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Old Masters
Market: The State of the Fairs
By: Sallie Brady It’s a new year: Time to adjust the fair calendar. If you live in New York, you’ll find yourself making fewer trips to the Park Avenue Armory. A dramatic rent increase continues to claim the lives of smaller specialty fairs such as Sanford Smith’s Works on Paper, which usually runs in February,…
Market: Eastern Hospitality
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley Last year at this time, New York’s Asian art community was scrambling to deal with the cancellation of the International Asian Art Fair, which had become an Asia Week draw to match the auctions at the major houses. But so much is happening during 2010’s Asia Week, which takes place March…
Market: Garden of Delights
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley The European Fine Art Fair always opens in Maastricht, Netherlands, just weeks before the country’s famous tulips do. The 2010 edition, which takes place March 12–21, shows how the fair’s stewards are like master gardeners, always tending their creation to keep it fresh and vibrant. Hammer Galleries of New York, first-timers…
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.
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