivers.
From the Editor: Instant Art
“Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away,” sang Paul Simon back in 1973. Thirty-six years later, in the midst of a digital revolution, Kodachrome is still with us—barely—but lovers of Polaroid are crooning a similar tune. The iconic instant film went out of production in 2008, and remaining supplies are dwindling fast.
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