Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Old Masters
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…
Market: Indigenous Finds
By: Jenna Curry San Francisco has been the go-to city for tribal arts in February, and this year, two major shows are scheduled for the same weekend. In its 24th year, the San Francisco Tribal & Textile Arts Show, running Feb. 12–13, will showcase art from Oceania, Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Central and South…
Market: The Outsider Edge
By: Sheila Gibson Stoodley The 2010 Outsider Art Fair will take place Feb. 5–7 at 7 West 34th Street off of Fifth Avenue, returning to the venue it moved to last year. Among the nearly 40 exhibitors of works by artists who received little or no formal artistic training will be the Luise Ross Gallery…
Market: Santa Fe Trail
By: John Dorfman Santa Fe is the second-largest art market in the United States, and yet coastal collectors often act as though it existed only in the summer, when Indian Market, Spanish Market, Art Santa Fe and the Opera are on. But Santa Fe doesn’t disappear when outsiders turn their backs—far from it. And during…
Essay: What Goya Saw
“The author is convinced that it is as proper for painting to criticize human error and vice as for poetry and prose to do so,” proclaimed Francisco de Goya y Lucientes in the Diario de Madrid on Feb. 6, 1799, announcing the publication of Los Caprichos(or “Caprices”), his suite of 80 prints made by etching and aquatint, which were intended to reveal “the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual.”
The New Outsiders
The late 1940s saw the first rumblings of appreciation for what is now called “Outsider” art—works created by nonacademically trained artists who operate apart from the cultural mainstream and its art-historical canon. In France, the artist Jean Dubuffet, the Surrealist leader André Breton and the art critic Michel Tapié celebrated visionary autodidacts, whose work they labeled “art brut,” or “raw art.”
Talking Pictures: Sons, Fathers and Forefathers
In his new book, Tom and Jack: The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock (Bloomsbury, $35), Henry Adams, a professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, challenges the received wisdom about these two great 20th-century painters—one, the foremost exponent of American Regionalism; the other, the mysterious genius of Abstract Expressionism
Subscribe to Art & Antiques for your Digital copy!
